While higher education has continued to adjust to COVID-19, which has included moving to virtual platforms and supporting students’ mental health, what is absent from these conversations is the campus staff enacting the rapidly changing university context. These professionals in academic and student affairs, residential life staff, and advising staff have had to readjust roles, responsibilities, and programs, all while facing ambiguous threats of budget cuts and struggling with their own wellness. Through a qualitative study at a midwestern university using Critical Race Theory, this study focuses on both the pandemic as well as the endemic concerns of racism Staff of Color experience at their higher education institutions. Findings reveal disconnects between university values and communication with the (lack of) financial prioritization and care. While many seek a return to the pre-COVID-19 campus, the strategies, execution, and prioritization of staff hold much longer ramifications regarding campus retention, inclusion, and equity.

College campuses are the current battleground for racism and race-based ideas of white supremacy with the most recent being the slew of bans against the teaching of Critical Race Theory in classrooms. Yet, as these battles rage on, a parallel phenomenon is occurring within college campuses with changes in student conduct codes and resolutions passed by universities to target student protesters and activists – more specifically, Student Activists of Color. Utilizing critical discourse through Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organization and Cho’s (2018) institutional response framework, this study examines student conduct codes and university policies and explores their racialized impact on student involvement and activism. Findings from this qualitative study reveal color-evasive language to justify sanctions; co-opt the language of safety and care; and illuminate how campus policies like “time, place, manner” influence, limit, and silence the concerns of marginalized communities.

The temporalities of COVID-19 and resultant economic crisis, along with increased visibility of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, have exacerbated the longstanding challenges Women of Color (WOC) faculty experience, particularly around negotiating labor and navigating the academy. Through Anzaldúa's borderlands framework, and an interwoven methodology of testimonios and pláticas, this paper's findings illuminate how the fixed, shifting, and messy boundaries of academic work have, especially for WOC faculty working through COVID-19, violated the limits of the personal and professional, intruded into the homes as sacred spaces, and continued and expanded demands to provide labor. Institutions have placated these fraught borders with professional development and networks of mentorship-all while pivoting away from addressing the material and structural conditions that disintegrate the borders, particularly for WOC faculty. By exploring the layered complexities of traversing the academy-a space not made for our existence as WOC within them-we offer a nuanced understanding of academic borderlands. As a part of this, we highlight our resistance to carve out spaces of solidarity and collectivity in the face of Eurocentric, individualistic institutions to imagine

Institutional response to #BlackLivesMatter and anti‐Asian hate are shaped by crisis response with strategic plans, rather than structural change and investment in care networks. In this article, we offer our personal narratives to illustrate the possibilities of embodying carework to support student activists and illuminate how we collectively survive.

Colleges and universities continue to contend with issues of campus racism, often illuminated by student concerns. Within these ongoing conversations, governance boards play a critical part in engaging with campus issues. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, this study examines two universities through 2000 documents of board meeting minutes, agendas, student newspapers, and campus archives to scrutinize the language, framing, and decision-making of board efforts with diversity, equity, inclusion, and addressing student concerns. Findings illuminate aspects of the Institutional Response Framework and interest-convergence in the ways boards rationalize decisions through concerns about reputation and protecting the university’s best interests.