Reconstructing Equality on New Political Ground: The Politics of Representation in the Charter School Debate at the University of California,San Diego

Abstract

Attacks on the legitimacy of affirmative action pose new challenges for public universities committed to creating a diverse student population without considering race or ethnicity as factors in admissions. On the basis of a case study of the controversy surrounding the building of a charter school at the University of California, San Diego, in response to the elimination of affirmative action in University of California admissions, the authors describe the meaning-making process by which that campus established new procedures for promoting educational equality and constructed new meanings to justify those policies and to resolve conflicts about their legitimacy. The charter school was created after a contentious public debate, in which the concept for the school and tacit definitions of equality, of social responsibility, and of the university itself became objects of contestation. The analysis reveals (a) the constitutive social processes by which particular meanings of equality and social responsibility are constructed and institutionalized, and (b) the role of higher education policy in reconstituting meanings of equality in the wake of affirmative action’s political retreat.