BCRW @ 50

Change, But Not Enough: Part II

In 1975, when Walker and Jordan raised their challenges to educators, students, and arbiters of knowledge, their words resounded with many. By now and for many years, students and teachers had been denouncing the order of universities with demands to revise curriculum and change pedagogy; expand admissions through affordability programs, affirmative action, and the elimination of racial quotas; and address the insidious roles these institutions played as gentrifiers of neighborhoods or through the leveraging of intellectual and financial resources in neighborhoods and in national politics and global politics (see Freeman, There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up; Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955; Juan Gabriel Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile). 

When the protests of 1968 erupted around the globe—in New York, Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, Prague, in Pakistan, Northern Ireland, Japan, Tunisia, Yugoslavia, Brazil, Italy, Spain...—at San Francisco State College, the rebellion formed into the largest student strike in U.S. history. George Mason Murray, a Black instructor of English at the college, and the minister of education for the Black Panther Party, was fired after speaking out against the Vietnam War, saying, “The war in Vietnam is racist. It is the war that crackers like Johnson are using Black soldiers and poor white soldiers and Mexican soldiers as dupes and fools to fight against people of color in Vietnam.” Outraged at the institution’s retaliation, students in the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front jointly called a strike. What became the largest student strike in U.S. history was also among the most violently repressed. Students, along with select staff, faculty, and members of the Bay Area community, were arrested and beaten by the police. They were shot and chased down by cops on horseback. Many faced years in prison. 

Students and their supporters took enormous risk and suffered irreparably for demands they made of the institution. The institution attempted repressive tactics beyond the police, but in 1969 acquiesced to two significant demands. The school increased admissions for Black students (and in subsequent years Asian and Latinx students would make and win similar demands), and established the College of Ethnic Studies. These momentous changes at SFSU lent support to students organizing at other schools across the country, where similar programs and shifts in pedagogy and theory emerged in the years to come (see San Francisco State: On Strike; Johannella E. Butler, ed., Color-line to Borderlands: The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies). Just one year later, in May 1970, the first women’s  studies program was founded at San Diego State University (then known as San Diego State College), and the following year, in 1971, the Barnard Center for Research on Women was founded at Barnard College (see Marilyn J. Boxer, Women Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women’s Studies in America; Sharon L. Davie, University and College Women’s Centers: A Journey Toward Equity). 

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