How Colleges Co-opt Black-Student Protests

Are there professional-development seminars on how best to be the target of a student protest? If so, I missed them. Yet in the winter of 2015, I found myself in need of an etiquette lesson. Black Lives Matter was transforming campuses — from sit-ins at administrative offices to a “die-in” at my university’s annual Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony to organizing at my alma mater, the University of Missouri, in remembrance of Michael Brown Jr., the teenager fatally shot by a police officer in 2014 in Ferguson.

I was slated to talk at a small northeastern college that day about my online collaboration project, #FergusonSyllabus, and student activists had deemed it the right moment to interrogate their college’s relationship to racism. My talk wasn’t the target, but more an opportunity for black and brown students who often felt isolated and unheard to capture the attention of the hundreds assembled. Campus activism is as much about timing as it is about principles.

Just before the formal introduction to my lecture, a booming voice in the back of the gymnasium cried out, soon followed by a chorus of chants, and a few dozen students commenced a die-in. Outfitted in high heels and a dress, I got up from my squeaky folding chair in the front row and joined them. It was all over in a few minutes.

Although it has been more than 20 years since I myself organized campus protests, student dissent in some ways remains the same. Colleges fail black students. Black students protest. Colleges concede to some of their demands. In this process, students realize the power of protest.

In other ways, things have changed. Colleges have started to realize that students’ gains are their gains too. They may see the protesting student as a nuisance, but they have learned how to turn a student crisis into an institutional opportunity. They extract the students’ intellectual energies, best ideas, and activist vision and label them part of the college growth process. Administrators occasionally take barbed critiques to heart, but more often they calmly repackage activists’ demands as pedagogical lessons to be passed back down the campus hierarchy.

This sleight of hand has been honed throughout the recent history of higher ed. Within it, we may find ways to eradicate the need for so much protest in the first place. There is a cycle to black-student activism, and underneath each turn of the wheel, underneath every reform and corresponding retrenchment lies a lingering question: Is change actually possible in the historically racist world of academe?

At predominately white institutions, every February — Black History Month — brings a litany of PR-friendly commemorations of black firsts. Campuses recognize the first black students in their classrooms, athletic fields, and (in too few institutions) president’s offices. These are well-meaning celebrations, even if they gloss over the tremendous trauma that often accompanies being the very first. At HBCUs, February is a little different: The month is about placing one’s college in the wider pantheon of black achievement. Amid all this, the protests continue. At Syracuse University, in response to recent and past racist incidents, protests led by black students have involved taking over an administration building and resulted in some protestors being suspended — and then having their punishments rescinded. Clearly, institutions are still contending with demands for action they often have no idea how to meet.

Those of us in higher ed need to examine how we got here: how the firsts became firsts, how change happens over time, and how campus leaders have failed miserably (or, occasionally, behaved admirably) in the face of student dissent. There’s no better place to start than with two recent, meticulous books that seek to capture just how much black students and their voices matter: Stefan M. Bradley’s Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League (NYU Press, 2018) and Jelani M. Favors’s Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). In examining the spirit of activism in these disparate types of institutions — the Ivies, HBCUs — the authors, both historians, show why the mere hint of student action can send academic leaders into a tailspin.

While the black students of the Ivy League may have seemed worlds apart from the young radicals of Oakland and Chicago, they still relied on Black Power to transform their colleges. In Upending the Ivory Tower, an account focusing on the period between World War II and 1975, Bradley asserts that “what the students did on campus in the name of black freedom was just as significant as what advocates for black liberation did off campus.”

The student experience was not uniform. In Ithaca, N.Y., and Hanover, N.H., small towns with few black residents, black students feared for their personal safety. In Philadelphia and New York City, black students could encounter black compatriots within blocks of their campuses, but their identification as Penn Quakers or Columbia Lions caused some of them to feel distant from black communities socially, if not physically. In tackling the turns of the 1960s, Bradley studies mostly young black men — both those whose families were among the black elite and those who found their way to college through fellowships designed for low-income students from urban areas or the Deep South — but he does not ignore the hard work of black female students at sister colleges like Radcliffe College and Pembroke College at Brown University.

The history is often remarkable. When a liberal student group at Princeton brought the executive director of the NAACP to campus in 1946, he was received as an intruder, rather than a guest. Princetonians taunted him and pelted him with snowballs, according to the onlooker Robert Rivers. Rivers grew up at Princeton, where his father worked at an eating club and his mother was a maid for a professor. When black students couldn’t live on campus, Rivers provided lodging. He attended the university and would eventually become one of Princeton’s first black trustees. When Rivers’s accomplishments are applauded at assemblies or evoked in the revised history of Princeton, one wonders if the stories of the class of 1968 are evoked: That class carries with it the memories of black students being targets of garbage and urine thrown down from a dormitory.

The Alabama governor George Wallace spoke at Dartmouth in 1963, and the college newspaper reported that there seemed to be more applause than ridicule. When Wallace returned to campus in 1967, he encountered a more militant attitude. Some members of the nascent Afro-American Society (AAS) openly jeered during his speech before initiating a walkout. Others tried to flip Wallace’s car and banged on its roof as he left campus. The administration — echoing actions we still see today — sent a letter apologizing to Wallace. The impossibility of the students’ struggle was evidenced by the song lyrics of Gregory Young’s “Song to My Brother at Dartmouth,” first printed in the college’s black student newspaper and later cited in Ebony: “chump…being cool/acting rational/playin’ the role/nothin’s a game, my brother … Dyin’s for real!/don’t git caught in the enemy’s camp/eatin’ his food, thinking his thoughts.”

The poignancy of “Song to My Brother” is woven throughout Bradley’s account: the excitement of making it to the Ivy League and the difficulty of surviving in an unfamiliar and often unwelcoming place. Bradley’s research goes beyond student activists and sympathetic faculty and administrators. Upending the Ivy League also forces readers to reckon with the black janitor whose task it was to clean a student-occupied administration building at Princeton in 1969, the black families of early-1900s Ithaca who opened their homes to black boarders (men could not live on campus at the time), and the numerous neighborhood action groups who helped sustain student takeovers of offices and invited black students into their campaigns against university-driven “slum-clearance” plans.

Bradley’s chapter on Harvard’s Afro-American studies program resonates most. In the spring of 1968, the Harvard-Radcliffe Association for African and Afro-American Students (known as AFRO), registered its discontent with the lack of recruitment of black students, the displacement of black residents due to campus expansion, and the paucity of black workers hired for campus construction projects. Motivated by their own experiences of racism on campus and concern for the black working class that suffered under the weight of Harvard’s power, the AFRO activists’ demands remained central to student activism for decades and continue to animate collective action in Cambridge.

The most immediate wins came through the development of black studies at Harvard. In 1969 AFRO led a successful campaign including both white and black faculty to establish a concentration in black studies. In response to an exploratory study of black-student life at Harvard, the Ad Hoc Committee of Black Students, which was formed the previous year 10 days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, made demands that included “at least 10 tenured, term, and visiting faculty members” and also student representatives sitting on personnel committees.

The demand that students hold seats on tenure-review committees was no small ask. The idea that students would evaluate their future educators was beyond the pale for some of AFRO’s faculty allies, including the economic historian Henry Rosovsky. A usually sympathetic Rosovsky later dramatically likened faculty support and concession to this student request to an “academic Munich,” a reference to the appeasement of Nazi rule. After some experimental years and with the growth of traditionally trained black-studies scholars, Harvard’s black-studies program evolved into a standard bearer for the field. By 1972, the new department graduated its first class of concentrators and would soon conform to Harvard’s standard rank-and-tenure system. (Just weeks ago, Harvard commemorated the 50th anniversary of the program with distinguished speakers, music, and art.)

The students’ initial request to sit on personnel committees could be dismissed as the naïveté or egalitarian idealism of the era, but it should not. At the heart of all the conflicts in Bradley’s book is power, and although student activism — then and now — can celebrate the progressive turns their collective action brings about, they rarely, if ever, get to share power. Such maintenance of the status quo comes with consequences, including at Harvard, where a top Latina/o-studies scholar, Lorgia García-Peña, was recently denied tenure.

Jelani M. Favors’s Shelter in a Time of Storm challenges “the dominant interpretations” of HBCUs that have “tended to depict black colleges as bastions of conservativism, constructed either through white philanthropic efforts or by the order of white politicians.” In reality, HBCUs have long fought the paternalism of their white benefactors and federal advocates. In seven vignettes, Favors traces HBCU governance from 1837 to 1974. This expansive time period reminds readers that the political work of HBCUs predated the more widely known midcentury civil-rights era and carries the story of struggle to the early days of Black Power on campuses.

The historical actors Favors highlights range widely. He dwells on John Robert Clifford, a Civil War veteran who graduated from Storer College in the 1870s to become a newspaper publisher and founding member of the Niagara movement (the forerunner to the NAACP). Readers also encounter Southern University’s Felton Grandison Clark, “the very archetype of an unyielding, ruthless, and tyrannical black college president,” responsible for expelling student protesters, terminating employees, and generally lording over the campus during the turbulent 1960s. He honored his father — his predecessor at the helm of the university — with annual processions to his gravesite, the entire faculty and student body in tow. During such processions Clark the junior would openly weep.

Jackson State University’s leader from 1940 to 1967, Jacob L. Reddix, also “represented the politics of confrontation,” in Favors’s estimation. He complied with the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission’s request for information on students. Like many of his peers, he served at the pleasure of a white board that “had zero tolerance for educated blacks who sought to break stride with the expectations of local custom or law.” Other academic leaders, like Alfonso Elder of North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University), affirmed the right of students and the faculty to protest. Favors also captures the small, subtle moments of standing up to the pressures of all-white boards, going as far back as the Institute for Colored Youth in 1859.

The entire ecosystem of what makes up an HBCU is revealed: the churches, the federal and state authorities, the neighboring towns, the main-street shopkeepers, the boards. Sometimes these authorities came under fire from students directly, at other times their concerns were mediated by college presidents. These relationships were symbiotic, for good and for bad. At Tougaloo College, in Mississippi, for instance, students were under pressure to conform with the Christian values of the institution lest they invite greater white scrutiny or violence to their doors. Yet this was not enough, and Favors describes campus temperance being met by drunken conflicts with white community members.

In the years leading up to the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., Alabama State University’s faculty was politicized not only by the ideas they shared on campus, but by the violence against black people occurring throughout Montgomery. When the white grocer Sam Green sexually assaulted a black teenager, the ASU faculty member and football coach Rufus Lewis organized a boycott of his business, which led to its closure. Five years later, the bus boycott would be a shared victory between domestic workers and doctoral-degree holders.

Regardless of how campus leaders exercised their leadership, Favors emphasizes the role of the “second curriculum,” the affective work of the HBCU — its “pedagogy of hope grounded in idealism, race consciousness, and cultural nationalism.” (It is the opposite of the cultural “hidden curriculum” students of color decry at primarily white institutions.) The second curriculum was a salve against the sting of white racism, but it didn’t inoculate students sparring with faculty members and administrators.

In some of his most compelling storytelling, Favors presents the “New Negro” politics of Bennett College, a women’s college in Greensboro. The New Negro movement provided a sense of purpose and pride in its celebration of black arts, culture, and Pan-Africanism, and it took a special kind of leader to support its adherents at Bennett: David Dallas Jones. Assuming the presidency in 1926, Jones “refused to soft-pedal his increasing irritation with Jim Crow,” and prioritized hiring black workers to maintain the campus. He also encouraged students to refrain from patronizing businesses that insulted them or gave them poor service. In Favors’s view, the radicalism born out of the struggle against Jim Crow cultivated a Black Power sensibility long before that term was commonplace. Jones “was never reckless, but he delighted in provocation.” As did his students. They picketed outside a local movie theater that censored movies to exclude black actors and scenes of interracial cooperation and celebrated a small but uplifting victory when the Southern Theatres company agreed to screen unedited films. Bennett students would have to wait over two decades, Favors notes, before the destruction of separate ticket counters and seating.

As the Bennett history shows, black-student protest has been and remains inevitable in the university, which no matter its mission rarely tolerates radical or dissenting viewpoints about black freedom. Still, the leadership of a university has the capacity to bend to its calls when necessary for its own interest. Jones nurtured and understood his students’ desire to fight at Bennett. Perhaps Felton Clark also recognized the desire to attack Jim Crow, but he believed that the risks were too high.

HBCUs have sometimes relied on dubious strategies to keep their doors open. From their uneasy relationships with the current White House to their dependence upon technology-sector funders to open opportunities for students, the liberal arts and activist roots Favors celebrates are under threat. HBCUs, in Favors’s estimation, have garnered media attention and have become a fixture in popular representations of black life and culture, but he closely observes the loss of talented black students to primarily white institutions, an overemphasis on STEM that equates college with economic rather than social gain, and the constant problem of funding. His is a sobering look at where these colleges are now.

What’s changed in the 50 years since the spring 1969 student rebellion at Harvard, in protest of the university’s calling the police on students who had seized an administration building? More students of color are enrolled in the Ivy League, more women are on the faculty, and university leadership is slightly more cautious in its approach to student conflicts. Yet student demands remain eerily similar, and the concessions they win are uncomfortably predictable: Black students’ appeals are often met with poorly funded or structurally unsound initiatives, committees, and programs that ignore the structural problems that lead to the conflicts in the first place.

The sharing of power is always a bump in the road to reconciliation. In early proposals for African American studies, like the one at Harvard, students asked to play a role in governing the creation of programs, hiring, and the granting of tenure to future professors. This was a line that faculty members generally were and are unwilling to cross. Although there are some questions that have to be asked, are the insights of black students less valid than those of the white colleagues who didn’t believe that black studies should exist in the first place?

The history shows how black students became the university’s greatest unpaid consultants. They still are. To savor the privilege of elite education, to ensure the experience is better for the next generation, to help favored professors receive a fair shake at tenure — these competing demands are a full-time job. This turns our black students into another type of contingent labor force on campus. They shoulder an undue burden to identify and rectify the racism of the academy. The college presidents who skillfully negotiated potentially violent standoffs between students and administration all shared one key quality: They were willing to sit with students, to hear out their ideas, and to compromise.

Yet even this approach has created a cycle of conflict, mediation, and “solution” that forces students to do all the work and vigilantly monitor the results. Black students raise the problems, then they solve them. They may receive awards at graduation or commendation from a university administrator, but this approach to addressing racism elides the university’s necessity to disrupt its own processes. This impulse may turn out to be more insidious than co-optation: The issues that black students have been advocating for have never fully become grafted onto the university’s sensibilities. Instead, students have been given unfunded mandates and directives, some incredibly taxing and exhaustive, and they have been told that they are building leadership skills and character.

Yes, the students may protest. They may embarrass, shame and expose the institutions for their inconsistencies, their incoherence, their internal instability. But carrying out justice in the academy is difficult. Maybe, someday, institutions will actually be brave enough to change.