Young people are told that college is a place where they will “find themselves” by engaging with diversity and making friendships that will last a lifetime. This vision of an inclusive, diverse social experience is a fundamental part of the image colleges sell potential students. But what really happens when students arrive on campus and enter this new social world? The Cost of Inclusion delves into this rich moment to explore the ways students seek out a sense of belonging and the sacrifices they make to fit in.

Blake R. Silver spent a year immersed in student life at a large public university. He trained with the Cardio Club, hung out with the Learning Community, and hosted service events with the Volunteer Collective. Through these day-to-day interactions, he witnessed how students sought belonging and built their social worlds on campus. Over time, Silver realized that these students only achieved inclusion at significant cost. To fit in among new peers, they clung to or were pushed into raced and gendered cultural assumptions about behavior, becoming “the cool guy,” “the nice girl,” “the funny one,” “the leader,” “the intellectual,” or “the mom of the group.” Instead of developing dynamic identities, they crafted and adhered to a cookie-cutter self, one that was rigid and two-dimensional. Silver found that these students were ill-prepared for the challenges of a diverse college campus, and that they had little guidance from their university on how to navigate the trials of social engagement or the pressures to conform. While colleges are focused on increasing the diversity of their enrolled student body, Silver’s findings show that they need to take a hard look at how they are failing to support inclusion once students arrive on campus.

The only book-length study of the ways that postsecondary desegregation litigation and policy affected writing instruction and assessment in US colleges, Desegregation State provides a history of federal enforcement of higher education desegregation and its impact on writing programs from 1970 to 1988. Focusing on the University System of Georgia and two of its public colleges in Savannah, one a historically segregated white college and the other a historically Black college, Annie S. Mendenhall shows how desegregation enforcement promoted and shaped writing programs by presenting literacy remediation and testing as critical to desegregation efforts in southern and border states.
 
Formerly segregated state university systems crafted desegregation plans that gave them more control over policies for admissions, remediation, and retention. These plans created literacy requirements—admissions and graduation tests, remedial classes, and even writing centers and writing across the curriculum programs—that reshaped the landscape of college writing instruction and denied the demands of Black students, civil rights activists, and historically Black colleges and universities for major changes to university systems. This history details the profound influence of desegregation—and resistance to desegregation—on the ways that writing is taught and assessed in colleges today.
 
Desegregation State provides WPAs and writing teachers with a disciplinary history for understanding racism in writing assessment and writing programs. Mendenhall brings emerging scholarship on the racialization of institutions into the field, showing why writing studies must pay more attention to how writing programs have institutionalized racist literacy ideologies through arguments about student placement, individualized writing instruction, and writing assessment.