The Equity Administrators Who Cannot See Themselves

On the peculiar psychology of critical scholars who become the thing they used to critique

If you have spent any time in higher education, you may have met this administrator. I’n not speaking of every administrator who comes in with equity credentials and a justice-oriented background, to be clear. Most do the work honestly and well. But there is a specific type, one that many people have encountered, and it helps to understand what produces it.

This variety arrives with impeccable credentials: a doctorate from a name-brand institution; a publication record steeped in equity and social justice; a personal narrative woven so tightly into their scholarship that you cannot tell where the CV ends and the memoir begins. They speak the language of inclusion, the way some people speak French: fluently, from childhood, with an accent that signals authenticity.

The institution celebrates the hire. At last, someone who gets it. The early months are promising. The right language is used in meetings. The right frameworks appear in strategic plans. There is talk of transformation.

And then, gradually or suddenly, the cracks start to show. Faculty show up late to meetings and leave early. Hallway conversations become less frequent as everyone bunkers behind closed doors. A few start heading for the exits.

If this surprises you, you have not been paying attention. If it does not surprise you, pull up a chair.

The Type

The administrator in question is someone whose scholarly identity and personal biography are tangled together. They have studied inequity not as a scholarly pursuit in the ivory tower but as personal and professional experiences that preceded the doctorate. Their publications connect autobiography to theory. They frame their careers as an extension of a social justice and equity project, and for a long time, that framing may have been entirely earned.

The trouble starts when they acquire institutional power, often for the first time. A first deanship. A first provostship. A first presidency. The corner office with the view of the quad that, until recently, they were crossing as a regular faculty member with a tote bag and opinions.

The move from scholar-critic to administrator is one of the most misunderstood transitions in academic life, and almost nobody is prepared for it. As a scholar, they critiqued systems. As an administrator, they are the system. That shift demands self-examination that their identity was never built to accommodate.

Think of it this way: hire a restaurant critic to run a restaurant and see how they handle a bad Yelp review.

Years of equity scholarship, advocacy work, and identity-building create a moral savings account. The balance grows large enough that withdrawals become possible: protecting favorites, punishing disagreement, and selectively enforcing standards. They never feel overdrawn. The account was flush before they moved into the administrator’s suite. And because their self-concept is built on being the person who always gets it right, contradictory evidence does not register as a wake-up call. It registers as noise. Faculty pushback, department or committee objections, uncomfortable exit surveys: these get filed under “people who don’t get it.” Not because the administrator is being dishonest, but because the filter is automatic. They do not choose to ignore the contradiction; they simply cannot perceive it.

This is what makes them so confounding to deal with, and, if you step back far enough, so fascinating to observe.

The Five Tells

Poker players call the unconscious behaviors that reveal what someone is holding “tells.” Equity administrators who have crossed into this territory have five consistent ones.

1. The Selective Equity Deployment. Equity language gets activated strategically rather than consistently. Rules apply to some and bend for others. Diversity concerns surface in certain hiring conversations and go on vacation during others. The inconsistency is not random. It maps onto who is allied with the administrator and who is not. But because the word “equity” is always somewhere in the sentence, the selectivity is almost impossible to name without sounding as though one is opposed to equity itself, which is the point.

2. The Procedural Redirect. You raise a substantive concern about a decision. The response is not about your concern. The response is about how you raised it. You did not file correctly. You did not provide the right documentation. You did not use the proper channel. By the time the conversation ends, you have forgotten what you came in to say and are instead defending your paperwork. It is administrative jiu-jitsu: using the opponent’s momentum against them, all while appearing to care very much about process.

3. The Preemptive Paper Trail. This administrator writes memos the way some people write thank-you notes: promptly, prolifically, and always with an eye to the audience that matters. Emails are deliberate. Meeting summaries are drafted by their office and framed to reflect their version of events. By the time a formal complaint surfaces, the administrator has already written the first draft of history. It is not paranoia. It is narration dressed up as record-keeping.

4. The Hierarchy Invocation. When challenged from below, they invoke authority from above. The senior administrator supports this direction. Central administration has been briefed. The president is aligned. Whether or not these claims are accurate (and they are sometimes more aspirational than factual), they silence discussion by suggesting that your objection is not wrong but is institutionally illegitimate. Most faculty do not want to test whether the senior administrator actually believes that.

5. The Public-Private Divide. In faculty meetings, board presentations, and community events, the narrative is one of progress, collaboration, and shared governance. Behind closed doors, decisions are made unilaterally, dissent is noted and remembered, and faculty who push back discover that their committee appointments have disappeared or their program resources have shifted elsewhere. The divide between the public story and the private reality widens, but the public version is so fluent and so in tune with institutional values that challenging it may seem futile.

Why the Lightbulb Never Goes On

Faculty who recognize these patterns sometimes believe that if they present the evidence clearly enough, the administrator will recognize the pattern. This is a reasonable expectation held by reasonable people, and it almost always fails to come true.

Direct feedback does not produce insight here. It produces defensiveness because the feedback threatens the identity that holds everything together. The administrator does not experience your assembled evidence as a correction. They experience it as an attack on who they are. And their response will follow the playbook: reframe your feedback as a procedural violation, create a memo documenting your hostility, involve the senior administrator, and narrate the encounter to colleagues as further evidence that you are difficult.

They will not have an epiphany. What they will do is experience your resistance as further proof that they are surrounded by people who do not share their commitment. Which deepens the very narrative you were hoping to dislodge.

It is, if nothing else, an impressively closed loop.

A Field Guide, Not a Battle Plan

The poignant part, when this pattern does appear, is that these are not villains who infiltrated higher education. They are often people who entered the academy because they cared about justice, who built scholarly careers challenging the very dynamics they now reproduce without recognizing it. The critical lens that made them perceptive scholars becomes the blind spot that makes them difficult administrators. The irony is structural, not personal, which is an observation they would have made brilliantly in a journal article, before they had a budget and direct reports.

Understanding this does not excuse the behavior. But it does reframe it. Equity administrators who cannot see themselves are not disingenuous. They are a case study in how power changes people, even well-intentioned ones, and in why institutions need governance structures that do not depend on the virtue of whoever happens to be sitting in the corner office.

None of this is inevitable. Plenty of administrators carry equity commitments into leadership while maintaining self-awareness. It is a cautionary tale about what can happen when identity and power reinforce each other unchecked. If you have read this far and thought, “I know who this is,” you are not alone. The real test of self-awareness is not whether we recognize this pattern in someone else. It is whether we recognize it in ourselves.