Scholar Spotlight: Natasha Warikoo
This week, our Scholar Spotlight highlights Natasha, who co-wrote a powerful op-ed in the New York Times about the admissions processes of top universities and how they systemically uphold the privileges of elite, mainly white students.
Natasha Warikoo
Associate Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
SSN Key Findings: How the Ways College Authorities Talk about Diversity Can Undercut Efforts to Fight Racial Inequality
Warikoo is an expert on the relationships between education, racial and ethnic diversity, and cultural processes in schools and universities. Her most recent book, The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities (University of Chicago Press, 2016), illuminates how undergraduates attending Ivy League universities and Oxford University conceptualize race and meritocracy. The book emphasizes the contradictions, moral conundrums, and tensions on campus related to affirmative action and diversity, and how these vary across racial and national lines. Warikoo teaches courses on racial inequality and the role of culture in K-12 and higher education. She serves as co-chair of the School Advisory Council of her children’s public elementary school in Cambridge, and has been actively involved in the political process in Cambridge. Prior to her academic career, Warikoo was a teacher in New York City’s public schools for four years, spent time working at the U.S. Department of Education, and served as a fellow with the Teachers Network Leadership Institute.