by President Stephen Kodur
The Student Senate for California Community Colleges (SSCCC) represents students from the most diverse student population in the nation, California community colleges. After the unjust murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the SSCCC began to work actively within the higher education system to initiate change because we had seen too much of others talking about the issue without taking meaningful action. More resolutions of “commitment to students of color” will not make a difference; what is needed is action that can affect results. As students, we want change and understand it starts with education, in our classrooms with our teachers and our administrators. After forming an Institutional Success for People of Color Task Force, the SSCCC held two town hall meetings to hear from students about their experiences in California community colleges and to allow them to provide feedback on the work we were doing. As a result of listening to the students’ stories, the SSCCC developed an anti-racism student plan of action. Link to full report.
Links to the August 4, 2020 Town Hall and August 21, 2020 Town Hall.
Quynh Diem Bui Ngyuen, Phuc Bui Diem Nguyen, and Amiri Taylor smile together on Wednesday, May 30, 2020. Earlier this month, Phuc Bui Diem Nguyen was asked by a professor to anglicize her name. (Photo courtesy of Quynh Diem Bui Ngyuen)
The Black Revolution on Campus by
The Black Revolution on Campus is the definitive account of an extraordinary but forgotten chapter of the black freedom struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black students organized hundreds of protests that sparked a period of crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed college life. At stake was the very mission of higher education. Black students demanded that public universities serve their communities; that private universities rethink the mission of elite education; and that black colleges embrace self-determination and resist the threat of integration. Most crucially, black students demanded a role in the definition of scholarly knowledge. Martha Biondi masterfully combines impressive research with a wealth of interviews from participants to tell the story of how students turned the slogan "black power" into a social movement. Vividly demonstrating the critical linkage between the student movement and changes in university culture, Biondi illustrates how victories in establishing Black Studies ultimately produced important intellectual innovations that have had a lasting impact on academic research and university curricula over the past 40 years. This book makes a major contribution to the current debate on Ethnic Studies, access to higher education, and opportunity for all.
From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s by
In the wake of the 50th anniversary of the historic sit-in at Woolworth's lunch counter by four North Carolina A&T college students, From Sit-Ins to SNCC brings together the work of leading civil rights scholars to offer a new and groundbreaking perspective on student-oriented activism in the 1960s. The substantive essays in this collection not only delineate the role of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) over the course of the struggle for African American civil rights, but also offer an updated perspective on the development and impact of the sit-in movement in light of new research into organizational records and the personal papers of key actors. The contributors provide provocative analyses of such topics as the dynamics of grassroots student civil rights activism, the organizational and cultural changes within SNCC, the impact of the sit-ins on the white South, the evolution of black nationalist ideology within the student movement, works of fiction written by movement activists, and the changing international outlook of student-organized civil rights movements.
Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism by
For generations, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black freedom struggle, forever altering the political destiny of the United States. In this book, Jelani M. Favors offers a history of HBCUs from the 1837 founding of Cheyney State University to the present, told through the lens of how they fostered student activism. Favors chronicles the development and significance of HBCUs through stories from institutions such as Cheyney State University, Tougaloo College, Bennett College, Alabama State University, Jackson State University, Southern University, and North Carolina A&T. He demonstrates how HBCUs became a refuge during the oppression of the Jim Crow era and illustrates the central role their campus communities played during the civil rights and Black Power movements. Throughout this definitive history of how HBCUs became a vital seedbed for politicians, community leaders, reformers, and activists, Favors emphasizes what he calls an unwritten "second curriculum" at HBCUs, one that offered students a grounding in idealism, racial consciousness, and cultural nationalism.
This Bright Light of Ours: Stories From the Voting Rights Fight by
This Bright Light of Ours offers a tightly focused insider's view of the community-based activism that was the heart of the civil rights movement. A celebration of grassroots heroes, this book details through first-person accounts the contributions of ordinary people who formed the nonviolent army that won the fight for voting rights. Combining memoir and oral history, Maria Gitin fills a vital gap in civil rights history by focusing on the neglected Freedom Summer of 1965 when hundreds of college students joined forces with local black leaders to register thousands of new black voters in the rural South. Gitin was an idealistic nineteen-year-old college freshman from a small farming community north of San Francisco who felt called to action when she saw televised images of brutal attacks on peaceful demonstrators during Bloody Sunday, in Selma, Alabama. Atypical among white civil rights volunteers, Gitin came from a rural low-income family. She raised funds to attend an intensive orientation in Atlanta featuring now-legendary civil rights leaders. Her detailed letters include the first narrative account of this orientation and the only in-depth field report from a teenage Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project participant. Gitin details the dangerous life of civil rights activists in Wilcox County, Alabama, where she was assigned. She tells of threats and arrests, but also of forming deep friendships and of falling in love. More than four decades later, Gitin returned to Wilcox County to revisit the people and places that she could never forget and to discover their views of the "outside agitators" who had come to their community. Through conversational interviews with more than fifty Wilcox County residents and former civil rights workers, she has created a channel for the voices of these unheralded heroes who formed the backbone of the civil rights movement.
We Demand: The University and Student Protests by
In the post-World War II period, students rebelled against the university establishment. In student-led movements, women, minorities, immigrants, and indigenous people demanded that universities adapt to better serve the increasingly heterogeneous public and student bodies. The success of these movements had a profound impact on the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century: out of these efforts were born ethnic studies, women's studies, and American studies. In We Demand, Roderick A. Ferguson demonstrates that less than fifty years since this pivotal shift in the academy, the university is moving away from "the people" in all their diversity. Today the university is refortifying its commitment to the defense of the status quo off campus and the regulation of students, faculty, and staff on campus. The progressive forms of knowledge that the student-led movements demanded and helped to produce are being attacked on every front. Not only is this a reactionary move against the social advances since the '60s and '70s--it is part of the larger threat of anti-intellectualism in the United States.
The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985 by
In the 20th century, Americans have increasingly looked to the schools--and, in particular, to the nation's colleges and universities--as guardians of the cherished national ideal of equality of opportunity. With the best jobs increasingly monopolized by those with higher education, theopportunity to attend college has become an integral part of the American dream of upward mobility. The two-year college--which now enrolls more than four million students in over 900 institutions--is a central expression of this dream, and its invention at the turn of the century constituted oneof the great innovations in the history of American education. By offering students of limited means the opportunity to start higher education at home and to later transfer to a four-year institution, the two-year school provided a major new pathway to a college diploma--and to the nation's growingprofessional and managerial classes.But in the past two decades, the community college has undergone a profound change, shifting its emphasis from liberal-arts transfer courses to terminal vocational programs. Drawing on developments nationwide as well as in the specific case of Massachusetts, Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel offera history of community colleges in America, explaining why this shift has occurred after years of student resistance and examining its implications for upward mobility. As the authors argue in this exhaustively researched and pioneering study, the junior college has always faced the contradictorytask of extending a college education to the hitherto excluded, while diverting the majority of them from the nation's four-year colleges and universities. Very early on, two-year college administrators perceived vocational training for "semi-professional" work as their and their students' mostsecure long-term niche in the educational hierarchy. With two thirds of all community college students enrolled in vocational programs, the authors contend that the dream of education as a route to upward mobility, as well as the ideal of equal educational opportunity for all, are seriouslythreatened.With the growing public debate about the state of American higher education and with more than half of all first-time degree-credit students now enrolled in community colleges, a full-scale, historically grounded examination of their place in American life is long overdue. This landmark studyprovides such an examination, and in so doing, casts critical light on what is distinctive not only about American education, but American society itself.
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America's Universities by
A 2006 report commissioned by Brown University revealed that institution's complex and contested history of involvement in slavery-setting off a controversy that soon leapt outside of the academic circuit and made headlines across the country. The relationship between slavery, the slave trade and American higher education isn't a part of America's triumphal narrative of racial healing-in Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder, a rising star in American history, explosively lays bare some of the uncomfortable truths about slavery and the antebellum academy. Not just Brown, but most of America's revered colleges and universities--from Harvard to Amherst to William & Mary--were built on the backs of the enslaved. The slave economy determined the financial fates of many colleges, and the politics of the peculiar institution influenced curricula and intellectual culture in the young republic. Commercial slavery funded the growth of academic communities, literally built campuses, and filled the purses of matriculating scholars. Enslaved Americans waited on professors and students, and academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slaveowners and slave traders. Ebony and Ivy is a powerful and propulsive study, the first of its kind, revealing the racism and anti-abolitionist history of our the institutions usually considered the cradle of liberal politics. Wilder crafts an unflinching portrait of an education system that not only benefited from injustice, but helped to provide the intellectual justification for it.
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies by
"Slavery and the University" is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post-Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery's influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.
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