ABSTRACT
While the United States and Britain are commonly understood as multicultural capitalist democracies, they differ in the role that diversity has played in the popular imagination as well as on university campuses. In what follows I discuss the history of diversity as it is commonly understood in the United States and Britain, with particular attention to how the national contexts have shaped cultures of diversity in higher education, comparing the cases throughout. I show that while both countries have dealt with critiques of diversity and multiculturalism in the civic sphere, in the United States these debates have often spilled onto high-status university campuses, while similar British campuses have not seen the same level of public critique related to diversity and multiculturalism. At low-prestige universities, in both contexts minority students are overrepresented. On the one hand, the expansion of this sphere may be a source of increased opportunities for ethnic minority students in higher education; on the other hand, the lower completion rates and levels of prestige suggest that minority students are not benefi tting from the just rewards of university education when shunted to lower-level institutions. I conclude with some areas for further research and refi nement in the literature on diversity in higher education in comparative perspective.
