Date of Award

Summer 8-2-2025

Access Restriction

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctorate in Education

Department

Education

School or College

School of Education

First Advisor

Rebecca Stephenson

Second Advisor

La'Tonya Rease Miles

Third Advisor

Steve Desir

Abstract

The #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) movement in 2020 pressured higher education institutions to address their oppressive and exclusive systems. As these institutions communicated their diversity, equity, and inclusion, (DEI) commitments and processes, it was those who took charge to facilitate the operational and cultural change for their respective area through the DEI lens, those who assumed DEI roles in their designated units, actualized the ground-level work of designing and implementing DEI programs and policies to produce the institutional progress reported by the university’s executive leadership. I will refer to those change agents as Unit-level DEI Officers (UDOs). Meanwhile, the current body of literature on DEI work in higher education has a dearth of studies focused on the experiences of UDOs and the immediate impacts of DEI policies and programs during the change process. Using the conceptual frameworks of equity sense (Ching, 2023), sensemaking, and sensegiving (Weick, 1995), and change processes in higher education (Kezar, 2018), this qualitative case study included semistructured, in-depth interviews with 11 participants and document analysis to investigate the roles and experiences of UDOs in advancing antiracism and DEI efforts at a private university in the aftermath of the #BlackLivesMatter movement of 2020. The findings revealed epistemic dominance within the institutional structure, which caused detrimental personal and institutional barriers against UDOs making a transformative impact through their DEI initiatives. Moreover, interviews with UDOs revealed community building as the strategic DEI leadership praxis to spread equity sense to overcome and challenge these problematic norms. These findings highlight the crucial role of UDOs in fostering authentic commitments to equity and justice and the need for higher education institutions to engage strategically with diverse stakeholders to overcome systemic barriers and ensure the sustainability of DEI initiatives. Immediately after transitioning into power in 2025, Donald Trump sought opportunities to dismantle DEI programs in education by coercing social justice blindness. The rapid regression makes it undoubtedly crucial for higher education personnel to quickly pivot and implement new change plans to continue promoting inclusive excellence progress and resist the changing political climate. Through the findings and discussion of strategic equity-sense-focused leadership praxis of UDOs, this study sought to contribute to the resistance by suggesting how DEI leaders can finesse the intimidatingly fast-regressing sociopolitical climate so they may instill the agency in others to spread the equity sense influence within their community in their efforts to persist through the regression.

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