Elite universities’ diversity and widening participation initiatives are self-interested “performative acts”, the authors of a new book on inequality in higher education have claimed.
Elite Universities and the Making of Privilege: Exploring Race and Class in Global Educational Economies, co-authored by Kalwant Bhopal and Martin Myers, alleges that institutions will support such measures only when they benefit from them.
Much of the research for the study is based on interviews with students at four elite universities in the UK and the US, where, Professor Bhopal said, racism is often “very overt”.
According to the authors, their interviews reveal that access to elite universities is managed through gatekeeping systems and processes that legitimise race and class inequalities.
