INCREASING Faculty Diversity: The Occupational Choices  of High-Achieving Minority Students, † by the sociologists Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber, has already aroused controversy. Recently the subject of a lengthy article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the book has made news because its findings bear directly on the important University of Michigan affirmative-action cases to be decided by the Supreme Court this June. The book’s research counters in one important respect the argument that racial preferences are good for blacks and for higher education more generally, and it therefore may play a role in the Court’s decision.