Only one American in six ever takes a course in American history after high school. But colleges and universities do teach history in other ways -- via their historical markers, the statues on their greens, and the names on their buildings.
What do Americans learn from such lessons? Mostly that colleges and universities don’t take history seriously.
The oldest institution of higher learning in the United States gets things off to a rocky start regarding historical accuracy with its statue of a seated John Harvard, at a central spot on campus. Known locally as the “statue of three lies,” the monument gives the wrong date for the founding of Harvard College, implies that John Harvard founded it (he merely donated books to its library), and isn’t a likeness of him anyway, but of a 19th-century undergraduate.
When college historical markers give anything more than the date an institution was founded, they usually read as if written by a college’s public-relations office, not its history department. Thus the marker for the University of California at Berkeley not only recognizes “the first permanent site of the University of California,” but goes on to note when and where the college’s first graduation ceremony was held (South Hall, in 1873), when the central-campus buildings date from, and what kind of international competition (the first to be held for a California site) gave rise to their design.
“The program of the competition, which was sponsored by Phoebe A. Hearst, embodied the highest aspirations of the university and the state at the turn of the century,” we are told. How those “highest aspirations” were ascertained in a state as varied as California is not explained.
Even when history professors do play a role in writing the texts of historical markers, they seldom make good use of the opportunity to educate. The lengthy text of a marker at the University of Georgia goes on about (among other things) early presidents and famous graduates (mostly Confederate leaders), while avoiding all mention of events from the last 130 years. It never refers to slavery or any of the moral issues associated with the war and implies that the Confederacy was right to secede. In the early 1990’s, a professor at the university persuaded the state to change a phrase on the marker from “the Civil War” to “the War for Southern Independence,” a phrase rarely employed either during the war or in the 1990’s.
In 1995, I wrote a book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, which sold over 300,000 copies. The response to the book taught me that many people thought that the errors mattered, and it led me to write Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, published last fall.
In textbooks and on college campuses, the errors matter because they shape how people think about the past. While I wasn’t surprised to find that so many town squares and historic houses distort history, I was saddened to learn how often our colleges and universities do, too.
Like small-town chambers of commerce, colleges only want to remember happy events from the past. Therefore, their campuses often delete all mention of conflict. The University of Mississippi’s historical landmarks make no mention, for instance, of the institution’s notorious ban, put into force after the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation, on speakers who espoused integration. The ban divided the campus until a suit by Charles Evers, brother of the slain civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, overturned it in 1970. Not telling that story demeans the efforts of people on the campus like the college’s chaplain, Will Campbell, who staged silent vigils to protest the ban. It also robs students and townspeople of the opportunity to understand how a basic American freedom was lost for a time.
Some institutions do better. Berkeley does have a plaque about Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement in its Sproul Plaza, where the movement began in the 1960’s. And on May 4, 1990, the 20th anniversary of the killing of four students on its campus, Kent State University dedicated a memorial to those slain students. South Carolina State University and Jackson State University also have memorials to their students killed during protests in the 1960’s.
But if no one died, a campus protest rarely gets remembered. Perhaps the biggest mass arrest in the history of American higher education, at least in terms of the percentage of the student body taken into custody, happened at Mississippi Valley State University in February 1970. Students were boycotting classes and demonstrating for more library books, better facilities, and better-trained faculty members. To break up the protest, the administration had almost 900 students -- more than half the student body -- arrested. Today, the campus is silent about it all.
Omitting the role of campus protest in our institutional past only reinforces the unfortunate tendency, found in so many high-school textbooks, to reduce citizenship to the mere act of voting. The possibility that Americans must sometimes protest to alter the policies of their governments and institutions seems as foreign to many college landscapes as it does to high-school classes -- even though protest is an American tradition.
Another lesson presented by our college campuses has to do with how we understand -- or misunderstand -- the importance of race and gender. Many of our institutions of higher education for years kept out nonwhites; some excluded women; others served women or African-Americans exclusively. When, how, and why they opened -- or didn’t open -- their doors more broadly is an important part of their institutional chronicle, but it rarely gets mentioned on college landscapes.
The University of Mississippi provides a modest exception. One of the university’s dormitories, Baxter Hall, boasts a plaque that concludes, “Baxter Hall was the home of some distinguished Mississippians -- one of them being James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1962.” While hardly an adequate treatment of the riot that integration sparked at Ole Miss, the sentence is at least preferable to institutional amnesia.
Historically black institutions usually handle the topic of race more forthrightly than do historically white institutions. Consider the marker for West Virginia State College: “Founded as West Virginia Colored Institute in 1891. ... Voluntarily desegregated in 1954. First state public four-year college and U.S. black land-grant college to be fully accredited.” In contrast, formerly white institutions tend not to mention that they were ever segregated. The counterpart of West Virginia State, West Virginia University, was all white until a court decision forced it to desegregate its law school in 1937; the rest of the institution remained white until the 1950’s, but its campus is silent on the matter. The diffidence about acknowledging race exemplifies the inability of most white people in our culture to even notice when institutions are all white.
One reason to use college campuses to discuss the collective history of women and people of color is to counter the covert signals about gender and race that institutions send with their celebration of individuals. Portraits in faculty dining rooms, as well as the names on campus buildings, are overwhelmingly of white men. Some names carry specific implications for white supremacy: Bowdoin College and Brown University are named for men who grew rich from slavery and the slave trade, while Lord Jeffrey Amherst, in the words of 19th-century historian Francis Parkman, “initiated the first known use of biological warfare in the ‘New World.’” (Amherst College sometimes claims to be named for the town rather than the man, but, until the 1960’s, college dishes boasted images of Lord Jeff on horseback, sword drawn, chasing American Indians.)
All across America, institutions of higher learning venerate people who, after the Civil War, worked to force African-Americans into second-class citizenship. During Reconstruction, the Chapel Hill resident Cornelia Phillips Spencer helped foment a student boycott of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to protest integration. After staying open for a mere handful of students for two years, the university finally bowed to pressure and closed. Reopened on a whites-only basis, it later named its first women’s dormitory Spencer Hall. With no apparent irony, the plaque on the dorm credits Spencer with preserving the institution (she celebrated its reopening by ringing the campus bell).
To be sure, most students who live and study in college dormitories and classrooms have no idea who the people were whose names the buildings carry, what those people did, or what principles they represented. Sometimes the students are better off not knowing. The two most prominent buildings at Mississippi Valley State University are named for two men who were, I believe, among the most racist political leaders in Mississippi’s history, Walter Sillers Jr. and Fielding Wright.
Throughout Sillers’s long tenure as speaker of the Mississippi House, he opposed compulsory school attendance. Reasoning that black children stayed out of school more than white children, he said that not forcing them to attend both saved the state money and helped maintain segregation. Fielding Wright, the governor of Mississippi from 1946 through 1952, led the Dixiecrat walkout from the 1948 Democratic National Convention to protest a platform that included a plank favoring civil rights for black Americans.
Meanwhile, the university has never named a single building after an African-American who might have offended a white person. There is no Medgar Evers Hall and no Fannie Lou Hamer Dormitory (even though Hamer lived less than 20 miles from the college) to commemorate the state’s civil-rights leaders, and no Blanche K. Bruce Hall of Political Science, to honor the first African-American to serve a full term in the United States Senate.
Nevertheless, a few institutions do provide creative examples of how to use public spaces to teach history. In 1988, the University of Oklahoma became embroiled in controversy over the fact that its chemistry building carried the name of the Ku Klux Klan leader Edwin C. DeBarr. The university might have defended the name, since DeBarr had served longer than any other founding faculty member. Or it could have quietly removed it; eventually, no one would have recalled that DeBarr had ever graced or disgraced the campus.
Instead, the university renamed the hall -- and put up a marker to tell why. The marker explains that the building “was originally named DeBarr Hall in honor [of] ... one of the original four members of the faculty,” goes on to tell that DeBarr chaired the chemistry department for 31 years, and concludes that “strong campus reaction to the revelation that DeBarr had been involved with the Ku Klux Klan led to the removal of his name from the building.”
At the University of Colorado at Boulder, the scholar Patricia Nelson Limerick used a controversy over a building’s name to teach her campus some history. In 1961, the university had renamed a building to honor Captain David H. Nichols, the speaker of the House of Representatives in the Territorial Legislature, who had helped locate the university in Boulder. He had, as the building noted, also “participated in the battles of Buffalo Springs, Beaver Creek, and Sand Creek with great credit.” By the 1980’s, few Coloradans believed that participating in the Sand Creek “battle,” in reality a massacre of noncombatant American Indians, reflected “great credit” on anyone. The resulting dispute finally led to renaming the building. Limerick realized that the controversy provided an opportunity, as she wrote in a more-than-100-page paper circulated on the campus, “to raise the crucial questions of Colorado’s complex history.”
The University of Southern Mississippi provides still another way that an institution can deal with past dishonor. It recently renamed a building to honor Clyde Kennard, an African-American born in Hattiesburg, home of the university. After earning medals for duty in Korea, Kennard attended the University of Chicago for two years before returning to Hattiesburg to seek admission to the then-all-white university there. While he was in the admissions office applying, illegal whiskey (Mississippi was a “dry state”) was planted under the front seat of his car. Later, he was also charged as an “accessory to burglary,” for allegedly buying five bags of stolen chicken feed. He was sentenced to the state penitentiary, where he developed stomach cancer, was denied medical attention until too late, and was finally released to die in a Chicago hospital in 1963.
“By placing his name on this landmark building,” the university’s president, Aubrey Lucas, said in a 1993 ceremony honoring Kennard, “we’re saying to the world we apologize for the indignities he suffered.”
Then there’s the University of Texas at Austin, perhaps the most Confederate campus in America, featuring statues of Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston, and a fountain claiming that the Civil War was about states’ rights. Like most Confederate memorials, those went up during a low point of race relations -- from 1890 through 1920. Last fall, the university dedicated a new statue of Martin Luther King Jr. to counter them, mainly in response to student requests over the last 12 years.
But neutralizing antiprogressive whites with progressive leaders of color raises another issue. In every era of our history, some white Americans have worked for fairness for all. Creating campuses dominated by whites who stood for injustice and people of color who worked for justice misrepresents the past -- and has destructive implications for students trying to get along in the present. Already the University of Texas feels it necessary to mount a round-the-clock guard at the King statue to ensure that no disaffected student topples or disfigures it.
Telling history in public is never easy, but confronting an institution’s past with honesty and compassion is surely better than distorting or omitting untoward events. When a university tells of its failures to live up to reasonable standards of fairness and justice, it enables the healing process to begin. By telling how few people of color they admitted or hired before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Northern universities can help students and faculty and staff members realize that racism is not just a Southern problem. By explaining how recently they denied women entry into many graduate programs, and refused to grant tenure to Jewish faculty members, Ivy League institutions can help their campuses understand the feelings of older women and members of religious minority groups today. The truth about segregation can help people better understand the controversy that swirls today around affirmative action.
When institutions of higher learning tell their history fully and honestly, they also exemplify good historical practice for their students. In the process, they provide a much-needed lesson about the contentious, sometimes unpleasant, nature of truth.
James W. Loewen, a former professor of sociology at the University of Vermont, is the author of Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New Press, 1999).
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