About this item
We've heard plenty from politicians and experts on affirmative action and higher education, about how universities should intervene - if at all - to ensure a diverse but deserving student population. But what about those for whom these issues matter the most? In this book, Natasha K. Warikoo deeply explores how students themselves think about merit and race at a uniquely pivotal moment: after they have just won the most competitive game of their lives and gained admittance to one of the world's top universities. What Warikoo uncovers - talking with both white students and students of color at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford - is absolutely illuminating; and some of it is positively shocking. As she shows, many elite white students understand the value of diversity abstractly, but they ignore the real problems that racial inequality causes and that diversity programs are meant to solve.
About the Author
Natasha Warikoo is Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University. She is an expert on the relationships between education, racial and ethnic diversity, and cultural processes in schools and universities. Her most recent book, The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities (University of Chicago Press, 2016) , illuminates how undergraduates attending Ivy League universities and Oxford University conceptualize race and meritocracy. Warikoo's first book, Balancing Acts: Youth Culture in the Global City (University of California Press, 2011) , analyzes youth culture among children of immigrants attending diverse, low-performing high schools in New York City and London. Balancing Acts won the Thomas and Znaneicki Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association's International Migration Section. Both of these projects involve extensive ethnographic research in the United States and Britain.
At Harvard Warikoo teaches courses on racial inequality and the role of culture in K-12 and higher education. Prior to her academic career Warikoo was a teacher in New York City's public schools for four years, and also spent time working at the US Department of Education and as a fellow with the Teachers Network Leadership Institute. Warikoo completed her PhD in sociology from Harvard University, and BSc and BA in mathematics and philosophy at Brown University.
