About 25 years ago, in March 1998 to be exact, NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday aired a documentary I produced that explored how affirmative action policies in higher education admissions and hiring practices affected students, faculty and staff at a specific university from the 1960s through the 1990s.
The piece, Affirmative Action and Higher Education: An Aural History, actually was an aural case study in which I captured the opinions and experiences of various members of the University of Chicago community – including prominent faculty like historian John Hope Franklin and sociologist William Julius Wilson, the university’s vice president for research (and former Morehouse College president) Walter Massey, and former students Christopher Kang and novelist A.J. Verdelle.
The insights of those interviewees along with many others at this elite university, continue to resonate in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s current ruling against the affirmative action policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina – and its broader implications for higher ed.
To hear my piece, please click on the following link: Affirmative Action and Higher Education
