Liberation for Sale? Examining STEM, Non-STEM, and Market-Driven Pressures on HBCU Graduate Education

Abstract

This dissertation uses a multi-state content analysis to examine how public Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) navigate the layered demands of market-driven higher education policy while remaining rooted in their historic missions of racial uplift and educational justice. Analyzing strategic plans, graduate catalogs, and state-level policy documents from Florida, Texas, and North Carolina, the study explores how graduate education is deployed not just as academic expansion, but as institutional strategy—used to resist erasure, secure visibility, and assert value in systems never built for Black educational spaces. Grounded in frameworks of Racial Academic Capitalism (RAC)—a synthesis of racial capitalism (Robinson, 1983) and academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004)—alongside servingness (Garcia et al., 2019; Garcia, 2020; DeTurk & Briscoe, 2020) and mission drift (Jaquette, 2013; Jones, 2007), this research introduces the concept of institutional code-switching: a discursive maneuver through which HBCUs perform policy alignment while preserving core commitments to community, culture, and care. Findings reveal that graduate programs function as both protective spaces and political tools—allowing institutions to survive without conceding the totality of their mission. Rather than chasing external legitimacy, these institutions are reframing what counts as success, on their own terms. This study calls for policy conversations that stop demanding proximity to whiteness as a condition for support, and instead center the lived realities, historical labor, and liberatory visions that HBCUs have always embodied. Chapter 1 grounds the study in contemporary political and policy conditions and introduces the research questions. Chapter 2 reviews literature on HBCU graduate education, performance funding, and institutional identity, and outlines the conceptual framework of RAC, servingness, and mission drift. Chapter 3 details the methodological design, including case selection, coding strategies, and the rationale for using across-case content analysis. Chapter 4 presents institutional findings by state, followed by an across-case thematic synthesis that highlights how HBCUs enact adaptation, resistance, and rhetorical negotiation. Chapter 5 concludes with a synthesis of insights, original contributions—including institutional code-switching—as well as implications for theory, future research, and policy reform.