The primary objective of this book is to help higher education and student affairs graduate students as well as current higher education and student affairs professionals practice and refine thinking skills needed to resolve diversity-related issues and problems on college and university campuses. Within each chapter the author has included case studies that address all of the different aspects of diversity and the following functional areas within higher education and student affairs: academic advising, administration, admissions, career services, counseling and psychological services, financial aid, Greek affairs, international education, institutional research, judicial affairs, multicultural affairs, orientation services, residence life, student activities, student development in the two-year college, teaching, and wellness and student health. The case studies are designed to serve as a useful starting point to enable students and professionals to practice examining and thoughtfully articulating appropriate plans of action in response to the issues presented in each. Specifically, each case study is designed to help readers recognize and develop multicultural awareness and become competent users of multicultural knowledge and related skills. This book may be used as a supplementary textbook or a stand-alone text in undergraduate or graduate level courses, training modules, workshops, and seminars designed to provide opportunities to learn how to communicate with persons from different cultural backgrounds. In addition, the text contains a number of research projects that students and researchers will find interesting and challenging, including some that may be expanded to serve as dissertation projects and/or research publications.

We’ve heard plenty from politicians and experts on affirmative action and higher education, about how universities should intervene—if at all—to ensure a diverse but deserving student population. But what about those for whom these issues matter the most? In this book, Natasha K. Warikoo deeply explores how students themselves think about merit and race at a uniquely pivotal moment: after they have just won the most competitive game of their lives and gained admittance to one of the world’s top universities. What Warikoo uncovers—talking with both white students and students of color at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford—is absolutely illuminating; and some of it is positively shocking. As she shows, many elite white students understand the value of diversity abstractly, but they ignore the real problems that racial inequality causes and that diversity programs are meant to solve. They stand in fear of being labeled a racist, but they are quick to call foul should a diversity program appear at all to hamper their own chances for advancement. The most troubling result of this ambivalence is what she calls the “diversity bargain,” in which white students reluctantly agree with affirmative action as long as it benefits them by providing a diverse learning environment—racial diversity, in this way, is a commodity, a selling point on a brochure. And as Warikoo shows, universities play a big part in creating these situations. The way they talk about race on campus and the kinds of diversity programs they offer have a huge impact on student attitudes, shaping them either toward ambivalence or, in better cases, toward more productive and considerate understandings of racial difference. Ultimately, this book demonstrates just how slippery the notions of race, merit, and privilege can be. In doing so, it asks important questions not just about college admissions but what the elite students who have succeeded at it—who will be the world’s future leaders—will do with the social inequalities of the wider world.

Diversity has been a focus of higher education policy, law, and scholarship for decades, continually expanding to include not only race, ethnicity and gender, but also socioeconomic status, sexual and political orientation, and more. However, existing collections still tend to focus on a narrow definition of diversity in education, or in relation to singular topics like access to higher education, financial aid, and affirmative action. By contrast, Diversity in American Higher Education captures in one volume the wide range of critical issues that comprise the current discourse on diversity on the college campus in its broadest sense. This edited collection explores: legal perspectives on diversity and affirmative action higher education's relationship to the deeper roots of K-12 equity and access policy, politics, and practice's effects on students, faculty, and staff. Bringing together the leading experts on diversity in higher education scholarship, Diversity in American Higher Education redefines the agenda for diversity as we know it today.

The primary objective of this book is to help higher education and student affairs graduate students as well as current higher education and student affairs professionals practice and refine thinking skills needed to resolve diversity-related issues and problems on college and university campuses. Within each chapter the author has included case studies that address all of the different aspects of diversity and the following functional areas within higher education and student affairs: academic advising, administration, admissions, career services, counseling and psychological services, financial aid, Greek affairs, international education, institutional research, judicial affairs, multicultural affairs, orientation services, residence life, student activities, student development in the two-year college, teaching, and wellness and student health. The case studies are designed to serve as a useful starting point to enable students and professionals to practice examining and thoughtfully articulating appropriate plans of action in response to the issues presented in each. Specifically, each case study is designed to help readers recognize and develop multicultural awareness and become competent users of multicultural knowledge and related skills. This book may be used as a supplementary textbook or a stand-alone text in undergraduate or graduate level courses, training modules, workshops, and seminars designed to provide opportunities to learn how to communicate with persons from different cultural backgrounds. In addition, the text contains a number of research projects that students and researchers will find interesting and challenging, including some that may be expanded to serve as dissertation projects and/or research publications.

With the goal of building more inclusive working, learning, and living environments in higher education, this book seeks to reframe understandings of forms of everyday exclusion that affect members of nondominant groups on predominantly white college campuses. The book contextualizes the need for a more robust analysis of persistent patterns of campus inequality by addressing key trends that have reshaped the landscape for diversity, including rapid demographic change, reduced public spending on higher education, and a polarized political climate. Specifically, it offers a critique of contemporary analytical ideas such as micro-aggressions and implicit and unconscious bias and underscores the impact of consequential discriminatory events (or macro-aggressions) and racial and gender-based inequalities (macro-inequities) on members of nondominant groups. The authors draw extensively upon interview studies and qualitative research findings to illustrate the reproduction of social inequality through behavioral and process-based outcomes in the higher education environment. They identify a more powerful systemic framework and conceptual vocabulary that can be used for meaningful change. In addition, the book highlights coping and resistance strategies that have regularly enabled members of nondominant groups to address, deflect, and counteract everyday forms of exclusion. The book offers concrete approaches, concepts, and tools that will enable higher education leaders to identify, address, and counteract persistent structural and behavioral barriers to inclusion. As such, it shares a series of practical recommendations that will assist presidents, provosts, executive officers, boards of trustees, faculty, administrators, diversity officers, human resource leaders, diversity taskforces, and researchers as they seek to implement comprehensive strategies that result in sustained diversity change.

By the New York Times bestselling author: a provocative account of the attack on the humanities, the rise of intolerance, and the erosion of serious learning America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton? Oppressive. American history? Tyranny. Professors correcting grammar and spelling, or employers hiring by merit? Racist and sexist. Students emerge into the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American experience. Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force. The Diversity Delusion argues that the root of this problem is the belief in America’s endemic racism and sexism, a belief that has engendered a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in society and academia. Diversity commissars denounce meritocratic standards as discriminatory, enforce hiring quotas, and teach students and adults alike to think of themselves as perpetual victims. From #MeToo mania that blurs flirtations with criminal acts, to implicit bias and diversity compliance training that sees racism in every interaction, Heather Mac Donald argues that we are creating a nation of narrowed minds, primed for grievance, and that we are putting our competitive edge at risk. But there is hope in the works of authors, composers, and artists who have long inspired the best in us. Compiling the author’s decades of research and writing on the subject, The Diversity Delusion calls for a return to the classical liberal pursuits of open-minded inquiry and expression, by which everyone can discover a common humanity.