Wrestling with Diversity
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
“Diversity” has become a mantra within discussions of university admissions policies and many other arenas of American society. In the essays collected here, Sanford Levinson, a leading scholar of constitutional law and American government, wrestles with various notions of diversity. He begins by explaining why he finds the concept to be almost useless as a genuine guide to public policy. Discussing affirmative action in university admissions, including the now famous University of Michigan Law School case, he argues both that there may be good reasons to use preferences—including race and ethnicity—and that these reasons have relatively little to do with any cogently developed theory of diversity. Distinguished by Levinson’s characteristic open-mindedness and willingness to tease out the full implications of various claims, each of these nine essays, written over the past decade, develops a case study focusing on a particular aspect of public life in a richly diverse, and sometimes bitterly divided, society.Although most discussions of diversity have focused on race and ethnicity, Levinson is particularly interested in religious diversity and its implications. Why, he asks, do arguments for racial and ethnic diversity not also counsel a concern to achieve religious diversity within a student body? He considers the propriety of judges drawing on their religious views in making legal decisions and the kinds of questions Senators should feel free to ask nominees to the federal judiciary who have proclaimed the importance of their religion in structuring their own lives. In exploring the sense in which Sandy Koufax can be said to be a “Jewish baseball player,” he engages in broad reflections on professional identity. He asks whether it is desirable, or even possible, to subordinate merely “personal” aspects of one’s identity—religion, political viewpoints, gender—to the impersonal demands of the professional role. Wrestling with Diversity is a powerful interrogation of the assumptions and contradictions underlying public life in a multicultural world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In contemporary academic and legal discourse, the term"diversity" has become such a floating signifier that the word can be taken to mean virtually anything. Levinson is well aware that the term's soggy genealogy must be complicated if diversity is to become praxis rather than mere theory. His thoughtful treatise concerns itself primarily with the way in which debates about diversity have ignored religious practice in favor of race and ethnicity. An endowed chair of the University of Texas School of Law, Levinson dwells on the contentious legal battles over affirmative action, a topic over which his own school has seen considerable litigation. Levinson offers a principled defense of diversifying universities, basing his arguments on John Stuart Mill's foundational text On Liberty. However, his reliance on such works of classical liberal philosophy may sometimes undermine his otherwise cogent arguments for bringing religion into a heretofore secular discussion. In the book's most compelling chapter,"Identifying the Jewish Lawyer," the author discusses how identity is constructed by both culture and religion, and vice versa. Levinson's quiet insistence on bringing religion into our definition of diversity is a critical gesture that is particularly welcome coming from a legal scholar. For, as the recent Supreme Court decision regarding affirmative action made clear, the definition of such ambiguous terms will ultimately be codified in the courtroom.