Routing Tokenism

I admit, right off the top, to approaching a book on diversity hiring in the university with more than a little trepidation. This is a field so pitted with the academic equivalent of improvised explosive devices as to make the ivory tower look like an outpost in Afghanistan. Negotiating that field is made even more delicate by the fact that I am a retired white academic and Anthony Stewart is a young black academic who points critically at a near white monopoly in university departments.

It did not take many pages into You Must Be a Basketball Player: Rethinking Integration in the University to shake off any such concerns. Stewart is a most engaging writer whose own argument for preferential hiring of minorities is straightforward and persuasive.

He makes quick work of the restitution argument that preferential hiring is required to right past wrongs. The problem with this, as he rightly indicates, is that today’s faculty can hardly be held...