From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline

Preface

I first became aware of black studies as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1990s. At the time, students were pushing for a multiculturalism requirement. The purpose was to instill in undergraduates a working knowledge of the history and culture of various American ethnic groups. In response to student activism, Berkeley became one of the first major universities to require undergraduates to take a course addressing multiple American ethnic groups. Students could take ethnic studies courses to satisfy the requirement, which drew my attention to the fact that Berkeley had had programs such as black studies for decades. Black studies did not cross my mind again for years, until I enrolled in the sociology doctoral program at the University of Chicago. During my second year, I joined a small group study course headed by Charles Bidwell and Robert Dreeben, two sociologists of education who have spent decades thinking about how schools and colleges are organized. One of the readings was Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society. Their main point is simple: an educational institution’s role is to re-create the status order or class structure that already characterizes society. This perspective has a long pedigree in the Western intellectual tradition, going back to Paolo Freire, Emile Durkheim, and Karl Marx. This analysis struck me as wrong, or at the very least seriously incomplete, and Berkeley provided a great counterexample. Rather than just being a place where elites came to study and reinforce their position, Berkeley attracted a great deal of conflict. It is true that schools certify social elites, but it is also true that schools are the focus of political disputes. Simply walk through Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza on a busy day early in the fall semester. A dozen groups of all stripes can be seen complaining about some issue or another. Many of them want new courses taught and new professors hired. Students frequently organize protests for ethnic studies. I came to realize that many political movements target institutions of higher Preface education. Conservative Christians want creationism taught; multiculturalists want ethnic studies; homosexual activists want gay and lesbian studies; progressives want social work training; and evangelicals have opened their own colleges . In the post-9/11 era, we have become acutely aware that radical Islamists target college students in Europe and run their own religious colleges in Afghanistan and Iran. Higher education does not seem to be completely about reinforcing the status quo. In fact, the highly visible and public position of universities invites dissent and conflict. My view is that American higher education goes through phases of conflict and consensus, as does any social institution. Much of the time, schools reproduce the status quo, just as Bourdieu and Passeron said. Colleges, by themselves , do not change fundamental social and economic realities. The wealthiest families are the ones most able to take advantage of America’s outstanding colleges and universities. As a wistful Bill Murray tells a chapel full of wealthy private school boys in the film Rushmore, “You were born rich, and you’re going to stay rich.” But talented people of humble origins often scramble their way up to good colleges and graduate schools; an ambitious Bill Clinton made it to Georgetown and Oxford. America’s relatively open higher education system means that the talented and the wealthy will be concentrated in a relatively few schools, creating a future society with leaders who started their careers in the same institutions. At the same time, the openness of America’s colleges encourages them to be the focus of political struggles and social change. People can complain and demand things. Every university executive knows that part of the job is fending off political attacks.This is not to say that complainers will always be heard,but outsiders can affect university agendas in many ways. People can literally show up and protest. They can influence students and professors. They can lobby trustees and the political appointees who govern public universities. They can give money to a university so that a new research center will be opened or a chair in their favorite subject will be established. Universities can even become involved in electoral politics, such as when Ward Connerly targeted the University of California through an anti-affirmative action referendum. All the direct and indirect opportunities for influence mean that the university becomes a place where interests clash and politics comes...