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This article responds to Daniel Kuehn’s critique and expands on the discussion of James Buchanan’s later essay, which has received insufficient attention. The focus is on the 1965 revision of the “Virginia Plan for Universal Education” by Buchanan and Warren Nutter. While the revision is acknowledged by all, its significance is debated. The authors argue that Nutter and Buchanan’s original contribution lies in contrasting implied majority rule with explicit proportional representation, a distinction not found in Milton Friedman’s work. The period between 1959 and 1965 witnessed changes, including the development of an economic approach to constitutions and the attempt to prevent parents from using vouchers for integrated schools. The 1965 addition highlights the importance of alternative democratic decision rules and sets the stage for Buchanan’s subsequent work on racially determined policies. Buchanan’s involvement with racial issues extended beyond the voucher proposal, including his support for affirmative action. The addition to the 1965 voucher proposal addresses the impact of decision rules on minority well-being. The mischaracterization of minority concerns is addressed, drawing on Lani Guinier’s book and quoting Buchanan’s principles of fair representation. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of the 1965 addition in Buchanan’s work on racial fairness and its connection to Lani Guinier’s perspectives.

In attempts to defuse racial tensions on campus, higher education administrators have often commissioned special units and campus-wide initiatives. Historically, these commissions often address racial challenges in higher education that impact both faculty and students. If designed and deployed carefully, these commissions can be very useful mechanisms to address sensitive racial, religious, and linguistic concerns on campus. Despite the prevalence of studies that discuss racial experiences on campus, far less scholarship has focused on the effectiveness of these commissions and the dialogic strategies that faculty of color have employed in their service.

This study draws on three major findings. First, the chapter explores why the presidential commission structure is a powerful mechanism for improving dialogue about racial and ethnic issues on campus. Former commissioners discuss its potential for addressing the complex and interlocking concerns of faculty, staff, and students of color. Second, although the commission’s structure is promising, we present numerous problems that require further attention. We discuss how the emphasis on dialogue and less dedication to targeted actions and policies may actually undermine the goals of commissions like these and further frustrate aggrieved faculty, staff, and students. Third, the chapter highlights successful and unsuccessful strategies for sustaining fruitful dialogue that lead to an increased understanding and acceptance of diverse viewpoints and perspectives. These findings have specific relevance for international faculty and faculty of color interested in ways to be more proactive in shaping existing programs, policies, and approaches to meet the diverse needs of university life.

In this article Professor Perry argues that Plessy v. Ferguson and the de jure segregation it heralded has overdetermined the discourse on Jim Crow. She demonstrates through a historical analysis of activist movements, popular literature, and case law that private law, specifically property and contract, were significant aspects of Jim Crow law and culture. The failure to understand the significance of private law has limited the breadth of juridical analyses of how to respond to racial divisions and injustices. Perry therefore contends that a paradigmatic shift is necessary in scholarly analyses of the Jim Crow era, to include private law, and moreover that this shift will enrich our understandings of both historic and current inequalities.

This paper describes and reflects upon the “Future of Diversity and Opportunity in Higher Education: A National Forum on Innovation and Collaboration”.

Participant observation, journaling and content analysis comprise data sources for this work.

Featured sessions center upon the need for leaders in higher education to play key roles in advocating for diversity on postsecondary campuses and the move from individual to democratic merit in student admission and faculty hiring or promotion.

Adjudication against institutions working toward diversity requires new ways of promoting opportunity for underrepresented members of the postsecondary community. The following work describes such strategies.

This article develops an alternative theoretical approach to the Supreme Court’s controversial electoral redistricting decisions in Shaw v. Reno (1993) and its progeny. Instead of relying on the traditional equal protection interpretation, this paper argues that controversies over electoral redistricting are at base disputes among competing visions of democracy. In the Court’s recent redistricting cases, the majority and the dissent adopted fundamentally different visions of democracy – Individualist Democracy and Democracy as Power. In addition to elaborating these rival understandings of democracy, this article develops the concept of Symbolic Democracy to explain a central paradox in the Court majority’s decision: its simultaneous denial and recognition of the relevance of racial groups in representation.

This chapter explores the concept of allyship in social justice struggles. It provides a road map for self-reflection as well as acquisition of skills necessary for effective allyship. It describes appropriate roles for allies in dismantling systems and structures that protect the privilege of the majority in various contexts – privilege often unseen, unacknowledged and/or actively denied. This chapter will examine unique roles of allies in exposing, challenging, and dismantling privilege and white supremacy. Concrete examples of benefits that have accrued to white Americans through privilege – both conscious and unconscious, are assessed. The reader will be encouraged to explore personal areas of privilege and marginalization and acknowledge multidimensional identities (race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, etc.) of individuals and unique lived experiences. Those seeking authentic positions of allyship are challenged to root out embedded privilege/white supremacy through direct action.

On June 21, 2021, a motion was introduced to the Australian Senate calling on the federal government to reject critical race theory (CRT) from the national curriculum, claiming that CRT is divisive and racist. This was allegedly sparked by revisions to the national school curriculum, which included a more accurate reflection of the historical record of First Nations peoples’ experiences of colonisation and the framing of British arrival onto the continent as an invasion. This paper aims to overview the omnipresence of Western thought systems in the academy and critiques how knowledge production as a disciplinary practice positions race as a “marginalised knowledge”.

This paper is conceptual and it theorises the morphology and functions of racism within the Australian education system specifically, and across the board. This theorisation offers an invaluable starting point in rethinking how we advocate for and preserve Blac/k scholarship in academia. It examines how the political economy of racism in education offers a transformative position from which scholars can contribute to potential systemic change that promotes racial literacy and racial dignity, and the conditions necessary to foster these changes.

The paper confirms what studies by Blac/k scholars already highlight: that racialised knowledges are marked – as an aesthetic addition or as disruptive – or unnecessary – and how these patterns of colonial desires are manifested in the classroom or in race discourse.

Specifically, the arguments made in this paper examine two undertheorised concepts, namely, “racial dignity” and “trauma porn” to foreground the reimagination of practices that inform racial literacy in education. This offers a helpful starting place to consider how this form of education facilitates ongoing settler colonialism in Australia. The authors then propose an anti-racist pedagogical practice in social work education entailing three core crucial and transformative elements: self- reflexivity, storytelling and collaboration with Blac/k people.

The law-oriented short stories and novels of lawyer/English professor John William Corrington are receiving increasing attention from legal scholars. However, no one has analyzed the science fiction screenplays he co-wrote with his wife, Joyce, from a legal perspective. This article analyzes two such screenplays and concludes that they are “Socratic” texts whose narrative structures and epistemological processes work in much the same way that the traditional participatory exchange works in law school. My analysis explores the links between law, allegory and science fiction as intersecting methods to imagine the possibilities for the future.

It has been argued that the workplace and the labor market in general, by processes of education, mobility and competition, have become the main forces behind the individualization and atomization in societies and in people’s lives. This paper inquires into the tensions between solidarity, identity, and individualism among workers in their efforts to organize collective struggles to improve their workplaces and their lives. Drawing on the dilemmas of increased diversity in the new workplace, the paper delineates three models of organized labor: (1) The Universalist-Individualist model of organized labor, peaking at the New Deal crisis and embedded in National Labor Relations Act, as an attempt to establish universal solidarity, which suppressed differences and presented a unified worker voice; (2) The Separatist model, which emerges as a reaction to intragroup exclusion and involves fragmentation of workers into identity groups, each representing the interests of its members; (3) The Coalitionist-Altruist model, envisioned in the paper as a middle ground between solidarity and self-interest, through interrelated moves: a move from totalizing universal solidarity to coalitionist solidarity through continuous dialogue and “rotation of centers” and a move from rights-based identity politics and the dominance of employment antidiscrimination claims to a fuller substantive theory for social reform.