In The Making of Reverse Discrimination Ellen Messer-Davidow offers a fresh and incisive analysis of the legal-judicial discourse of DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the first two cases challenging race-conscious admissions to professional schools to reach the US Supreme Court. While the voluminous literature on DeFunis and Bakke has focused on the Supreme Court's far from definitive answers to important constitutional questions, Messer-Davidow closely examines each case from beginning to end. She investigates the social surrounds where the cases incubated, their tours through the courts, and their aftereffects. Her analysis shows how lawyers and judges used the mechanisms of language and law to narrow the conflict to a single white male applicant and a single white-dominated university program to dismiss the historical, sociological, statistical, and experiential facts of "systemic racism" and thereby to assemble "reverse discrimination" as a new object of legal analysis. In exposing the discursive mechanisms that marginalized the interests of applicants and communities of color, Messer-Davidow demonstrates that the construction of facts, the reasoning by precedent, and the invocation of constitutional principles deserve more scrutiny than they have received in the scholarly literature. Although facts, precedents, and principles are said to bring stability and equity to the law, Messer-Davidow argues that the white-centered narratives of DeFunis and Bakke not only bleached the color from equal protection but also served as the template for the dozens of anti-affirmative action projects-lawsuits, voter referenda, executive orders-that conservative movement organizations mounted in the following years.

In The Making of Reverse Discrimination Ellen Messer-Davidow offers a fresh and incisive analysis of the legal-judicial discourse of DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the first two cases challenging race-conscious admissions to professional schools to reach the US Supreme Court. While the voluminous literature on DeFunis and Bakke has focused on the Supreme Court's far from definitive answers to important constitutional questions, Messer-Davidow closely examines each case from beginning to end. She investigates the social surrounds where the cases incubated, their tours through the courts, and their aftereffects. Her analysis shows how lawyers and judges used the mechanisms of language and law to narrow the conflict to a single white male applicant and a single white-dominated university program to dismiss the historical, sociological, statistical, and experiential facts of 'systemic racism' and thereby to assemble 'reverse discrimination' as a new object of legal analysis. In exposing the discursive mechanisms that marginalized the interests of applicants and communities of color, Messer-Davidow demonstrates that the construction of facts, the reasoning by precedent, and the invocation of constitutional principles deserve more scrutiny than they have received in the scholarly literature. Although facts, precedents, and principles are said to bring stability and equity to the law, Messer-Davidow argues that the white-centered narratives of DeFunis and Bakke not only bleached the color from equal protection but also served as the template for the dozens of anti-affirmative action projects-lawsuits, voter referenda, executive orders-that conservative movement organizations mounted in the following years.

"Socially and conceptually, we are disciplined by our disciplines. They help produce our world. They specify the objects we can study (genes, deviant persons, classic texts) and the relations that obtain among them (mutation, criminality, canonicity). They provide criteria for our knowledge (truth, significance, impact) and the methods (quantification, interpretation, analysis) that regulate our access to it. We have come to see these disciplines as so natural that we tend to forget their historical novelty and fail to imagine how else we might produce and organise knowledge", write the editors in the Introduction to this book. They have brought together a diverse group of contributors to examine how all sorts of knowledges have been constituted and how to reconsider their constitution. The essayists concentrate on several issues: how particular disciplines came into being (genealogy); how disciplines are demarcated from each other and from other ways of knowing (boundary-work); how disciplines are ordered internally (field construction); how individuals learn to be disciplinary practitioners (socialising practices); and how disciplines might be superseded as ways of producing knowledge (counter- and post-disciplinary projects). These five topics are refracted through a broad range of disciplines: accounting, art history, biochemistry, economics, education, gay studies, history of science, international relations, law, literary studies, mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, particle physics, and the philosophy of the social sciences. For all their breadth, the essays have considerable resonance. All of them imply the possibility of moving beyond disciplines to new ways,of knowing. Collectively, they challenge the universe of scholarship to new levels of self-consciousness and creativity.

"Literature, Language, and Politics" brings together papers drawn from and inspired by the controversial, landmark symposium on "Politics and the Discipline" held at the 1987 Modern Language Association meeting in San Francisco.
During the 1980s, debates raged both within and outside academe over curriculum, with conservatives arguing for a return to an educational philosophy based on the "classics" of Western civilization and a multi-cultural coalition of liberals, leftists, and feminists seeking to preserve the diversity of educational experience fought for since the 1960s.
Engaging this crucial debate, the contributors to "Literature, Language, and Politics" argue that the conservative educational agenda imperils not only scholarship and academic freedom but the very social well-being of the nation. They call for firm resistance to any attempts to make education conform to the social agenda of one race, one gender, one language, or one ideology; for a continuation of attempts to broaden the curriculum until it reflects the experience of women and men of all classes and all cultures.
Includes essays by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Gerald Graff, Annette Kolodny, Paul Lauter, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Catharine R. Stimpson, and Ana Celia Zentella.