Given the assault on public higher education in California and on ethnic studies in Arizona, Nancy Abelmann's ethnographic study of Korean American students attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign could not be more timely. Its main focus is the students. What are they looking for in a college education? What are they getting? And how important is race in their pursuit of these ideals? The students whom Abelmann interviews want what many other students want: a highly individualized program of study, social interaction, and extracurricular activities that would allow them to work at their own pace with the help of skilled mentors. Once they arrive on campus, however, these students discover an official commitment to diversity, one that seems to work against the very liberal idealism they arrive expecting to achieve, and a concomitant institutional inability to speak frankly about race. “While many of the dilemmas they face in college are decidedly American,” Abelmann writes, “it is their particularity that is at the heart of this book, for they are students of a particular color managing their complex college dreams in an age that celebrates diversity even as it is largely silent on race, and in a moment that paradoxically both downplays and asserts Asian American difference” (p. 1).

In a style that is refreshingly engaging and accessible, Intimate University explores this “particularity” with great nuance. Divided into two sections, the first begins with a survey of Korean American communities in the greater Chicago area. It examines the ways in which class as well as race draw boundaries—often concrete ones that separate suburb from city—around individual experiences. It then looks at a large evangelical student-focused church, referred to pseudonymously as AAC, that has taken up much of the role of mentoring that the university does not provide. Especially for students who come from the wealthier suburbs, AAC speaks to the need to make the most out of their time in college and to the spiritual concerns that the secular classroom remains silent about, while at the same time enforcing restrictive gender and other kinds of narrow cultural norms. As such, AAC constitutes a Korean American mainstream against which those who do not fit in feel marginalized. This last point is pursued in chapter 3 through a focus on a student called Mary. As “the daughter of poor immigrants,” Mary speaks angrily about AAC as standing in for a “white America,” which, in turn, gestures toward “larger racist and classist exclusionary practices, including those of the university” (p. 66).

The second section focuses on a single extended family, to consider how the tension surrounding contemporary ideas of the university is made “intimate” for students because it involves more than simply themselves, but also draws in their familial relations and, through these, a larger history of geopolitical contact. The section begins with a discussion of a student who struggles with many of the tensions explored in the previous section. It then looks at a brother and cousin positing their ethnic family as an ideal that challenges the troubled liberal idealism of the university. The next chapter turns to the father, who at once helped originate a desire among his sons for the kind of individual development that a college education promises to cultivate and gestures toward a transnational past that had enabled this desire to bud in the first place. The final chapter takes up the topic of gender, which lead the immigrant women in the family to a different, but equally cosmopolitan, trajectory of thought.

The first section glows with insightfulness, mapping out a college experience that many readers will be unfamiliar with. It is also informative for those that have personally lived through it. The second section feels a little less tightly constructed, exploring familial relations that remain murky and not always easy to follow. The last chapter in particular feels underdeveloped, tackling the issue of gender in a belated way that might have been better woven into all the chapters of this section. It may be the case, however, that this apparent structural weakness is necessary, as there are some parts of the book's topic that invite cogent analysis and others that do not. Indeed, what students most seem to want is that research, teaching, and mentoring not restrict themselves only to the parts of their lives that are open to analysis; the other parts, the parts that are most important to them and that remain elusive, are also what they need, and desire, help in thinking through. One student, for instance, recalls how a philosophy professor responded to a question about religion: “It's none of your business” (p. 89). In telling this story, what this student seems to be saying is that such a question should in fact be a part of the business of the university.