Affirmative Action is About More Than Acceptance Letters
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Everyone’s talking about affirmative action at elite universities. But they educate fewer than 5 percent of students seeking advanced degrees. So why should the other 95 percent care?
Kai wants to know about the future of equity in higher education. So he talks to:
-Dominique Baker, Southern Methodist University Associate Professor of Education Policy.
-Imani Perry, Harvard University Professor of African and African American Studies, and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everybody, this is Kai. In our show this past Sunday, we devoted the whole hour |
| 0:06.8 | to thinking about the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling. And in the first part of that |
| 0:11.6 | show, we spoke with historian Ibrahim X. Kendi about the logic of the ruling and the history |
| 0:17.5 | behind the idea of race neutral or so-called colorblind public policy. That's the most |
| 0:23.5 | recent episode in your feed. And what you're about to hear now is the second part of our |
| 0:28.7 | affirmative action show and which we talk more about the future of equity in higher education. |
| 0:34.9 | So here you go. Let's turn now to the question of what this ruling does or doesn't mean for equity |
| 0:44.1 | in higher education moving forward. And listeners, I want to hear from you if you're getting ready to |
| 0:49.8 | apply for college or if you're helping someone with that process as a parent or guardian or |
| 0:55.4 | school advisor, call us up. How do you think the ruling impacts your process? And joining me for |
| 1:01.7 | this conversation is Dominique Baker, Associate Professor of Education Policy at Southern Methodist |
| 1:07.2 | University. Her research focuses on equity in higher education. Dominique, welcome to the show. |
| 1:13.4 | Thank you for having me. I am also joined again by the National Book Award-winning Professor |
| 1:19.4 | Amani Perry, who has just joined a Harvard University as a professor of African and African |
| 1:25.4 | American studies and studies of women, gender, and sexuality. And Amani, welcome back to the show. |
| 1:31.4 | Thanks for having me. So Dominique, can you start off with some basics here? You have studied affirmative |
| 1:39.6 | action and host of other policies for equity in higher ed. How should we be thinking about the |
| 1:44.6 | ruling and its impact? You said we should be careful not to overstate its power. What do you mean by that? |
| 1:51.4 | So I think there are sort of two pieces we can think about with this ruling. The first is that |
| 1:57.2 | there will be a real decrease in the share of Black and Brown and Indigenous students who are |
| 2:03.8 | enrolling at a set of institutions across the country, thinking about the institutions in this case, |
| 2:10.1 | right? Harvard, UNC, all those sorts of things, but that those institutions are fairly small number |
... |
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