One key assumption I should note is that I assume that qualified pools of scholars of color exist. This is based on statistics produced by the National Center for Education Statistics which indicate that the number and proportion of women and people of color receiving doctorate degrees have increased since 2000 (Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics 2012).
Bourdieu: The Academic Field and the (Re)production of the White Male Habitus Pierre Bourdieu is no stranger to sociologically interrogating the academy. In Distinction (1984), he identifies educational institutions as sites where academic capital is generated and reproduced (in the service of other forms of capital), habitus are cultivated, and class inequalities are legitimized
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Where I begin this discussion, then, is not with how American universities came to be predominantly White male institutions, but with how they continue to persist as predominantly White male institutions given social and demographic changes in American society and explicitly articulated intentions to change the composition of higher educational faculty. To do this, I begin with an examination of the academic field. But, before I move into an analysis of the field, three general concepts must be clarified in Bourdieu’s work: habitus, academic capital, and field. In his studies of cultural reproduction, Bourdieu argues educational institutions serve an important social function of preserving social hierarchies, in part by training those of dominated classes to legitimize and accept their domination, replicating power relations across generations, and exchanging existing cultural capital of dominant class backgrounds into other forms of capital, mainly academic capital (Bourdieu 1984,