Equality and Resistance in Higher Education

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper is an account of how higher education can become a site of resistance in the pursuit of equality while also identifying the dangers and limitations involved in this process. The development of a new intellectual perspective, namely Equality Studies, is examined and its potential for the understanding of egalitarian practice is explored. The paper examines the reasons why sociology, in particular critical and neo‐Marxist sociology, became inadequate as a way of understanding inequality and exploring egalitarian goals. It explores the limitations of the work of equality empiricists which has failed to move outside the liberal paradigm, and of critical theory and neo‐Marxism which has not gone beyond critique to identify mechanisms and institutions to develop a new egalitarian order. Prom the author's perspective, the seeming inability of sociology to marry empirical and normative discourses was a key factor in contributing to the development of Equality Studies. The latter part of the pa...