Joy Ann Williamson-Lott says she didn’t expect the publication of her book about the fight for academic freedom and free speech at colleges in the South in the 1960s and ’70s to coincide with a time in which those battles are being waged again.
“With the current administration and all these appeals for using national security as a rationale to abridge constitutional rights, it’s very contemporary again,” she says.
Her Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order (Teachers College Press) examines how students and professors who made campuses strongholds of the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements also transformed higher education in the South, and how that, in turn, transformed Southern society more generally.
Until that time, higher education’s established role in the South was to help maintain an oppressive system of segregation in “Jim Crow” society whose features included hostility toward mass education, says Williamson-Lott, a professor of the history of education at the University of Washington’s College of Education. She writes that the gatekeepers of a two-tiered system of racially segregated institutions, most of them designated as white and a minority as black, “threatened to defund any public institution that veered from racially restrictive mandates.”
Slowly but surely, she says, students and faculty members who challenged the system’s gatekeepers — elected state officials, trustees, funding agencies, campus administrators — opened up “cracks in the edifice of the Old South and precipitated wide-ranging changes in Southern higher education and Southern society as well.”
Historians, she says, haven’t paid much attention to what it meant that students and professors who took part in the larger civil-rights and antiwar movements “weren’t only foot soldiers for the movement off campuses; they were also interested in changing their campuses.”
At first, public officials in the South “refused to approve policies that pre-empted their ability to suppress campus dissent,” she writes. They took such actions as firing dissident professors and expelling activist students. But the disruptions, including students’ challenges to restrictive in loco parentis regulations, unsettled state and campus officials.
Outside pressures grew, too, including the threatened loss of regional accreditation and increased legal protection for campus free speech. Particularly effectual of change, she writes, were campus and system officials’ appetites for federal funds designed to foster an emerging national “knowledge economy.”
Crushing dissent, Williamson-Lott says, “was incompatible with what the knowledge economy demanded: freedom to explore the frontiers of knowledge.”
Even then, she says, traditionally white institutions maneuvered to minimize changes — for example, by hiring and enrolling only small numbers of nonwhite students. But change came nonetheless, as campus activists kept pressing for the right to teach and learn more expansively.
And there, she says, is the takeaway for colleges confronted today by challenges to free speech and academic freedom: Progress is hard won and must be hard fought. The committed activists of the South, determined to bring their campuses out of a Jim Crow academic backwater despite punitive opposition, “soldiered on.”
