The diversity bargain And other dilemmas of race, admissions, and meritocracy at elite universities

Warikoo (Harvard Graduate School of Education) acknowledges that elite institutions of higher education commit resources to diversifying their student bodies, yet fall short of their goals with respect to race and class. While admissions offices and enrolled white students value affirmative action and diversity, they do so because they feel much is to be gained and learned by diversifying the collegiate way of life. That the numbers of underrepresented minorities in the student body fall short of their relative percentages of the population does not occur to them as a problem, for two reasons. First is faith in the concept of merit. Second is the conviction that the admission process is fair. Thus, admitted students ascribe this distinction to individual merit and are thereby willing to accept some affirmative action so long as it personally benefits their own college experience. This is the diversity bargain. But demographic realities raise the question as to what merit is and how it can be redefined to ensure that all sectors of the population can access the opportunities that society offers. The author distinguishes between symbolic and real solutions and has several suggestions for next steps. A sophisticated contribution unobtrusively informed by current theory and distinguished by substantial field research at Brown, Harvard, and Oxford. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --William S. Simmons, Brown University

This book highlights a persistent question facing diversity efforts in higher education: how do universities make the case for diversity in the highly selective, competitive, and rigorous environments that define them as elite institutions? Warikoo, a Harvard professor, bases her conclusions on interviews with students at her home institution, at Brown University, and at Oxford. Her narrow sample has empirical limitations, but Warikoo makes a case for these conversations as proving grounds for four perspectives that students use to understand race: color-blindness, diversity, power analysis, and the "culture of poverty." These frames are an effective foundation to support Warikoo's larger conclusion, that "many white students expressed what I term the diversity bargain: ambivalent support for affirmative action as long as they benefited through a diverse campus, and as along as black and Latino peers didn't seem to deprive them of success in other competitive endeavors." Many institutions have embedded the diversity bargain in their own marketing for multicultural programming. The author provocatively laments that by adopting such rhetoric, universities-and the students that they influence-may limit their ability to make real social change. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.