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The 2020 health pandemic and high-profile police murders of Black people inspired national conversations about racism and police brutality. This study examined how Intermediary Public Policy Organizations (IPPOs) discursively engaged with the racialized nature of the pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd, which have increased awareness of systemic racism in society. Our discursive analysis of IPPO statements published during these events revealed a pattern of humanizing higher education institutions, race evasive policy proposals, and a lack of policy action addressing systemic racism. IPPO evasion of race is consequential because it has the potential to limit the ability of public policy to dismantle systems of oppression and highlights the need for race-conscious policies to support Black, Indigenous, and people of color students and communities.

This study takes an inventory of a particular type of intermediary organization ascendant within the state-level higher education policy: ideological think tanks. Our inventory identifies 99 think tanks: 59 affiliated with the conservative State Policy Network and 40 with the Progressive States Network. The analysis shows that state-level conservative think tanks (CTTs) are more tightly connected to national networks than are progressive think tanks (PTTs). By narrow margins, CTTs are also better funded and have more robust higher education policy activity than PTTs. The two most common policy issues—state funding and costs and affordability—represent higher education issues of equal salience to conservative and progressive organizations but from contrasting ideological perspectives. This inventory of the landscape of ideological think tanks’ activity and their supply of information has implications for future research that might examine policymakers’ demand for and utilization of ideological think tank information and services.