Thematic Book Review: Labor and Elite Domination in the Color Line of U.S. Higher Education

Abstract

Sociologists of race who study the U.S. society after the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have typically considered how racism persists in a society touted for its commitment to equal opportunity. For studies of U.S. colleges and universities, this question animates inquiries into the higher education context that ask why long-standing marginalization persists among students and faculty despite expanded access to these institutions. Although researchers continue to advocate for including students and faculty from historically excluded backgrounds, sociologists have increasingly turned to historical and structural analyses to explain how access and inclusion alone are not enough to promote student or faculty success (Okechukwu 2019; Wooten 2016). The goal is not nebulous cultural change, which ignores how organizations were formed in relation to racism, but transformative change. With transformative change, structural racism is challenged in its various forms, and individuals create a collective, antiracist orientation to build something new (Chang 2002). From this lens, sociologists have studied how colleges and universities changed their norms of exclusion, particularly from the post-Civil War period onwards. Focusing on how cultural norms changed in different eras of student and faculty relations, scholars traced why college officials pragmatically removed restrictive norms that explicitly privileged White, male, and Protestant students from the colonial social elite (Karabel 2005; Synnott 2010; Wechsler 2014; WilliamsonLott 2018; Wooten 2016). For instance, colleges were the province of the social and economic White elite between the late-1800s and the mid1900s (Brubacher and Rudy 1968), but this changed after World War II when the federal government invested in enrolling students into an expanded, stratified system of advanced education. In the postwar period, advanced training was more accessible because colleges and universities were progressively integrating their White campuses. Although some cautioned that the expansion of access into a stratified system would produce a further stratified society based on credentials, others argued that broadened access represented a necessary move to actualize the United States as a multiracial and multicultural democracy (Collins 2019; Ris 2021). From within this intellectual history enter three new texts on higher education: Doing the Right Thing: How Colleges and Universities Can Undo Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring by Marybeth 1174507 SREXXX10.1177/23326492231174507Sociology of Race and EthnicityBook Reviews research-article2023