The Access to Inequality: Reconsidering Class, Knowledge, and Capital in Higher Education

Amy Stich’s Access to Inequality: Reconsidering Class, Knowledge, and Capital in Higher Education is the most original and important book on knowledge and power I have read in recent years. Here, Stich demonstrates the ways colleges–in particular, less elite comprehensive schools–are using art programs and museums to ‘open up’ privileged knowledge to broader communities. Stich puts us at the center of the resulting tensions and complexities, illuminating a discussion of cultural capital with stunning and nuanced ethnographic detail. This is a masterful intervention.

Stich has a well-defined remit that assists in her analysis of some contemporary practices in parts of North American higher education: she is also a very talented writer. Her title appears a deliberately provocative response to the now-familiar question ‘access to what’? The answer she sets out is a chilling one for liberal-minded educators (amongst whom I often include myself) but perhaps not so surprising for those who try to take a strongly reflexive sociological view of higher education in their research (amongst whom I also include myself). . . .What is even more impressive is her capacity to oscillate back and forth between system-level features and the most ‘micro’ of everyday social processes. . . .I would argue that Access to Inequality already provides powerful justification for more radical action in terms of admissions, perhaps drawing lessons from affirmative action policies.