And because Barnard College did not teach me necessity, nor prime my awareness as to urgencies of need around the world, nor galvanize my heart around the critical nature of conflicts between the powerful and the powerless, and because, beyond everything else, it was not going to be school, evidently, but life-after-school, that would teach me the necessities for radical change, and revolution: I left; I dropped out of Barnard; it was, apparently, an optional experience. 

[N]o one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea, for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force… Nothing I learned showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black conditions in white America. 

Jordan believed a real, revelatory, revolutionary education would allow a student to hone tools to interpret their experience—to first have the experience, to feel rage or grief or hatred—then to think about it, to study its connections to one’s life and to the world, study its origins, come to know its players and its possible futures, and to act, to bring about an apocalypse of the present world conditions, a “defeat of international evil, indifference, and suffering.” An education should provide a toolbox of actions so that one may choose at any moment what kind of agent for change the situation and their own soul calls on them to be. An education should allow one to understand “the critical nature of conflicts between the powerful and powerless,” and it must not feed into the bureaucracy of administrative industrial complex or, for example, “the travesty of high-paid, ‘anti-poverty’ planning and research on the Lower East Side, research that yielded no housing to the people’s forced to live there, in continuous jeopardy.” It must not be forced, it must not be absorbed from a model of “mastery,” and one must not be bribed. In any event, in 1975, twenty years after dropping out, Jordan was not sure that an education like this must happen or could happen at a place like Barnard. 

Walker was educated at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College a decade later, in the 1960s. About this, she said, “[T]hroughout my four years at a prestigious Black and then a prestigious white college, I had heard not one word about early Black women writers.” To be without models, she said, was “an occupational hazard for the artist.” Here she suggests that an education should provide a student with a range of models to choose from, “simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect–even if rejected–enrich and enlarge one’s view of existence.” One must find models that speak to them in the breadth and depth of their beings, so while Walker found models in Anaïs Nin and Tillie Olsen, she also needed Colette, Jean Toomer, and most of all, her guide and sentinel, Zora Neale Hurston. 
Walker and Jordan’s denunciations of the racism and sexism endemic to mainstream institutions of knowledge and culture reverberated through leftist critiques in these times. In the world and on university campuses, revolutionary movements like Black Power, Third World Liberation, and the American Indian Movement were organized and powerful, and faced massive repression from university administration, police, and the state. Leftist student activism had built over several decades on university campuses. This momentous presence grew from the influence of movements (anti-war, Civil Rights, Black Power, Third World Liberation, American Indian, Black feminism, Third World feminism, lesbian feminism, and many others) and larger global political shifts (anti-colonial revolutions, and ongoing wars and colonial occupations spurring global migrations, among other forces). It also emerged with demographic changes in higher education following the 1944 G.I. Bill and the Great Society programs of the 1960s, which made higher education more accessible to poor and working-class students. 

However, as many writers have documented, the government’s democratizing programs in higher education were not designed to radically alter society, neither to upend the capitalist class system, nor to rupture the hold of white supremacy, nor to challenge the sexist foundations of society, but to expand by degree access to its benefits and the assumed obligations of citizenship; state as parent, citizen as dutiful and disciplined child. The G.I. Bill was restricted to veterans, most of whom were white men; millions of Black veterans were systematically excluded from accessing the bill’s benefits. On the other hand, the Great Society programs did much more to increase student aid and infrastructure—building libraries and community colleges, among other infrastructural improvements—they continued to exclude Black and Indigenous people and people of color, ensuring that colleges and universities remained racially segregated and majority white (see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America; Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-1975). Campuses were more democratic than before, but fissures in these liberalizing gestures glared. For those with commitments to ending domination and achieving actual freedom, what were the moral and intellectual obligations of higher education? What was the role of the student or the teacher?