In Degrees of Failure, Randle Nelsen brings together such diverse topics as campus parking, college sports, helicopter parents, edu-business as edu-tainment, and technology in teaching to show how continuing inequities, grounded in large part upon social class differences, are maintained and reproduced in our universities.

Paying special attention to the role played by professors in solidifying status-quo arrangements, Nelsen makes the strange familiar for those outside the university bureaucracy and the familiar strange for those whose participation in university settings is a routine part of everyday life.