The issues explored in The Feminist Classroom are as timely and controversial today as they were when the book first appeared six years ago. This expanded edition offers new material that rereads and updates previous chapters, including a major new chapter on the role of race. The authors offer specific new classroom examples of how assumptions of privilege, specifically the workings of unacknowledged whiteness, shape classroom discourses. This edition also goes beyond the classroom, to examine the present context of American higher education. Drawing on in-depth interviews and using the actual words of students and teachers, the authors take the reader into classrooms at six colleges and universities - Lewis and Clark College, Wheaton College, the University of Arizona, Towson State University, Spelman College, and San Francisco State University. The result is an intimate view of the pedagogical approaches of seventeen feminist college professors. Feminist scholars have demonstrated that American higher education has long represented a white, male, privileged minority. The professors here bring together the twin upheavals that have challenged this tradition: namely a rapidly changing student body and the more inclusive knowledge of feminist and multicultural scholarship. They uncover the voices, concerns and experiences of groups hitherto marginalized in higher education: women, people of color and working class students. Through concrete examples of classroom practice, the work of these professors challenge the traditional split between knowledge and pedagogy that has long characterized higher education.

Over the past several decades, higher education has been transformed by the entry of faculty of color and women into the university system. Through detailed institutional ethnographies of three very different universities, Privilege and Diversity in the Academy explores how this diversification has dismantled and reconfigured relationships of privilege and diversity in higher education. Authors Maher and Tetreault use examples from a top-ranked private university, a comprehensive urban university, and a major public university to illustrate how privilege is enacted, resisted, and transformed as changes occur in the student bodies and faculties of these schools. In their analyses, they identify the institutional structures that facilitate the success of a diverse faculty and make valuable observations about patterns of institutional change and resistance.

Over the past several decades, higher education has been transformed by the entry of faculty of color and women into the university system. Through detailed institutional ethnographies of three very different universities, Privilege and Diversity in the Academy explores how this diversification has dismantled and reconfigured relationships of privilege and diversity in higher education. Authors Maher and Tetreault use examples from a top-ranked private university, a comprehensive urban university, and a major public university to illustrate how privilege is enacted, resisted, and transformed as changes occur in the student bodies and faculties of these schools. In their analyses, they identify the institutional structures that facilitate the success of a diverse faculty and make valuable observations about patterns of institutional change and resistance.

Entering the academy at the dawn of the women's rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first generation of feminist academics had a difficult journey. With few female role models, they had to forge their own path and prove that feminist scholarship was a legitimate enterprise. Later, when many of these scholars moved into administrative positions, hoping to reform the university system from within, they encountered entrenched hierarchies, bureaucracies, and old boys' networks that made it difficult to put their feminist principles into practice. In this compelling memoir, Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault describes how a Catholic girl from small-town Nebraska discovered her callings as a feminist, as an academic, and as a university administrator. She recounts her experiences at three very different schools: the small progressive Lewis & Clark College, the massive regional university of Cal State Fullerton, and the rapidly expanding Portland State University. Reflecting on both her accomplishments and challenges, she considers just how much second-wave feminism has transformed academia and how much reform is still needed. With remarkable candor and compassion, Thompson Tetreault provides an intimate personal look at an era when both women's lives and university culture changed for good.