Race, Meritocracy, and Higher Education

Catalog description

This course will consider two principles that have shaped American higher education: meritocracy and diversity. The ideal of diversity has shaped higher education at least since the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in Bakke v. University of California Regents. More recently, the Supreme Court has prohibited the use of race-based affirmative action in pursuit of diversity. And the Trump Administration has advocated for ideological diversity, while condemning the idea of racial diversity and approaches such as disparate impact and DEI, with which it is associated. In recent years, the idea of meritocracy has itself become subject to criticism. As with diversity, meritocracy is subject to multiple meanings, which we will probe. The central inquiry of the course concerns the extent to which the ideals of diversity and meritocracy are intertwined with current controversies in higher education, from admissions criteria, to cost, student debt, and social mobility, to research, institutional orthodoxy, academic freedom, and free speech. Course Materials & Culture: The course materials will be varied and will include not only judicial opinions and law review articles, but also books, magazine articles, social science research, and podcasts. We will also read my book manuscript, The Miseducation of America, which addresses many of the issues we will discuss. This course will be conducted as a seminar, in which your active participation is essential. Elements of Grading: There will be three elements of grading, weighted as indicated. 1: Two 2-3 page reflection papers responding either to the reading or to a prior discussion. (25%) Your aspiration should be to stake out a position that you believe to be true, but with which you expect most of your classmates would disagree. Alternatively, you could identify a question or line of inquiry that you believe is important, yet which most…