Daniel Sabbagh

Fair Access to Higher Education: A Comparative Perspective

What does “fairness” mean with respect to the distribution of access to higher education? We conceived this special issue as part of a broad conversation to address this and related questions across disciplines and across nations. Within that conversation philosophers have asked what criteria should be used to allocate funding and offers of admission at selective institutions (Fullinwider and Lichtenberg 2004). Assuming the notion of “merit” comes into play when answering these first questions, others have focused on how merit should be conceived and assessed (Daniels 1978; Selmi 1995; Guinier and Sturm 2001). Moving from a normative to a descriptive standpoint, sociologists such as A. H. Halsey (2011) have examined the criteria that countries actually do use—or did use in the past—to decide who will be admitted whenever some selection needs to be made. Given these criteria, to what extent and through which mechanisms do existing inequalities of class, race/ ethnicity, and gender impact university entrance? Such questions motivate many contemporary analysts (Shavit et al. 2007; Charles et al. 2009; Espenshade and Walton Radford 2009). Scholars have also looked into the initiatives now taking place with a view to alleviating these inequalities (Grodsky 2007; van Zanten 2009). Finally, we sought to connect this concern for “widening participation”—to use a ubiquitous British phrase—to the research on the consequences of the marketization of higher education (Callender 2006; Douglass 2007; Kirby 2011). Those are some of the general questions that

The Rise of Indirect Affirmative Action: Converging Strategies for Promoting “Diversity” in Selective Institutions of Higher Education in the United States and France

A growing trend in the comparative politics literature on patterns of minority incorporation emphasizes the emerging policy convergence in this area, conventional oppositions between national models notwithstanding. This convergence is further illustrated by drawing upon the cases of two countries often analyzed within an “exceptionalist” framework and generally viewed as polar opposites as far as the political legitimacy and legal validity of race-based classifications are concerned: the United States and France. The analysis of recent programs designed to increase the “diversity” of the student body in selective institutions of higher education demonstrates that indirect affirmative action is the instrument around which French and U.S. policies have tended to converge. This increasingly visible convergence obtains in part because of the current move toward color-blindness as a matter of law in the United States. Yet it is also a reflection of the fact that the ultimate purpose of affirmative action in liberal democracies requires a measure of indirection and/or implicitness.

Affirmative Action: The U.S. Experience in Comparative Perspective

Broadly defined, affirmative action encompasses any measure that allocates resources through a process that takes into account individual membership in underrepresented groups. The goal is to increase the proportion of individuals from those groups in positions from which they have been excluded as a result of state-sanctioned oppression in the past or societal discrimination in the present. A comparative overview of affirmative action regimes reveals that the most direct and controversial variety of affirmative action emerged as a strategy for conflict management in deeply divided societies; that the policy tends to expand in scope, either embracing additional groups, encompassing wider realms for the same groups, or both; and that in countries where the beneficiaries are numerical majorities, affirmative action programs are more extensive and their transformative purpose is unusually explicit.

Nationalism and Multiculturalism

Any conceptual or empirical analysis of the relations between ‘nationalism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ must begin by acknowledging the ambiguity of such notions—and setting aside those of their possible meanings which would make that analysis fruitless or impracticable from the outset. Thus, in the discussion that follows, the word ‘multiculturalism’ will refer exclusively, not to the fact of cultural diversity—which is characteristic of most contemporary liberal democracies—but to a specific kind of political response to that fact, so as to avoid the confusions deriving from ‘the [widespread] tendency to slide from descriptive to normative uses’1 of that most equivocal term. Similarly, and in contrast with the assumption that a nation can be defined as an ethnically homogeneous community—an assumption seemingly embraced by some of the leading scholars in the field, who tend to equate nationhood with cultural distinctiveness,2 thereby leaving it to others to account for the historical process by which nationalist movements actually invented the distinctive ‘culture’ of their nation-to-be3—I will adopt a more consensual and, at any rate, less unduly restrictive definition of that second, equally capacious notion. For the purpose of this article, the word ‘nation’ will refer to a community of people characterised by some common cultural features, mutual recognition, ‘the anonymity of membership’4 and an aspiration to collective political self-determination that distinguishes it from an ethnic group (although an ethnic group whose identity is being threatened is likely to begin to think of itself as a nation). For while ‘ethnic groups can transform themselves into national ones and national communities may define their identity in terms of common ethnic origins […], this broad area where ethnicity and nationhood overlap does not make the two phenomena identical. National unity need not refer to common descent and ethnic groups need not understand themselves as separate political communities within the wider society.’5

Elements Toward a Comparative Analysis of Affirmative Action Policies

Broadly defined, affirmative action encompasses any measure that allocates resources through a process that takes into account individual membership in underrepresented groups, with a view to increasing the proportion of individuals from those groups in positions from which they have been excluded as a result of state-sanctioned oppression in the past or societal discrimination in the present. A comparative overview of affirmative action regimes reveals that the most direct and controversial variety of affirmative action emerged as a strategy for conflict management in deeply divided societies; that the policy tends to expand in scope, either embracing additional groups, encompassing wider realms for the same groups, or both; and that in countries where the beneficiaries are numerical majorities, affirmative action programs are more extensive and their transformative purpose is unusually explicit.

The paradox of decategorization: deinstitutionalizing race through race-based affirmative action in the United States

Abstract In the United States, the expression ‘affirmative action’ encompasses measures that grant a more or less flexible kind of preferential treatment in the allocation of scarce resources – jobs, university admissions, and government contracts – to the members of ascriptive groups formerly targeted for legal discrimination and currently underrepresented in positions of power and prestige. Whilst often justified as a way of compensating for past wrongs or of promoting cultural diversity, the policy is best understood as an instrument aimed at reducing the correlation between race and class. In this light, its ultimate goal would be to eradicate the specific disadvantage still produced by racial identification in US society, a disadvantage that arises from a set of negative expectations partly based on the existence of this correlation and from which no black individual is entirely insulated. A detailed presentation and defence of this alternative argument is provided, the empirical assumptions upon which it rests are identified, and some of its limitations are discussed.

Religion and discrimination: extending the ‘disaggregative approach’

ABSTRACT Cécile Laborde’s disaggregation strategy, which is convincingly applied to religion, liberal neutrality, and freedom of association, should be extended to discrimination, in order to more systematically determine whether, when, and why indirect religious discrimination is unfair. Moreover, while Laborde’s distinction between the ‘Disproportionate Burden scenario’ and the ‘Majority Bias scenario’ is a powerful alternative to the discrimination-focused account of the justifiability of religious exemptions, the epistemic status of that distinction is not immediately clear. A case can be made that Disproportionate Burden and Majority Bias do not map onto different types of minority exemption claims. They are perspectives or analytical frames that may jointly and usefully be applied to most instances of such claims.

William Penn et l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre: Le chaînon manquant

RésuméLes deux projets de paix les plus célèbres publiés à l’époque de Louis XIV sont celui de William Penn, qui parut en anglais en 1693, et celui de l’abbé de Saint-Pierre, dont la version la plus connue fut publiée en plusieurs volumes datés de 1713 à 1716. Une traduction française anonyme du livre de Penn fut imprimée au plus tard en 1697 et connut une diffusion extrêmement restreinte. Nous pensons que l’abbé de Saint-Pierre a participé d’une façon ou d’une autre à cette traduction et s’est amplement inspiré des idées de Penn pour son propre projet.AbstractThe two most famous peace projects published at the time of Louis XIV are William Penn’sEssay towards the present and future peace of Europe and Castel de Saint-Pierre’sProjet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe, which came out in English in 1693, and that of the abbé de Saint-Pierre, which was published in its completed form in several volumes dating from 1713 to 1716. A French translation of Penn’s book was issued in 1697 at the latest and was privately distributed. Our claim is that Saint-Pierre was in some way involved in that translation and that he was indebted to Penn for many of his ideas.ZusammenfassungWilliam Penn’s BuchAn essay towards the present and future peace of Europe, das im Jahre 1693 auf Englisch veröffentlicht wurde, und Saint-Pierres’Werk,Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe, das in seiner endgültigen Form zwischen 1713 und 1716 herausgegeben wurde, sind zwei sehr wichtige Friedensentwürfe. Eine anonyme französische Übersetzung von Penns’ Buch wurde spätestens im Jahre 1697 gedruckt und seine Verbreitung wurde sehr beschränkt. Wir glauben, daß Saint-Pierre an der Ausarbeitung dieser Übersetzung beteiligt war und daß er jedenfalls von Penn stark beeinflußt wurde.