How a College Aims to Breed Activists With Keen Eyes on Identity Politics

City College of New York

Nimmi Gowrinathan knew that any discussion of the harm wrought by white international-development workers would be heated. Ms. Gowrinathan, a visiting research professor at the City College of New York, had co-written a paper on the topic, and she had already heard some criticism from the development community. But now, as she and a co-author sat down for a panel discussion on that paper, they welcomed the debate.

Women who are on the receiving end of international-aid efforts “see that what these interventions are trying to do is to push them away from politics into traditional feminine industries,” Ms. Gowrinathan told an audience gathered at City College last Wednesday night to hear about the paper, “Emissaries of Empowerment.” One co-author, Kate Cronin-Furman, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, also sat on the panel. (The third co-author, Rafia Zakaria, a lawyer and writer, could not attend.)

Sure enough, the first audience member to pose a question issued a challenge. “Activism is so subjective,” she said. “Who gets to decide what the ideal activism is?”

“My answer there is: Do everything carefully,” said Ms. Cronin-Furman. “Someone is going to push back, and they might be justified in their pushback.”

Questions continued, some from funders of international-aid projects, who appeared to take the argument as an affront to the work they do. They wondered incredulously whether the panelists thought doing nothing at all was preferable to good-faith efforts to help. Ms. Cronin-Furman and Ms. Gowrinathan did not back down.

In calling out white, feminist aid workers, the panelists opened up a challenging and sometimes tense conversation about a topic that has bedeviled many progressive activists: identity. Identity politics have come under fire since Donald Trump won the presidency. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who challenged Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary, suggested that the Clinton campaign had stressed identity too heavily, saying, “It’s not good enough for someone to say: ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” Mark O. Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia University, argued in The New York Times that liberals’ celebration of diversity is “disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age.”

Ms. Gowrinathan said she wants to “challenge the contemporary understanding of identity politics, while taking very seriously the role of identity in politics.” She argued that conversations like the Wednesday panel discussion are necessary to do activism better.

That’s why a group of students was seated in the front row during the talk. They are the first cohort in a program Ms. Gowrinathan launched at City College this semester, “Beyond Identity: A Gendered Platform for Scholar-Activists.” The program is designed to teach women of color to use their experiences to effect social change by emphasizing two attributes intended to bridge identity-group gaps: strong writing and a solid understanding of feminist theory. Here, the students were seeing women who are both activists and academics defend work that was derived from research and their personal experiences as aid workers.

“I’d never seen an all-women panel before,” said Christelle Jasmin, an international-studies major who is in the Beyond Identity program. She enjoyed watching the panelists “defend their work so ferociously and engage with the people who didn’t agree.”

A Partisan Campus

Reckoning with a president who campaigned on building a wall to keep out undocumented immigrants and who has since equated neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Va., with those protesting them, activists on college campuses have felt a call to arms. Some faculty members, staff, and students who did not think of themselves as activists have been searching for ways to oppose the current administration and its immigration policies.

At City College, where many students are immigrants and only 15 percent of the students are white, the urge to push back has been particularly strong.

The college’s administration has not been shy about taking a side in political debates.

After the Trump administration announced that it would end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that allowed people who had come to the United States as children to work and study, Vincent Boudreau, interim president of City College, released a statement pledging to protect immigrant students and asking people on the campus to protest the decision.

“On this issue, our campus is a partisan campus. Period,” the statement said.

“The way immigration policy is going these days is a direct affront to our mission and to our student population,” said Mr. Boudreau in an interview. “The substance of our work advocates a particular vision of America. If that means we join rallies in support of positions that we advocate for, we’ll join rallies. If that means figuring out how to do everything possible to make sure there’s not a single student on this campus who doesn’t remain on this campus, we’ll do that.”

Mr. Boudreau said the goal of the Beyond Identity program is to give students the power to advocate for themselves.

“A big part of this program is an effort to take young people with direct experience of injustice and clear ideas of how to redress injustice and let them speak to these issues,” he said.

Ms. Gowrinathan has seen identity politics divide students who she thinks should be able to find common cause. In a piece for Vice News in 2015, after terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., she warned against divisions between black and Muslim women.

“In the long term, political movements already have a hard time surviving,” Ms. Gowrinathan said. “Eventually these lines are prone to fracturing. These lines will divide women. I’ve seen South Asian women become frustrated with Black Lives Matter, because there’s not a reciprocal understanding of being an immigrant.”

The Beyond Identity program is partly about building a coalition of women of color who will eventually use each other as a network. An important part of that network will be the faculty members who are teaching in the program.

“In the next years we are going to have to build a very strong social movement and resistance,” said Valeria Luiselli, an author who is on leave as an assistant professor of Romance languages at Hofstra University to teach in the program at City College. “The greatest threat to that is interior divisions — people who would normally stand together and resist the situation that has suddenly befallen us. That’s at the heart of the way I envision this.”

Nimmi Gowrinathan

The first cohort of 10 students in Beyond Identity started classes this semester. The two-year program is funded by a $1.3-million grant from the NoVo Foundation.

The students will take courses on feminism, gender and violence, narrative nonfiction writing, and political writing. They will conduct field research in a community of their choice and receive a stipend to participate in a political movement.

Improving the students’ writing will be a main focus of the program. Ms. Gowrinathan said she’s seen past students write quick posts on social media in reaction to political discussions that could be stronger with more research and better writing. She hopes her students will learn to “take the experience that’ve have had and be able to communicate in a way that’s not polarizing.”

Clarify the Questions

The nonfiction-writing class is taught by Michael Archer, an adjunct faculty member at City College. Ms. Luiselli joined last week because the students were discussing a piece she’d written about a former member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia for Guernica, an online magazine that Mr. Archer co-founded. One of the students asked her how she thinks about the message she wants to convey before she begins writing.

“I never think about message,” Ms. Luiselli said. “That can seem like you’re delivering an answer. A good essay clarifies what the questions are.”

The students watched quietly. Some took notes.

“Writing with a message can feel like being on a highway with no off ramps,” said Mr. Archer.

The students in the program come from many different majors; not all are diehard activists. Ana Puente Flores has been involved in organizing for immigrant rights. She is a political-science major and is in a pre-law program at City College.

“I wanted to not lose ties to my interest in activism,” she said. She recently got into a discussion about DACA with some other pre-law students, who argued that since undocumented immigrants lack constitutional protections, protesting for their rights is pointless. It made her angry.

“It’s going to give us a much more solid ground to stand on, so when these things come into question in real life, we can express them,” Ms. Flores said of the program.

Ms. Jasmin, the international-affairs major, said she attends protests, but has been less involved in organizing. She is interested in the theoretical side of activism.

“I like to read about it and study it,” she said. “I want to turn that into something more tangible.”

In her freshman year, Ms. Jasmin took a course on food, health, and culture. At the end of the semester, she asked her professor what steps she took to eat in a healthy and ethical way.

“She was like, ‘If I did that I wouldn’t eat anything,’” Ms. Jasmin said. “I was so shocked.”

Ms. Jasmin, who is a vegan, said she never wants to be like that. She wants to make sure her activism informs her academic work, and vice versa.

“I’m a vegan in the black community,” she said. “That’s very contentious. I get pushback on both sides. The vegan community is not a very inclusive space, for sure. One of things I’m focused on is making a healthy lifestyle accessible to people of color.”

Already she has at least one convert: Ms. Flores.

“Now I’m a vegetarian too, or at least I’m trying to be,” Ms. Flores said. “That’s also a right, an immigrant right, to be healthy.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.