front cover of Academic Ableism
Academic Ableism
Disability and Higher Education
Jay Timothy Dolmage
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.
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front cover of Academic Ableism
Academic Ableism
Disability and Higher Education
Jay Timothy Dolmage
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.
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Affirmative Action and the University
A Philosophical Inquiry
edited by Steven M. Cahn
Temple University Press, 1995
"This book is recommended for anyone interested in understanding, questioning, articulating, and acting on the basis of their own and others' perspectives on sexism, racism, and affirmative action in American higher education." --Choice While equal opportunity for all candidates is widely recognized as a goal within academia, the implementation of specific procedures to achieve equality has resulted in vehement disputes regarding both the means and ends. To encourage a reexamination of this issue, Cahn asked three prominent American social philosophers--Leslie Pickering Francis, Robert L. Simon, and Lawrence C. Becker--who hold divergent views about affirmative action, to write extended essays presenting their views. Twenty-two other philosophers then respond to these three principal essays. While no consensus is reached, the resulting clash of reasoned judgments will serve to revitalize the issues raised by affirmative action. Contents Introduction - Steven M. Cahn Part I 1. In Defense of Affirmative Action - Leslie Pickering Francis 2. Affirmative Action and the University: Faculty Appointment and Preferential Treatment - Robert L. Simon 3. Affirmative Action and Faculty Appointments - Lawrence C. Becker Part II 4. What Good Am I? - Laurence Thomas 5. Who "Counts" on Campus? - Ann Hartle 6. Reflections on Affirmative Action in Academia - Robert G. Turnbull 7. The Injustice of Strong Affirmative Action - John Kekes 8. Preferential Treatment Versus Purported Meritocratic Rights - Richard J. Arneson 9. Faculties as Civil Societies: A Misleading Model for Affirmative Action - Jeffrie G. Murphy 10. Facing Facts and Responsibilities - The White Man's Burden and the Burden of Proof - Karen Hanson 11. Affirmative Action: Relevant Knowledge and Relevant Ignorance - Joel J. Kupperman 12. Remarks on Affirmative Action - Andrew Oldenquist 13. Affirmative Action and the Multicultural Ideal - Philip L. Quinn 14. "Affirmative Action" in the Cultural Wars - Frederick A. Olafson 15. Quotas by Any Name: Some Problems of Affirmative Action in Faculty Appointments - Tom L. Beauchamp 16. Are Quotas Sometimes Justified? - James Rachels 17. Proportional Representation of Women and Minorities - Celia Wolf-Devine 18. An Ecological Concept of Diversity - La Verne Shelton 19. Careers Open to Talent - Ellen Frankel Paul 20. Some Sceptical Doubts - Alasdair MacIntyre 21. Affirmative Action and Tenure Decisions - Richard T. De George 22. Affirmative Action and the Awarding of Tenure - Peter J. Markie 23. The Case for Preferential Treatment - James P. Sterba 24. Saying What We Think - Fred Sommers 25. Comments on Compromise and Affirmative Action - Alan H. Goldman About the Authors Index About the Author(s) Steven M. Cahn is Professor of Philosophy and former Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has published numerous other books, including Morality, Responsibility, and the University (Temple). Contributors: Laurence Thomas, Ann Hartle, Robert G. Turnbull, John Kekes, Richard J. Arneson, Jeffrie G. Murphy, Karen Hanson, Joel J. Kupperman, Andrew Oldenquist, Philip L. Quinn, Frederick A. Olafson, Tom L. Beauchamp, James Rachels, Celia Wolf-Devine, La Verne Shelton, Ellen Frankel Paul, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard T. De George, Peter J. Markie, James P. Sterba, Fred Sommers, Alan H. Goldman, and the editor.
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Black and Smart
How Black High-Achieving Women Experience College
Adrianne Musu Davis
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Even academically talented students face challenges in college. For high-achieving Black women, their racial, gender, and academic identities intensify those issues. Inside the classroom, they are spotlighted and feel forced to be representatives for their identity groups. In campus life, they are isolated and face microaggressions from peers. Using intersectionality as a theoretical framework, Davis addresses the significance of the various identities of high-achieving Black women in college individually and collectively, revealing the ways institutional oppression functions at historically white institutions and in social interactions on and off campus. Based on interviews with collegiate Black women in honors communities, Black and Smart analyzes the experiences of academically talented Black undergraduate women navigating their social and academic lives at urban historically white institutions and offers strategies for creating more inclusive academic and social environments for talented undergraduates.
 
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Black Power on Campus
The University of Illinois, 1965-75
Joy Ann Williamson
University of Illinois Press, 2003
Joy Ann Williamson charts the evolution of black consciousness on predominately white American campuses during the critical period between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, with the Black student movement at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign serving as an illuminating microcosm of similar movements across the country.

Drawing on student publications of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as interviews with student activists, former administrators, and faculty, Williamson discusses the emergence of Black Power ideology, what constituted "blackness," and notions of self-advancement versus racial solidarity. Promoting an understanding of the role of black youth in protest movements, Black Power on Campus is an important contribution to the literature on African American liberation movements and the reform of American higher education.

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Broke
The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities
Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Public research universities were previously able to provide excellent education to white families thanks to healthy government funding. However, that funding has all but dried up in recent decades as historically underrepresented students have gained greater access, and now less prestigious public universities face major economic challenges.

In Broke, Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen examine virtually all aspects of campus life to show how the new economic order in public universities, particularly at two campuses in the renowned University of California system, affects students. For most of the twentieth century, they show, less affluent families of color paid with their taxes for wealthy white students to attend universities where their own offspring were not welcome. That changed as a subset of public research universities, some quite old, opted for a “new” approach, making racially and economically marginalized youth the lifeblood of the university. These new universities, however, have been particularly hard hit by austerity. To survive, they’ve had to adapt, finding new ways to secure funding and trim costs—but ultimately it’s their students who pay the price, in decreased services and inadequate infrastructure.

The rise of new universities is a reminder that a world-class education for all is possible. Broke shows us how far we are from that ideal and sets out a path for how we could get there.
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Conditionally Accepted
Navigating Higher Education from the Margins
Edited by Eric Joy Denise and Bertin M. Louis, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 2024

A collection of essays that provides advice and strategies for BIPOC scholars on how to survive, thrive, and resist in academic institutions.

Conditionally Accepted builds upon an eponymous blog on InsideHigherEd.com, which is now a decade-old national platform for BIPOC academics in the United States. Bringing together perspectives from academics of color on navigating intersecting forms of injustice in the academy, each chapter offers situated knowledge about experiencing—and resisting—marginalization in academia. Contextualized within existing scholarship, these personal narratives speak to institutional betrayals while highlighting agency and sharing stories of surviving on treacherous terrain. Covering topics from professional development to the emptiness of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and redefining what it means to be an academic in our contemporary moment, this edited collection directly confronts issues of systemic exclusion, discrimination, harassment, microaggressions, tokenism, and surveillance. Letting marginalized scholars know they are not alone, Conditionally Accepted offers concrete wisdom for readers seeking to navigate and transform oppressive academic institutions.

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Degrees of Difference
Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School
Edited by Kimberly D. McKee and Denise A. Delgado
University of Illinois Press, 2020
University commitments to diversity and inclusivity have yet to translate into support for women of color graduate students. Sexism, classism, homophobia, racial microaggressions, alienation, disillusionment, a lack of institutional and departmental support, limited help from family and partners, imposter syndrome, narrow reading lists—all remain commonplace. Indifference to the struggles of women of color in graduate school and widespread dismissal of their work further poisons an atmosphere that suffocates not only ambition but a person's quality of life.

In Degrees of Difference, women of color from diverse backgrounds give frank, unapologetic accounts of their battles—both internal and external—to navigate grad school and fulfill their ambitions. At the same time, the authors offer strategies for surviving the grind via stories of their own hard-won successes with self-care, building supportive communities, finding like-minded mentors, and resisting racism and unsupportive faculty and colleagues.

Contributors: Aeriel A. Ashlee, Denise A. Delgado, Nwadiogo I. Ejiogu, Delia Fernández, Regina Emily Idoate, Karen J. Leong, Kimberly D. McKee, Délice Mugabo, Carrie Sampson, Arianna Taboada, Jenny Heijun Wills, and Soha Youssef

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Diversity Regimes
Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities
James M. Thomas
Rutgers University Press, 2020
2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

As a major, public flagship university in the American South, so-called “Diversity University” has struggled to define its commitments to diversity and inclusion, and to put those commitments into practice. In Diversity Regimes, sociologist James M. Thomas draws on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork at DU to illustrate the conflicts and contingencies between a core set of actors at DU over what diversity is and how it should be accomplished. Thomas’s analysis of this dynamic process uncovers what he calls “diversity regimes”: a complex combination of meanings, practices, and actions that work to institutionalize commitments to diversity, but in doing so obscure, entrench, and even magnify existing racial inequalities. Thomas’s concept of diversity regimes, and his focus on how they are organized and unfold in real time, provides new insights into the social organization of multicultural principles and practices.
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Fight the Tower
Asian American Women Scholars’ Resistance and Renewal in the Academy
Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Asian American women scholars experience shockingly low rates of tenure and promotion because of the particular ways they are marginalized by the intersectionalities of race and gender in academia. Although Asian American studies critics have long since debunked the model minority myth that constructs Asian Americans as the ideal academic subject, university administrators still treat Asian American women in academia as though they will simply show up and shut up. Consequently, because silent complicity is expected, power holders will punish and oppress Asian American women severely when they question or critique the system.

However, change is in the air. Fight the Tower is a continuation of the Fight the Tower movement, which supports women standing up for their rights to claim their earned place in academia and to work for positive change for all within academic institutions. The essays provide powerful portraits, reflections, and analyses of a population often rendered invisible by the lies that sustain intersectional injustices in order to operate an oppressive system.
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front cover of Inside Graduate Admissions
Inside Graduate Admissions
Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping
Julie R. Posselt
Harvard University Press, 2016

How does graduate admissions work? Who does the system work for, and who falls through its cracks? More people than ever seek graduate degrees, but little has been written about who gets in and why. Drawing on firsthand observations of admission committees and interviews with faculty in 10 top-ranked doctoral programs in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, education professor Julie Posselt pulls back the curtain on a process usually conducted in secret.

“Politicians, judges, journalists, parents and prospective students subject the admissions policies of undergraduate colleges and professional schools to considerable scrutiny, with much public debate over appropriate criteria. But the question of who gets into Ph.D. programs has by comparison escaped much discussion. That may change with the publication of Inside Graduate Admissions…While the departments reviewed in the book remain secret, the general process used by elite departments would now appear to be more open as a result of Posselt’s book.”
—Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed

“Revealing…Provide[s] clear, consistent insights into what admissions committees look for.”
—Beryl Lieff Benderly, Science

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front cover of Intersectionality and Higher Education
Intersectionality and Higher Education
Identity and Inequality on College Campuses
W. Carson Byrd
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Though colleges and universities are arguably paying more attention to diversity and inclusion than ever before, to what extent do their efforts result in more socially just campuses? Intersectionality and Higher Education examines how race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, and other identities connect to produce intersected campus experiences. Contributors look at both the individual and institutional perspectives on issues like campus climate, race, class, and gender disparities, LGBTQ student experiences, undergraduate versus graduate students, faculty and staff from varying socioeconomic backgrounds, students with disabilities, undocumented students, and the intersections of two or more of these topics. Taken together, this volume presents an evidence-backed vision of how the twenty-first century higher education landscape should evolve in order to meaningfully support all participants, reduce marginalization, and reach for equity and equality.
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front cover of Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation
Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation
James W. Endersby and William T. Horner
University of Missouri Press, 2016

Winner, 2017 Missouri Conference on History Book Award

In 1936, Lloyd Gaines’s application to the University of Missouri law school was denied based on his race. Gaines and the NAACP challenged the university’s decision. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) was the first in a long line of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding race, higher education, and equal opportunity. The court case drew national headlines, and the NAACP moved Gaines to Chicago after he received death threats. Before he could attend law school, he vanished.

This is the first book to focus entirely on the Gaines case and the vital role played by the NAACP and its lawyers—including Charles Houston, known as “the man who killed Jim Crow”—who advanced a concerted strategy to produce political change. Horner and Endersby also discuss the African American newspaper journalists and editors who mobilized popular support for the NAACP’s strategy. This book uncovers an important step toward the broad acceptance of racial segregation as inherently unequal.

This is the inaugural volume in the series Studies in Constitutional Democracy, edited by Justin Dyer and Jeffrey Pasley of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy.

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front cover of Misconceiving Merit
Misconceiving Merit
Paradoxes of Excellence and Devotion in Academic Science and Engineering
Mary Blair-Loy and Erin A. Cech
University of Chicago Press, 2022
An incisive study showing how cultural ideas of merit in academic science produce unfair and unequal outcomes.
 
In Misconceiving Merit, sociologists Mary Blair-Loy and Erin A. Cech uncover the cultural foundations of a paradox. On one hand, academic science, engineering, and math revere meritocracy, a system that recognizes and rewards those with the greatest talent and dedication. At the same time, women and some racial and sexual minorities remain underrepresented and often feel unwelcome and devalued in STEM. How can academic science, which so highly values meritocracy and objectivity, produce these unequal outcomes?
 
Blair-Loy and Cech studied more than five hundred STEM professors at a top research university to reveal how unequal and unfair outcomes can emerge alongside commitments to objectivity and excellence. The authors find that academic STEM harbors dominant cultural beliefs that not only perpetuate the mistreatment of scientists from underrepresented groups but hinder innovation. Underrepresented groups are often seen as less fully embodying merit compared to equally productive white and Asian heterosexual men, and the negative consequences of this misjudgment persist regardless of professors’ actual academic productivity. Misconceiving Merit is filled with insights for higher education administrators working toward greater equity as well as for scientists and engineers striving to change entrenched patterns of inequality in STEM.
 
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front cover of The Myth of Political Correctness
The Myth of Political Correctness
The Conservative Attack on Higher Education
John K. Wilson
Duke University Press, 1995
The classics of Western culture are out, not being taught, replaced by second-rate and Third World texts. White males are a victimized minority on campuses across the country, thanks to affirmative action. Speech codes have silenced anyone who won’t toe the liberal line. Feminists, wielding their brand of sexual correctness, have taken over. These are among the prevalent myths about higher education that John K. Wilson explodes.
The phrase "political correctness" is on everyone’s lips, on radio and television, and in newspapers and magazines. The phenomenon itself, however, has been deceptively described. Wilson steps into the nation’s favorite cultural fray to reveal that many of the most widely publicized anecdotes about PC are in fact more myth than reality. Based on his own experience as a student and in-depth research, he shows what’s really going on beneath the hysteria and alarmism about political correctness and finds that the most disturbing examples of thought policing on campus have come from the right. The image of the college campus as a gulag of left-wing totalitarianism is false, argues Wilson, created largely through the exaggeration of deceptive stories by conservatives who hypocritically seek to silence their political opponents.
Many of today’s most controversial topics are here: multiculturalism, reverse discrimination, speech codes, date rape, and sexual harassment. So are the well-recognized protagonists in the debate: Dinesh D’Souza, William Bennett, and Lynne Cheney, among others. In lively fashion and in meticulous detail, Wilson compares fact to fiction and lays one myth after another to rest, revealing the double standard that allows "conservative correctness" on college campuses to go unchallenged.
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Picture a Professor
Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning
Jessamyn Neuhaus
West Virginia University Press, 2022

“Does a service to all who would prefer a different path, offering realistic strategies to engage students in undermining scholarly stereotypes.”—Science

Picture a Professor is a collection of evidence-based insights and intersectional teaching strategies crafted by and for college instructors. It aims to inspire transformative student learning while challenging stereotypes about what a professor looks like.

Representing a variety of scholarly disciplines, the volume’s contributing authors offer practical advice for effectively navigating student preconceptions about embodied identity and academic expertise. Each contributor recognizes the pervasiveness of racialized, gendered, and other biases about professors and recommends specific ways to respond to and interrupt such preconceptions—helping students, teachers, and others reenvision what we think of when we picture a professor.

Educators at every stage of their career will find affirming acknowledgment of the ways systemic inequities affect college teaching conditions, as well as actionable advice about facilitating student learning with innovative course design, classroom activities, assessment techniques, and more.

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front cover of Race and the Foundations of Knowledge
Race and the Foundations of Knowledge
Cultural Amnesia in the Academy
Edited by Joseph Young and Jana Evans Braziel
University of Illinois Press, 2006

front cover of Race in the College Classroom
Race in the College Classroom
TuSmith, Bonnie
Rutgers University Press, 2002

Winner of the 2003 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Awards
Winner of the 2003 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award


Did affirmative action programs solve the problem of race on American college campuses, as several recent books would have us believe? If so, why does talking about race in anything more than a superficial way make so many students uncomfortable? Written by college instructors from many disciplines, this volume of essays takes a bold first step toward a nationwide conversation. Each of the twenty-nine contributors addresses one central question: what are the challenges facing a college professor who believes that teaching responsibly requires an honest and searching examination of race?

Professors from the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and education consider topics such as how the classroom environment is structured by race; the temptation to retreat from challenging students when faced with possible reprisals in the form of complaints or negative evaluations; the implications of using standardized evaluations in faculty tenure and promotion when the course subject is intimately connected with race; and the varying ways in which white faculty and faculty of color are impacted by teaching about race.     

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The Retreat from Race
Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics
Takagi, Dana Y
Rutgers University Press, 1993

“An excellent book. Takagi takes a very complex and sensitive subject—racial politics—and shows, through a careful analysis . . . that changes in the discourse about Asian American admissions have facilitated a 'retreat from race' in the area of affirmative action. . . . This book will appeal to an audience significantly wider than a typical academic one.”— David Karen, Bryn Mawr College

Charges by Asian Americans that the top universities in the United States used quotas to limit the enrollment of Asian-American students developed into one of the most controversial public controversies in higher education since the Bakke case. In Retreat from Race, Dana Takagi follows the debates over Asian-American admissions at Berkeley, UCLA, Brown, Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton. She explains important developments in the politics of race:  changes in ethnic coalitions, reconstruction of the debate over affirmative action, and the conservative challenge to the civil rights agenda of the 1960s. Takagi examines the history and significance of the Asian American admissions controversy on American race relations both inside and outside higher education.

Takagi's central argument is that the Asian-American admissions controversy facilitated a subtle but important shift in affirmative action policy away from racial preferences toward class preferences. She calls this development a retreat from race. Takagi suggests that the retreat signals not only an actual policy shift but also the increasing reluctance on the part of intellectuals, politicans, and policy analysts to identify and address social problems as explicitly racial problems.

Moving beyond the university setting, Takagi explores the political significance of the retreat from race by linking Asian-American admissions to other controversies in higher education and in American politics, including the debates over political correctness and multiculturalism. In her assessment, the retreat from race is likely to fail at its promise of easing racial tension and promoting racial equality.

 

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Special Admission
How College Sports Recruitment Favors White Suburban Athletes
Kirsten Hextrum
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Honorable Mention - 2022 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award​

Special Admission contradicts the national belief that college sports provide upward mobility opportunities. Kirsten Hextrum documents how white middle-class youth become overrepresented on college teams. Her institutional ethnography of one elite athletic and academic institution includes over 100 hours of interviews with college rowers and track & field athletes. She charts the historic and contemporary relationships between colleges, athletics, and white middle-class communities that ensure white suburban youth are advantaged in special athletic admissions. Suburban youth start ahead in college admissions because athletic merit—the competencies desired by university recruiters—requires access to vast familial, communal, and economic resources, all of which are concentrated in their neighborhoods. Their advantages increase as youth, parents, and coaches strategically invest in and engineer novel opportunities to maintain their race and class status. Thus, college sports allow white, middle-class athletes to accelerate their racial and economic advantages through admission to elite universities.
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They Don't Want Her There
Fighting Sexual and Racial Harassment in the American University
Carolyn Chalmers
University of Iowa Press, 2022
Before the nation learned about workplace sexual harassment from Anita Hill, and decades before the #MeToo movement, Chinese American professor Jean Jew M.D. brought a lawsuit against the University of Iowa, alleging a sexually hostile work environment within the university’s College of Medicine.

As Jew gained accolades and advanced through the ranks at Iowa, she was met with increasingly vicious attacks on her character by her white male colleagues—implying that her sexuality had opened doors for her. After years of being subjected to demoralizing sexual, racial, and ethnic discrimination, finding herself without any higher-up departmental support, and noting her professional progression beginning to suffer by the hands of hate, Jean Jew decided to fight back. Carolyn Chalmers was her lawyer.

This book tells the inside story of pioneering litigation unfolding during the eight years of a university investigation, a watershed federal trial, and a state court jury trial. In the face of a university determined to defeat them and maintain the status quo, Jew and Chalmers forged an exceptional relationship between a lawyer and a client, each at the top of their game and part of the first generation of women in their fields. They Don’t Want Her There is a brilliant, original work of legal history that is deeply personal and shows today’s professional women just how recently some of our rights have been won—and at what cost.
 
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Writing Across Difference
Theory and Intervention
James Rushing Daniel
Utah State University Press, 2021
As the nation becomes increasingly divided by economic inequality, racial injustice, xenophobic violence, and authoritarian governance, scholars in writing studies have strived to develop responsive theories and practices to engage students, teachers, administrators, and citizens in the crisis of division and to begin the complicated work of radically transforming our inequitable institutions and society. Writing Across Difference is one of the first collections to gather scholars from across the field engaged in offering theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical resources for understanding, interrogating, negotiating, and writing across difference.
 
No text in composition has made such a sweeping attempt to place the multiple areas of translingualism, anti-racism, anticolonialism, interdisciplinarity, and disability into conversation or to represent the field as broadly unified around the concept of difference. The chapters in this book specifically explore how monolingual ideology is maintained in institutions and how translingual strategies can (re)include difference; how narrative-based interventions can promote writing across difference in classrooms and institutions by complicating dominant discourses; and how challenging dominant logics of class, race, ability, and disciplinarity can present opportunities for countering divisiveness.
 
Writing Across Difference offers writing scholars a sustained intellectual encounter with the crisis of difference and foregrounds the possibilities such an encounter offers for collective action toward a more inclusive and equitable society. It presents a variety of approaches for intervening in classrooms and institutions in the interest of focalizing, understanding, negotiating, and bridging difference. The book will be a valuable resource to those disturbed by the bigotry, violence, and fanaticism that mark our political culture and who are seeking inspiration, models, and methods for collective response.
 
Contributors: Anis Bawarshi, Jonathan Benda, Megan Callow, James Rushing Daniel, Cherice Escobar Jones, Laura Gonzales, Juan Guerra, Stephanie Kerschbaum, Katie Malcolm, Nadya Pittendrigh, Mya Poe, Candice Rai, Iris Ruiz, Ann Shivers-McNair, Neil Simpkins, Alison Y. L. Stephens, Sumyat Thu, Katherine Xue, Shui-yin Sharon Yam
 
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Writing Centers and the New Racism
A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change
Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan
Utah State University Press, 2011

Noting a lack of sustained and productive dialogue about race in university writing center scholarship, the editors of this volume have created a rich resource for writing center tutors, administrators, and scholars. Motivated by a scholarly interest in race and whiteness studies, and by an ethical commitment to anti-racism work, contributors address a series of related questions: How does institutionalized racism in American education shape the culture of literacy and language education in the writing center? How does racism operate in the discourses of writing center scholarship/lore, and how may writing centers be unwittingly complicit in racist practices? How can they meaningfully operationalize anti-racist work? How do they persevere through the difficulty and messiness of negotiating race and racism in their daily practice? The conscientious, nuanced attention to race in this volume is meant to model what it means to be bold in engagement with these hard questions and to spur the kind of sustained, productive, multi-vocal, and challenging dialogue that, with a few significant exceptions, has been absent from the field.

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