Rethinking Diversity Frameworks in Higher Education

<p>With the goal of building more inclusive working learning and living environments in higher education this book seeks to reframe understandings of forms of everyday exclusion that affect members of nondominant groups on predominantly white college campuses. The book contextualizes the need for a more robust analysis of persistent patterns of campus inequality by addressing key trends that have reshaped the landscape for diversity including rapid demographic change reduced public spending on higher education and a polarized political climate. Specifically it offers a critique of contemporary analytical ideas such as micro-aggressions and implicit and unconscious bias and underscores the impact of consequential discriminatory events (or macro-aggressions) and racial and gender-based inequalities (macro-inequities) on members of nondominant groups. The authors draw extensively upon interview studies and qualitative research findings to illustrate the reproduction of social inequality through behavioral and process-based outcomes in the higher education environment. They identify a more powerful systemic framework and conceptual vocabulary that can be used for meaningful change. In addition the book highlights coping and resistance strategies that have regularly enabled members of nondominant groups to address deflect and counteract everyday forms of exclusion. <br><br>The book offers concrete approaches concepts and tools that will enable higher education leaders to identify address and counteract persistent structural and behavioral barriers to inclusion. As such it shares a series of practical recommendations that will assist presidents provosts executive officers boards of trustees faculty administrators diversity officers human resource leaders diversity taskforces and researchers as they seek to implement comprehensive strategies that result in sustained diversity change.</p>