Unequal Spaces: How College Is Portrayed in Film

Throughout its history, Hollywood has overtly or tacitly advocated white supremacy in ways that have thwarted progress toward diversity on college campuses. And it has done so with academe’s complicity.

So argues Curtis Marez, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California at San Diego, in University Babylon: Film and Race Politics on Campus (University of California Press).

Since its silent era, the American film industry has had a love affair with “white higher learning,” he writes. That is evident, he says, in scores of films about college life as well as relations between the popular-film industry and higher learning. The two institutions have together advanced a “fantasy of white wholeness” that has excluded or vilified people of color, he writes.

In recent years, several college horror films have suggested the precariousness of being a student today. In Happy Death Day (2017), filmed at Loyola University New Orleans, for example, a blond sorority sister must relive her murder day after day to discover who her killer is. The perpetrator, disguised as the school mascot, turns out to be — spoiler alert! — her roommate, a woman of color.

That plot’s element of racial dread, Marez says, typifies how college films produced by Hollywood have shaped or reflected public views of campus life as it relates to race, along with gender, class, and sexual difference. Preconceptions and prejudices have abounded in such films, he says. And no wonder, he adds, given the long history of such uncomfortable portrayals.

Silent films and then talkies — college-related or not — drew on “a new common sense of white superiority” developed by academic institutions, he says. For example, the filmmaker D.W. Griffith was able to call on connections to President Woodrow Wilson to have his racist The Birth of a Nation screened at the White House in 1915. The president, who had been a professor and president at Princeton University, “wielded his academic authority to promote the film, publicly confirming the accuracy of its sympathetic representation of the Ku Klux Klan,” Marez writes.

Another U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, helped shape public conceptions of higher education during his acting career. Knute Rockne: All American (1940) and four other college films in which Reagan played a student or professor were typical of a genre that made unequal access to higher education seem “natural,” and even “pleasurable.” When Reagan was governor of California, Marez says, he often invoked his films’ themes of endangered white family values and privilege to link a racialized form of “respectability” with students’ worthiness of access to academe. The author asserts that Reagan acted on those same prejudices in imposing financial hardship on poor and minority applicants and curtailing student protest and academic freedom.

Colleges, especially in Hollywood-friendly Southern California, have long made their campuses available for filming. Marez says that seeing campus film shoots and a flow of personnel between the two industries when he taught at the University of Southern California made him realize just how extensive the academe-Hollywood nexus was.

His research led him to identify some filmmakers — among them, Ava DuVernay and Aurora Guerrero — who have recently gained “a certain amount of cult success” by using their university education in ethnic studies to create examples of the “critical minority film” that oppose the dominant themes of college films. They have examined, for example, how hostility and the threat of overwhelming indebtedness impede attendance by students of color or of nonmajority sexual identity.

“I try to present some sort of dialectic — the dominant arc of the story versus a more marginal arc of people who are on the margins of the university,” Marez says. In that way, he says, “I hope to provide a window into some contemporary campus controversies, and a historical context for them.”