In the United States, the neoliberal university is enmeshed within a system of racial capitalism. Whether public “land grant” universities built on stolen land or private colleges built with slave labor (Wilder, 2013), higher education institutions in the U.S. have only relatively recently in their histories begun to admit a more diverse student body (Harper, 2020). This turn in admissions cannot be detached from the project of racialized neoliberalism, which Mayorga (2018) characterizes as “market logic and an exploitative use of cultural diversity.” Many institutions profit on the uncompensated labor of Black male athletes (Murphy, 2010), commodify students of color in their marketing materials to trumpet their commitment to “diversity” (Ferguson, 2017), and burden their Black students with exorbitant debt (Mustaffa, 2021). Student activists, however, promote radical alternative imaginaries to the racialized neoliberal university. These visions entail honoring the dignity and inherent worth of all students, dismantling systems of white supremacy, and promoting a spirit of collective care for all whose lives all touched by the university, from those who work to clean its halls and those who live in its neighborhoods to those whose tuition dollars keep it running. Drawing on two case studies of broad-based campaigns led by Black student activists to contest their university’s policies and practices, this paper explores “the role of race, diversity and justice in a post-neoliberal imaginary” (Cole & Heinecke, 2018, p. 4) advanced by student activists. We also consider how attempts by administrators to institutionalize responses to student demands reflect organizational learning and change. Guided by Cho’s (2018) institutional response framework, we examine the original demands students articulated in comparison to the presentation of these demands along with the university’s response to them in official university channels, and supplement these data with interviews with student activists and administrators at each institution. Ultimately, we argue that even well-intentioned efforts to prove responsive to students’ radical visionings for their universities fail to usher in a post-neoliberal paradigm shift, given the larger systems in which higher education institutions in the U.S. are entrenched, and the “pretense of progress” continues to serve, rather than undermine, the neoliberal project. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of our findings for administrators, staff, and student activists.

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