It’s September, and Jonathan Alger glances around the room at the 17 students in his freshman seminar on Diversity and the University. Alger, who is vice president and general counsel at Rutgers University, and a national leader on affirmative action, has asked the class to talk about their own experiences with diversity in high school.
A tall young man raises his hand. He grew up in Rutherford, N.J., he says, which was a nice town, “but not diverse.” The all-white community was quite different from the one he’s in now, he says. A young woman across the room says she was one of the only Latinas in a school almost entirely African American. A boy wearing a yarmulke confides that this is his first experience in a school not all Jewish.
