The Campus And The Racial Crisis

"Why is it that as we enter the twenty-first century, the nation's predominantly white colleges and universities continue to be settings where people of color feel unwelcome and marginalized? The contributors to this volume dissect a variety of structural and attitudinal factors that are prevalent in the higher education community, organizational constructs and value orientations which seem to hark more to the past than to the future. They comment on the political, social, and economic factors that have shaped academic culture, and buttressed its quietly efficient maintenance of racially discriminatory practices. "The American system of higher education is often regarded as the best in the world. Smith, Altbach, and Lomotey have edited a volume that implicitly asks how much better still it could be if it embraced people of color and provided them with a supportive and nurturing environment, one which encouraged them to reach their fullest creative and intellectual potential. Indeed, this will probably be the most significant challenge that the academy faces in the twenty-first century." — William B. Harvey, Vice President and Director, Office of Minorities in Higher Education American Council on Education, Washington, D.C.

A crisis of immense magnitude persists in higher education in the United States. For this third edition of The Racial Crisis in American Higher Education, Kofi Lomotey and William A. Smith have gathered outstanding scholars in the field to address this dilemma on several levels. In thirteen original essays, contributors establish a framework for understanding the current crisis, provide historical perspective on the present, offer a stark overview of the day-to-day realities on campuses, and illustrate the role and impact of university leadership. With a foreword by Donald B. Pope-Davis and an afterword by Valerie Kinloch, as well as an introduction by the editors, the volume is provocative, up-to-date, and solution-driven, giving readers both a comprehensive analysis of the racial crisis in American higher education and ideas for addressing it.

As the European Union seemingly teetered from a financial crisis to an immigration crisis around 2015 and onwards, discourses of race appeared to congeal in various member states. In some instances, these came with familiarly essentialist constructions; in others these were refracted cautiously through concerns about security, national and cultural integrity, distribution of public resources and employment, and so on. New political alignments surfaced on the back of such concerns, and established organizations changed their agendas accordingly. The border regimes of EU member states became increasingly fraught, both in terms of their everyday operations and in terms of the close attention and vociferous debates they attracted. In most instances, the internal and external borders of the EU hardened, and with increasing frequency the cohesion of the transnational union seemed on the verge of fracturing. Indeed, very real fissures opened up with secessionist moves and referendums. Through each step in this juncture of upheavals, the significance of race has been reiterated in tangential ways and sometimes with unabashed straightforwardness. This volume explores this juncture around 2015, and the constructions of race and of crisis therein, for specific contexts and from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The introduction gives an overview of the juncture, focusing on the rise of Eurosceptic nationalist political parties and their electoral success. Subsequent chapters are addressed to the management and representation of immigrants crossing the Mediterranean, border regimes in the Czech Republic, the narratives that converged on Brexit, riots in England, antagonistic popular movements in Sweden, racialization in crisis management in Italy, perceptions of migrants in Greece, and how race may be structured in and challenged through classroom pedagogy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

The compendium of writings in this edited volume sheds light on the event “Race & Ethnicity: A Day of Discovery and Dialogue” at Washington University in St. Louis and the work current students, faculty, and staff are doing to improve inclusivity on campus and in St. Louis.

Across the country our universities and colleges continue to be beset by incidences of racial turmoil on campus. The first contemporary serious collection of articles on this topic, this book goes beyond rhetoric to examine the causes and impact of campus racial tensions both by examining some key university case studies and by investigating some of the underlying elements of the crisis. In order to raise the consciousness of the entire university community to the import of these concerns the authors focus both on current research and on the flashpoints of controversy. The first part of the volume deals with broader issues relating to the academic community and to the curriculum. The overarching issues including debates about affirmative action, and admissions policies are considered as well as the difficulties of recruitment, retention, and campus life for Afro-American, Hispanic, and Asian-American faculty. Studies of some of the campuses which have recently experienced a heightening of racial tension including Columbia, Stanford, Arizona State, and Cornell are provided.