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77 The years 1969–1973 were critical to the formation of Chicano Studies. Students took advantage of a window of opportunity to form Chicano student organizations that were able to negotiate and disrupt when reason failed. The opportunities closed rapidly at the end of the Vietnam War, and any goodwill that Chicano students had dissipated quickly. After this point, the high priests moved to reassert their control over their institutions.1 The adrenaline boost infused by the movements of the sixties was gone. The only possible advantage was the decline in white enrollment. The end of the white baby boom led to a loss of 12,000 students in the Los Angeles schools in 1971, and the birthrate in the state slowed down another 6 percent that year. The crisis would have devastated the schools if it had not been for the rise in minority enrollment , which since 1967 had increased by 50 percent. The decline in the white student population was offset by the rise in the Latino student population at the K–12 levels.2 However, Chicanos were not in a position to exploit these events, because they were not used to thinking in these terms, and because most Mexican Americans were still not prepared academically to go to college. Unofficially over 60 percent were still pushed out before finishing high school, and the quality of the schools remained separate and unequal. What changed was the attitude of a minority of students that learned from the Chicano movement that si se puede, and more blamed the crappy schools instead of themselves. What had not changed was institutional racism and the attitudes of many educators who denied the glaring inequality in the schools. In 1973 many educators still attempted to explain the educational disadvantaged by saying that their culture bred poverty.3 Denial was still the main strategy for not ending education inequality—a strategy that had changed little since the early 1960s when the strategy to end the dropout rate was to end “cultural disadvantage.”4 Educational Opportunity Program and Numbers The name of the outreach efforts varied from state to state. The best known was the California EOPs. California was important because it had 9.8 percent of the The Building of Chicano Studies c h a p t e r 5  national population, 15 percent of all students in higher learning, and 12 percent of federal EOP funds.5 The programs varied at each level of California’s tripartite system of higher education, the student recruitment and retention program focused primarily on increasing access to higher education and to servicing the academic and financial needs of minority and low income students in an effort to redress educational inequity. Whereas EOP at the UC and the state college system was known as the Educational Opportunity Program, at times it was referred to as the Equal Opportunity Program in the community college system.6 The California Master Plan for Higher Education (1960) designated the University of California campuses as research institutions and the state colleges as teaching institutions. According to the plan, the University of California selected its freshmen students from the top one-eighth (12.5 percent) of the high school graduating class, and California State Colleges picked from the top one-third (33.3 percent). The junior colleges were supposed to take the leftovers. Without EOP, the growth of Chicano and Black Studies would not have been possible. EOP was the frontline; it admitted, motivated, funded, and retained students. In order to achieve this goal they were engaged in recruitment, counseling, tutoring, and retention. Hence, where strong EOP units emerged, strong Chicano Studies programs followed.7 Without a doubt, the expansion of these programs benefited from the large African American population. According to Harry Kitano and Dorothy Miller, California’s population was comprised of 11.1 percent Chicanas/os and 7.2 percent blacks—but only 11.0 percent of the community colleges, 3.8 percent of the university enrollment, and 5.8 percent of the state college students were black or Mexican American. In the fall of 1968 black Americans comprised 1,456 students out of 66,857 total University of California students and 960 EOP students, whereas Mexican Americans made up 1,186 students and 550 EOP students. In 1969, 4,216 EOP students attended the state colleges—59 percent were black and 34 percent had Spanish surnames.8 In 1968 the University of California president’s office reported that the...

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