Jerome Karabel

Pathways to Top Corporate Management

With college attendance approaching universality among senior managers in large American corporations, the issue of the impact of distinctions within the system of higher education in providing access to these positions has become increasingly salient. This study, based on data on the education, social backgrounds, and careers of 2,729 senior managers associated with 208 major corporations, analyzes the relationship between stratification within higher education (as measured by institutional status and level of credential) and stratification within the ranks of top corporate management. Findings reveal that: (1) Corporate ascent is facilitated by the possession of a bachelors degree from a top-ranked college, a masters degree in business administration from a prominent program, or a degree in law from a leading institution. (2) Controlling for educational credentials, an upper-class background increases the likelihood of rising to the top ranks of corporate management. (3) The impact of a law degree and an upper-class origin are most pronounced for successful movement beyond the firm into formal and informal inter-corporate networks.

Towards a theory of intellectuals and politics

The intellectual, Vaclav Havel has written, should constantly disturb, should bear witness to the misery of the world, should be provocative by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and open pressure and manipulations, should be the chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations, should be a witness to their mendacity.1 In this wonderfully eloquent passage, composed in 1986 when Czechoslovakias Communist regime still had the capacity to make life hellish for those who dared to oppose it, Havel provides a particularly vivid expression of the perspective that has dominated most thinking and writing about intellectuals: that they are disturbers of the peace whose ultimate responsibility is to tell the truth, even (and perhaps especially) if it arouses the ire of the established authorities. In so arguing, Havel joins a long tradition of discourse about intellectuals, beginning with Zola and extending through Benda and Orwell to Kolakowski and many others, that insists the proper function of intellect is, in the memorable words of Ignazio Silone, the humble and courageous service of truth.2 That this viewpoint, which we shall call here the moralist tradition, retains vitality today is illustrated by no less a figure then Edward Said, who in delivering the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC in 1993, repeatedly emphasized that the tasks of the contemporary intellectual is to speak the truth to power.3

Revolutionary Contradictions: Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Intellectuals

AT an 1866 meeting of a Congress of the First International, a leader of the French delegation, a worker named Tolain, arose to give his emphatic support to a motion to exclude from the organization all who were not workers. The motion was obviously directed against intellectuals-above all against a particularly troublesome German intellectual living in London who had been among the founders of the First International, Karl Marx. The congress rejected the motion after long discussions and debates, but the very raising of the issue reflected

High School Segregation and Access to the University of California

Using institutional data on fall 1999 freshman admissions, we document the existence and magnitude of inequalities among California high schools in the access they provide to the University of California (UC). Because high schools are segregated by socioeconomic status and race, we examine how schools that differ on these dimensions also differ in their rates of admission to UC. We find that UC admission rates are grossly unequal between the public and private sectors and within each sector. Different groups, however, face different barriers. Schools where the student body is heavily Latino tend to have low per capita admissions because fewer students apply; schools where the student body is heavily African American tend to have low per capita admissions because fewer applicants are admitted. Our research suggests the need for both high school outreach to increase applications and contextual review of applications to reduce inequalities in the admission of applicants.

American education, meritocratic ideology, and the legitimation of inequality: the community college and the problem of American exceptionalism

This article examines American education in comparative perspective, suggesting that the distinctive structure of the school system is both an embodiment and a source of the felt fluidity of class boundaries in the United States. Several characteristic features of the American educational system are identified: the avoidance of early selection, the lack of sharp segmentation between different types of institutions, relative freedom of movement both among and within institutions, openness to new fields of study, high levels of enrollment, and the provision of opportunities for educational mobility well into adulthood. The two-year public community college, it argues, is an essential expression of these patterns which, through its very accessibility, reinforces the American ideology that it is never too late for individual talent to reveal itself - and to be rewarded. The article concludes with a discussion of the effects of the nations distinctive school system on American culture and politics, suggesting that the perceived “classlessness” of American society may in part be a product of its seemingly open and democratic structure of education.

The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action at the University of California.

IN HIS FASCINATING memoir of the University of California at Berkeley in the 1930s sociologist Robert Nisbet describes the campus, with some exaggeration, as 99.99 percent white. I didnt know of a single American-bonl black student at Berkeley in the thirties, he recalls. Moreover, Nisbet claims, had anyone in the 1930s proposed an affirmative action policy at all like the one that prevailed until the passage of Proposition 209, it would have been rejected at just about every hand, student, and faculty irrespective of political ideology, or anything else.

The Community College and Democratic Ideals

*The research reported here has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Education (NIE-G-77-0037) and the National Science Foundation (SOC77-066, SES-80-25542 and SES-83-19986), and the Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California at Berkley. Adapted from The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 19001985. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming Fall, 1989). As an organizational innovation, the community college has been one of the great success stories in the history of American higher education. In the span of less than a century, the two-year institution has moved from being no more than a fantasy in the minds of a few educational visionaries through a period of rapid, if uneven, growth into its current status as a major component of the worlds largest system of higher education. Still something of a regional phenomenon as recently as 1940, the public community or junior college had by 1970 spread to every state in the union. During these same years, the idea of short-cycle higher education spread, with some help from the AAJC and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), beyond the United States and became institutionalized to varying degrees in nations as diverse as France, Yugoslavia, Canada, Norway, and Japan (OECD, 1973). As relatively undifferentiated university systems in Europe and elsewhere face the problems posed by mass higher education, the junior college, or something like it, may well become even more of a presence on the world scene. As an institution centrally involved in what we have called the management of ambition (Hopper, 1971) the community college, however firm its ideological commitment to its task of democratization, has little choice but to participate actively in the cooling-out process. The role of the public junior college as an agent of diversion as a place where a large number of students will be channeled away from four-year institutions and the professional and managerial occupations to which these institutions have historically provided access is thus