The central question addressed in this essay is how students engage in a class that focuses on the political and social power of whiteness. Specifically, it looks at how whiteness gets inscribed and reified in our education practices, even as we try to disrupt its normative influence. The essay is based upon an in-depth qualitative study of a graduate seminar dedicated to addressing diversity issues critically. We conclude that despite students' expressed intentions and efforts at disrupting whiteness, they draw upon a variety of discourses that actually serve to protect and secure whiteness's dominant position. Twelve different discourses that students cite are described, grouped into four broad appeals: to self, to progress, to authenticity, and to extremes. Understanding how students invoke these discourses as an implicit way of resisting critical engagements with whiteness can help us to problematize these practices as well as cultivate more productive and enabling interactions.

Recent research has suggested that the long-observed negative association between seniority and pay among college faculty largely reflects below-average research productivity of senior faculty-a possibility that most earlier studies did not examine.Overlooked in both waves of studies, however, is match quality. Because the higher quality of the faculty/institutional match implied by higher seniority should, all else equal, result in higher salaries, failure to account for match quality inflates the estimated returns to seniority. Indeed, that positive bias, the authors find, is roughly equal in magnitude to the negative bias caused by failure to account for research quantity and quality. When they account for both match quality and faculty research productivity in an analysis of data on economics faculty at five research universities over a 21-year period, the authors estimate that, holding experience and other factors constant, the penalty for twenty years of seniority is 16% of salary. aculty pay structures have long been of interest to economists.1 Consistentwith findings for nonacademic markets, faculty pay has been found to rise with experience and to be positively related to measures of productivity. Unlike in other markets, how-'Early studies of academic pay include Cohn (1973), Siegfried and White (1973), Ferber (1974), andJohnson and Stafford (1974).ever, there is evidence that returns to seniority are commonly negative for faculty. One proposed explanation for this anomalous finding emphasizes the monopsony power of most colleges and universities; another singles out the effects of "raiding," in which high-quality faculty are bid away, resulting in a negative correlation between seniority and unmeasured faculty productivity.Recently, Moore, Newman, and Turnbull (1998) argued that estimated returns to seniority in previous studies are biased downward because of the failure of these studies to control for quality of faculty research. Consistent with this claim, they showed that the coefficient of seniority became less negative once controls for research quality were included in the empirical model. Indeed, when the coefficient of seniority lost statistical significance, they concluded that the puzzle had been resolved: there is no need to explain negative

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"We track faculty for 30 yr at five PhD-granting departments of economics. Two-thirds of faculty who take alternative employment move downward; less than one-quarter moves upward. We find a substantial penalty for seniority, even after richly controlling for faculty productivity, and the penalty is little changed when we allow wages and returns to seniority to differ by mobility status. Faculty who end up moving to better or comparable positions were penalized as severely for seniority while they were in our sample as faculty who stay. These results are incompatible with the raiding hypothesis. Faculty from top 10 programs are also punished for seniority but to a lesser degree than other faculty, which could reflect reduced monopsony power against such faculty if they are more marketable. All results persist when we control for prospective publications and allow lower returns for older publications. Match-quality bias has dissipated in the post-internet period, which may be the consequence of greater availability of information. "("JEL" J62, J44, J42) Copyright (c) 2009 Western Economic Association International.