Ellen Berrey

Why Diversity Became Orthodox in Higher Education, and How it Changed the Meaning of Race on Campus

Using qualitative data about University of Michigan between 1965 and 2005, this article shows how administrators’ diversity discourse and programs have defined race as a cultural identity, expressed through interaction, which provides instrumental benefits. It also explains three major reasons why, starting in the mid-1980s, university administrators adopted this racial orthodoxy of “diversity”: to signal compliance with—and also to redefine—law and institutional norms while still practicing race-based affirmative admissions; to frame inclusion in more complex terms than a racial binary or numerical representation amidst growing campus multiculturalism; and to market the university, especially to white students. The article advances racial formation theory by developing the concept of a racial orthodoxy. It shows that diversity discourse and programs have sometimes advanced the goal of racial minority inclusion, but at the cost of downplaying problems of racial inequality and misrepresenting racial minorities’ campus experiences.

MAKING A CIVIL RIGHTS CLAIM FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The politics of affirmative action are currently structured as a litigious conflict among elites taking polarized stances. Opponents call for colorblindness, and defenders champion diversity. How can marginalized activists subvert the dominant terms of legal debate? To what extent can they establish their legitimacy? This paper advances legal mobilization theory by analytically foregrounding the field of contention and the relational production of meaning among social movement organizations. The case for study is two landmark United States Supreme Court cases that contested the University of Michigan’s race-conscious admissions policies. Using ethnographic data, the paper analyzes BAMN, an activist organization, and its reception by other affirmative action supporters. BAMN had a marginalized allied-outsider status in the legal cases, as it made a radical civil rights claim for a moderate, elite-supported policy: that affirmative action corrects systemic racial discrimination. BAMN activists pursued their agenda by passionately defending and, at once, critiquing the university’s policies. However, the organization’s militancy remained a liability among university leaders, who prioritized the consistency of their diversity claims. The analysis forwards a scholarly understanding of the legacy of race-conscious policies.

Race, Class, and Affirmative ActionRace, Class, and Affirmative Action, by AlonSigal. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2015. 348 pp.

The political prospects of affirmative action do not look good. Yes, the U.S. Supreme Court has stood by race-conscious college admissions policies for four decades, but those decisions have whittled away the acceptable rationales and methods. The most recent decisions rest on one-vote margins. Activist opponents are ready in the wings, as they pursue new cases against Harvard University, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and elsewhere. Eights states ban affirmative action in public colleges and universities altogether. Yet the policy still has ardent supporters who have run many of the country’s most powerful institutions: elite higher education, the Fortune 500, the U.S. military. Sigal Alon’s comparative study of race and class-based admissions in the United States and Israel is highly relevant for these debates. Race, Class, and Affirmative Action provides compelling evidence for those who want to assess admissions policies based on how these policies influence the representation of racial minority and economically disadvantaged students on elite campuses. The book presents concise empirical answers to pragmatic questions: What are the outcomes of a race-sensitive admissions policy? What happens without it? What can class-based affirmative action achieve? Alon’s launching point is the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, which permits colleges and universities to voluntarily consider applicants’ racial status so long as ‘‘race-neutral’’ options are inadequate for achieving an institutional goal of diversity. Let’s take that instruction seriously, Alon says. The result is a novel and exciting addition to the extensive body of social scientific research on race and college admissions. Existing research has generated instructive findings: a racially mixed student body generates educational and civic benefits, race-conscious admissions policies are an effective means of increasing the representation of students of color on campus, and policies that deliberately do not consider race have been ineffective at increasing minority representation in many top institutions. But, to date, we have not understood how class and racial considerations compare in elite admissions or the implications of swapping out racial considerations for classbased ones. This book reveals powerful core findings: across both countries, affirmative action provides valuable mobility for students of color and economically disadvantaged students. It enables them to access the most selective colleges and universities, where they excel, with better results than if they had attended less selective schools. Further, there is no feasible model of affirmative action that explicitly ignores applicants’ racial status and still achieves contemporary levels of African American and Latino enrollment in the top U.S. colleges and universities, where race-conscious admissions is still very common. The book’s artful research design is a U.S.centric analysis that successfully uses Israel as a comparison case. Focusing on the most prestigious colleges and universities in each country, it compares the outcomes of the United States’s race-conscious model of affirmative action to those of Israel’s class-based affirmative action. It also compares simulated policies to understand the consequences if the U.S. schools used only class-based affirmative action and if Israeli schools used only a race-based model. The selection of Israel for comparison is clever. The admissions policy of Israel’s top four universities is the only one in the world that explicitly considers class but not race. The unique data set comprises institutional administrative data on cohorts from 1999 to 2008 at these four schools, including student

37.50 cloth. ISBN: 9780871540010.

Memphis and the Paradox of Place is an in-depth, historical case study of Memphis, Tennessee, that explores how a specific place is simultaneously rooted in local dynamics and global processes. This book is part of a small but growing body of research on global cities that anchors observations in the everyday, lived realities and messy conflicts of a specific city (see e.g., the December 2009 issue of this journal). The book also contributes to a much-neglected area of urban research: the study of Southern cities. Wanda Rushing’s primary goal is to weave an analysis of place, as a concept, into the study of global economic activity and on-the-ground urban practices. She studies the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of urban redevelopment, conflict, and inequality in Memphis by investigating such issues as public parks, the demise of the cotton industry, community festivals, and the promotion of Graceland as tourist destination. The book pays particularly close attention to the ways that a place—as well as race, class, and gender— shapes these issues. Interdisciplinary in approach and attentive to the craft of writing, Rushing integrates archivaland interview-based evidence with poems and other literary works. One of the book’s strongest contributions to urban and community sociology is its deft illustration of how historical events, processes, and conflicts accumulate in both the physical landscape of a city and the cultural imagination of its denizens and, in turn, shape subsequent issues in often surprising ways. This is the most compelling “paradox of place” examined in the book. For example, in 1905, the city leaders erected a statue commemorating Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate Civil War general, and created a city park in Forrest’s name, following national and international trends in urban park design and so-called statuemania. Drawing on urban studies and the sociology of collective memory, Rushing observes that white city leaders were inventing tradition—the city of Memphis actually was of marginal importance in the Civil War—while legitimizing their presentday authority. At a time of anti-black violence and Jim Crow law, the legacy of General Forrest appealed to white supremacists. Flash-forward a hundred years and see city officials, civil rights activists, and southern heritage groups debating the relocation of the monument out of the neglected park. Many argue the park is standing in the way of downtown redevelopment. Government representatives stopped the relocation plans. They feared a potentially violent conflict

Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South by Wanda Rushing

Youngstown civic ties “amplified contacts among actors who were already well connected.” Because, as Safford argues, civic organizations seek community improvement while economic organizations are primarily concerned with profit-maximization, Allentown was characterized by more “community building” social capital. The bridging function of these civic institutions (of which the Boy Scouts is preeminent in Allentown, as the Garden Club is less so in Youngstown) is critical to the different trajectories of each city. These network differences derive from the historical relationship of ownership and control, where Allentown elites relinquished economic control to a managerial class and concentrated on civic obligations while Youngstown elites sought control in both institutional arenas resulting in excessive economic domination. Safford’s position is clearly stated, very well organized, and cogently written. His study integrates analytical insights and methodological comprehensiveness in explaining the intersection of economic forces, civic affairs, and urban development. Still, aspects of his argument raise questions, two in particular. Many scholars of ethnicity and religion may quarrel with his central thesis that ethnic-religious formations promoted a more virtuous business elite, even if by default, than the class-based networks that he deems catastrophic in Youngstown. They may wonder whether similar formations in other U.S. cities and the world have produced a structure of non-community oriented self-interest and whether class-based formations (focusing on working class initiatives rather than those of business elites) might operate in a more “community-building” fashion similar to Allentown. Indeed, given how damaging class relations were in Youngstown, one wonders how citizens have overcome the influence of organized crime as much as they reportedly have. Likewise, Safford’s structural emphasis is very revealing and persuasive, especially his historical analysis. Yet the social networks analysis of the 1950s and 1970s could have integrated far more of the interview data Safford alludes to in illustrating the new identities, roles, and rules he argues were central to each city’s fate. The structural emphasis may overlook micro relationships (and assumed conversations among elites) that are key to Safford’s explanations of elite motivations and coordination. Still, it is Safford’s wellcrafted research that leads to these questions, and scholars will find this book a valuable contribution to the post-industrial debate.