Since the Great Recession, a number of public colleges and universities have become operationally vulnerable. In this article, the authors point to two related processes leading to this crisis in public higher education. The first is the recent deterioration of operational conditions for a number of public colleges and universities. The second process results from hyper-partisan state governments and especially the politics of racial resentment that often motivate electoral participation among White voters. Under hyper-partisan conditions, some state governments have divested from public higher education especially aggressively when the student bodies of public colleges and universities grow more racially diverse than is the state as a whole (Taylor, Cantwell, Watts, & Wood, 2020). They elaborate on the two processes that underlie this state of affairs and offer possibilities for a more just, more equal higher education system