Chilling Admissions: The Affirmative Action Crisis and the Search for Alternatives Paperback - 1998 - 1st Edition

From the rear cover

The essays in this volume represent the work of the leading scholars of affirmative action in higher education, and place the current crisis on campus in its larger context of historical discrimination and the legal battle for educational equity. After a generation of efforts to reverse the historic exclusion of minorities from their campuses, U.S. colleges and universities are facing a frontal attack on the programs, policies, and commitments born of these efforts. Chilling Admissions documents and examines their struggle to foresee the consequences of abandoning affirmative action in admissions and financial aid, and to devise viable alternatives for promoting and preserving campus diversity.

"This may be the most important book in higher education today. At a time in which affirmative action is under siege, this volume offers the facts--research on the consequences of repealing affirmative action, and urgently needed, workable alternatives for maintaining diversity on campus. It is a must read for anyone who cares about or is responsible for the future of America's colleges and universities." -- Arthur Levine, President, Teachers College, Columbia University

"Chilling Admissions is desperately needed. Its great value is to bring facts into what has become a sterile and abstract ideological debate, fueled by political appeals to those who feel threatened by minority groups. I hope it is widely read." -- Burke Marshall, Professor, Yale Law School, Former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights

"An interesting, timely, and well-informed book on the impact of present efforts to eliminate affirmative action in college and university admissions. It illuminates many complexities that should inform debate on the subject." -- Nathan Glazer, Professor of Education and Social Structure, Emeritus, Harvard University

"Sheds vitally important new light on the effects of affirmative action. Enormously valuable." -- Diana Chapman Walsh, President, Wellesley College

"Chilling Admissions is an important contribution to a debate which often has relied more on rhetoric than reason. It will help elevate justice's side of the argument." -- Julian Bond, Chairman, NAACP

Edited by Gary Orfield and Edward Miller