History has repeatedly shown that moments of major social and political progress are often followed by backlash. For example, following the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the Reconstruction Era saw unchecked violence against Black Americans, and after the women's suffrage movement secured the rights of women to vote, anti-suffrage propaganda dominated the conversation for much of the early 20th century.
Two recent studies co-authored by Quinn Mulroy, assistant professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy; and Heather McCambly, assistant professor at University of Pittsburgh, analyzed archival documents, including congressional hearings and memos, speeches and correspondence by administration officials, to examine political and policy discussions around higher education from 1968 to 1994. Their research suggests that the current-day efforts to cut federal funding from educational institutions and eliminate diversity initiatives are not unprecedented and these efforts follow a playbook that dates as far back as the 1960s, when civil rights policies that increased access to the country's colleges and universities were met with backlash and warnings that this would lead to a "quality crisis" in higher education.
"We analyzed how these two concepts, equity and quality, became discursively linked and contested in the administration of postsecondary education policy over time, a process we refer to as (e)quality politics," Mulroy said. "The racialized political origins of that distinction and its subsequent policy implementation are part of an anti-equity policy paradigm. Once an (e)quality politics paradigm is established, racialized policy can persist."
The history of college accessibility
Following the implementation of college-access reforms provided by the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, a new federal grantmaking agency - the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) - was founded to identify, fund and disseminate projects to support equity-focused transformations in teaching, learning and administrative structures within universities.
"There was a resulting equity policy shock in the 1960s," Mulroy said. "Conversations around equality didn't start there, but civil rights bills in higher education, especially the Higher Education Act, were being enacted on Capitol Hill."
Demands coming out of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s included higher education. Civil rights advocates, educators and students were not only calling for reforms in admissions policies, but also in faculty and leadership representation and the development of internal race-conscious policies.
In an effort to protect the educational opportunity of students from diverse backgrounds who were now attending universities at growing rates, FIPSE was created to help fund and facilitate the institutional reforms needed to serve this more diverse student body. But this founding mission drew opposition from those who argued that college-access expansion and equity reforms would lead to a decrease in the quality of universities and colleges.
"Politicians on the opposing side of the argument said what was needed was not postsecondary transformation but preservation, especially in the form of federal financial protection for the nation's most elite universities," Mulroy said. "They argued these institutions needed protection from a quality crisis in the era of, what was called, college 'massification.'"
(E)quality politics
From the late 1960s to mid 1970s, FIPSE funded several path-breaking reforms in university administration, programs and hiring, but debate and conflict over what types of grants FIPSE should fund continued. In these policy debates, conversations around postsecondary equity and quality became discursively linked. "By the time we get to the 1980s, we see this coalescing around the idea that equity is somehow intrinsically separate from quality, or even a threat to quality," Mulroy said. "While conservative voices may have built up that narrative, by the 1980s, Democrats started hopping on board, too."
"They gave up the fight of trying to defend equity as a valuable route to achieving educational excellence," she said. "They gave in to conservative claims that preserving the quality of postsecondary education must be prioritized above everything else, even if that meant preserving the very same metrics that had always benefited the nation's most elite, white-serving institutions."
Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, and his administration proposed a 27% cut to financial aid for college students and advocated for eliminating the U.S Department of Education.
"Reagan's secretary of education, William Bennett, would repeatedly call for a 'reversal of course,'" Mulroy said, "one that eliminated the equity reforms of the 1970s and championed a return to an undergraduate curriculum based on 'the intellectual heritage of Western civilization.'"
Data over the years
The researchers said that policymakers, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an advisor to President Nixon, and Chester Finn, a staff assistant to Nixon, later became key figures in directing quality-focused initiatives in Reagan's administration.
Clark Kerr - then-president of the University of California - and the Carnegie Foundation authored and presented a report entitled "Quality and Equality: New Levels of Federal Responsibility for Higher Education" to Congress in 1968, outlining federal responsibilities to support and respond to the influx of access to higher education. The report highlighted how important "equity" reforms would be to maintaining the "quality" and "excellence" of postsecondary institutions. Quality and equality were not seen in opposition to each other but as working in tandem.
"The question was being asked 'how can we earnestly serve more students and how do we achieve equality because we know that there are some inherent biases going on in higher education and they won't just go away now that more students have access," Mulroy said.
After the Kerr report was presented to Congress, researchers said the term "quality" became politicized.
"They would say, 'we now have a quality crisis because of the influx of access,'" McCambly said. "They were implying that the shift of federal attention to equality and access meant that their elite institutions were going to suffer."
As the years went on, researchers noticed the language in the archival records framed equality reforms as a problem, and postsecondary quality as being threatened by access from people of color, guised as massification.
"They were able to link 'quality' to America's most white, elite institutions," McCambly said, "which insinuates that anything other than that is not."
The current landscape
The quality-threat stigma attached to equity programs persists in 2025, McCambly said. She noted that the language used in the Department of Education's "Dear Colleague" letter and in recent executive orders is similar to what was used in the Reagan era.
McCambly pointed out that it may look like the university structure is broadly under attack, but the specific orders regarding what is happening inside of institutions - funding to equity programs - is still very much aligned with what was seen in the '80s.
"They're literally saying, 'we need to get back to focusing on excellence and merit,' but often without directly referencing race," McCambly said. "It's the concept of getting away from equity, affirmative action, anything related to access or supporting underrepresented groups, but framing it in terms of race-neutral concerns about educational excellence."
The studies "The Rise of (E)Quality Politics on College Campuses: Then and Now" and "Constructing an Educational 'Quality' Crisis: (E)quality Politics and Racialization Beyond Target Beneficiaries" were published in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning and in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis respectively.
