2020 exposed just how much trouble higher education is in – and diversity and inclusion efforts along with it.

The historical conjuncture between a global public health crisis that took a disproportionate toll on historically marginalized communities and a national reckoning with the ongoing legacies of anti-Blackness galvanized college students, diversity officers, and educators on a scale not seen since the 1960s. As they had decades before, a multiracial coalition of students, staff, and faculty demanded that higher education leaders acknowledge how histories of white supremacy and systemic racism continue to shape higher education and academia. In so doing, they laid bare the unfinished business of the Civil Rights era on college campuses and the limits of DEI reform efforts to date.

In response to these joint crises, senior leadership across the nation scrambled to meet the moment. But their efforts, like those that preceded them, will flounder unless we have a better sense of the fraught history of higher education, the common obstacles we share, and the will to reimagine a new way forward.

Drawing on abolitionist frameworks of social change, this book offers senior leaders, diversity officers, and college faculty new values, tools, and mindsets to address – and redress – ongoing forms of oppression that thrive on college campuses. It argues that it’s time to create a more just future for the most marginalized members of our communities, one founded on an understanding of where we’ve been, what went wrong, and how to get back on track.