This edited volume connects the origins of US higher education during the Colonial Era with current systemic characteristics that maintain white supremacist structures and devalue students and faculty of color, as well as areas of study that interrogate Whiteness. The authors examine power structures within the academy that scaffold Whiteness and promote inequality at all levels by maintaining a two-tier faculty system and a dearth of Faculty and Administrators of Color. Finally, contributors offer systemic and collective solutions toward a more equitable redistribution of power, primarily among faculty and administration, through which other inequities may be identified and more easily addressed.

This book examines the increasing marginalization of and response by people living in urban areas throughout the Western Hemisphere, and both the local and global implications of continued colonial racial hierarchies and the often-dire consequences they have for people perceived as different. However, in the aftermath of recent U.S. elections, whiteness also seems to embody strictures on religion, ethnicity, country of origin, and almost any other personal characteristic deemed suspect at the moment. For that reason, gender, race, and even class, collectively, may not be sufficient units of analysis to study the marginalizing mechanisms of the urban center. The authors interrogate the social and institutional structures that facilitate the disenfranchisement or downward trajectory of groups, and their potential or subsequent lack of access to mainstream rewards. The book also seeks to highlight examples where marginalized groups have found ways to assert their equality. No recent texts have attempted to connect the mechanisms of marginality across geographical and political boundaries within the Western Hemisphere.

This edited volume explores and deconstructs the possibilities of higher education beyond its initial purpose. The book contextualizes and argues for a more robust interrogation of persistent patterns of campus inequality driven by rapid demographic change, reduced public spending in higher education, and an increasingly polarized political landscape. It offers contemporary views and critiques ideas and practices such as micro-aggressions, implicit and explicit bias, and their consequences in reifying racial and gender-based inequalities on members of nondominant groups. The book also highlights coping mechanisms and resistance strategies that have enabled members of nondominant groups to contest primarily racial- and gender- based inequity. In doing so, it identifies new ways higher education can do what it professes to do better, in all ways, from providing real benefit to students and communities, while also setting a bar for society to more effectively realize its stated purpose and creed.

This edited volume connects the origins of US higher education during the Colonial Era with current systemic characteristics that maintain white supremacist structures and devalue students and faculty of color, as well as areas of study that interrogate Whiteness. The authors examine power structures within the academy that scaffold Whiteness and promote inequality at all levels by maintaining a two-tier faculty system and a dearth of Faculty and Administrators of Color. Finally, contributors offer systemic and collective solutions toward a more equitable redistribution of power, primarily among faculty and administration, through which other inequities may be identified and more easily addressed.