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.

Frances A. Maher is Professor of Education at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.

Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault is Provost Emerita of Portland State University.

1. Frameworks of Analysis: Histories and Theories of Privilege 2. Portraits of Three Institutions 3. Diversifying the Faculty 4. Linking Diversity to Excellence and Deconstructing Privilege 5. Departments and Interdisciplinary Programs: Structural Privilege and Calls for Change 6. The New Scholarship of Diversity and its Relation to Institutional Structures 7. Privilege and Diversity: Narratives of Pessimism or Hope?