The Quest for Equity in Higher Education: Toward New Paradigms in an Evolving Affirmative Action Era (review)

Editors Beverly Lindsay and Manuel Justiz have gathered talented and prominent leaders in the field to address the ongoing challenges facing U.S. higher education in the rapidly changing context of affirmative action. The book's purpose is to examine how the policies and programmatic mechanisms designed to promote educational opportunities and fairness in colleges and universities affect equity in an era of shifting public policy around affirmative action. In particular, the book focuses on how contemporary and future policy decisions around equity must contend with volatile and contentious debates and a shift toward anti-affirmative action ideology over the past 30 years. The editors frame the book by asking an important and critical question of how U.S. higher education balances the contemporary socio-political movement of affirmative action relative to the goal of including various demographic groups within student, faculty, and administrative populations.

The editors organize the book around four themes related to equity and affirmative action in higher education: (a) legal and economic perspectives, (b) public and education policies, (c) executive initiatives, and (d) international perspectives. The editors do an excellent job of framing the book within past historical trends that have shaped the meaning and interpretation of affirmative action in higher education (e.g., Civil Rights Act of 1964, Higher Education Act of 1965, Bakke case in 1978, etc.) in addition to changing contexts and current trends (e.g., Proposition 209 in California in 1996, Hopwood v. Texas in 1997, the Michigan cases in 1999, etc.). They appropriately acknowledge the significance of the book by discussing how higher education has been a battleground for affirmative action and equity debates in America's broader social structure.

A diverse group of contributors (scholars and administrators) from different disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives address these issues relative to a range of populations in higher education (students, faculty, and administrators). Generally, the research and public debate on affirmative action tends to focus only on highly selective institutions that represent a small fraction of U.S. higher education. However, the contributors to this volume provide additional research that illuminate the issue with a number of different perspectives including for individual states, different institutional types (e.g., selective and nonselective institutions, HBCUs, two-year and four-year institutions), and comparatively from a cross-national perspective.

The different perspectives on the changes in and impact of affirmative action are particularly useful given the need for higher education leaders, policymakers, and researchers to recognize that achieving equity in higher education exists beyond the few highly selective institutions where the current debate on affirmative action has taken the spotlight. In addition the book is purposefully balanced to include theoretical and ideological perspectives on equity and affirmative action as well as the practical administrative and policy implications. I found the book a particularly effective tool for promoting dialogue about equity as it relates to affirmative action because the volume emphasizes the changing contexts of affirmative action and how it influences our policies and approaches to equity in higher education.

While the book is effective in providing fresh perspectives to the study and policy approaches to equity in higher education, a shortcoming is the lack of definitions of key concepts. In particular, I would have liked more discussion about how equality and parity are defined and operationalized in many different ways in the higher education field. In the book, some chapters focus on equality of opportunity while others focus on equality of outcomes. Broad concepts of equality should have been disentangled and explored more explicitly and intentionally in the conclusion. The evolution of affirmative action and how it is interpreted and applied to higher education will largely be based on debates over the subtle differences in...