Faculty Director of Research Initiatives and 2019-2020 Scholar-in-Residence
About
W. Carson Byrd is the faculty director of research initiatives and a 2019-2020 Scholar-in-Residence at the National Center for Institutional Diversity. His research examines race and educational inequality, inter- and intraracial interactions and their influence on identities and ideologies, and the connections among race, science, and knowledge production. These three areas intertwine under a broader research umbrella examining how educational institutions, particularly colleges and universities, can simultaneously operate as centers for social mobility and engines of inequality. His work often exhibits a “behind the numbers” or “contextualized numbers” approach to quantitative methodology combining survey, organizational, and other available data to peel back how social processes shape people’s navigation and understanding of race, educational environments, and related outcomes and experiences. This approach promotes a critical eye toward methodological use as well to understand how research may enlighten us regarding sociological phenomena in some situations, but may obscure such phenomena in other situations. Dr. Byrd’s work also involves tackling systemic inequality on our college campuses, particularly as they influence access to higher education and the persistent disparities found in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs.
Dr. Byrd has published extensively on race, education, and inequality in peer-review journals, edited volumes, and in public forums. His first book, Poison in the Ivy: Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses (Rutgers UP), examines college students’ interactions with one another and how these social interactions influence what they believe about race and inequality. He also recently coedited a collection of empirically-based intersectional analyses of college campuses, Intersectionality and Higher Education: Identity and Inequality on College Campuses (Rutgers UP). Dr. Byrd has published in journals such as the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Du Bois Review, Equity & Excellence in Education, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, among others. He has also published book chapters on race, education, health, and quantitative methods in the social sciences. He actively engages in public discussions of how to reduce racial inequalities through essays published in popular forums such as the Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the American Council of Education’s blog Higher Education Today, among others.
Dr. Byrd recently completed Behind the Diversity Numbers: What Makes a University “Too White” and How to Change Racial Inequality in Higher Education (Harvard Education Press), which will appear in print in spring 2021. This volume explores how the framing of racial inequality in conjunction with an overreliance of quantitative methods for diversity, equity, and inclusion can shift universities away from tackling racism as a systemic issue that requires organizational change to individualizing inequality as the deficits of people.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Race and ethnicity, sociology of (higher) education, affirmative action, science and knowledge production, research methods
