Harvard University Press Blog

The Origin Story of Black Education

To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve chosen excerpts from our books that reflect varied aspects of the Black experience. Fittingly, our first excerpt comes from a book about historian and educator Carter Woodson, the founder of Black History Month. The Los Angeles Review of Books praised Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis R. Givens, saying it “would make Woodson, the ever-rigorous teacher, proud.”

Before Emancipation, the enslaved had to gain their education by “snatching learning in forbidden fields,” as Woodson characterized it. The black abolitionist and teacher Francis Ellen Watkins Harper explained that some tried “to steal a little from the book. And put words together, and learn by hook or crook.” Acquiring knowledge was a criminal act. As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.” Stealing one’s self in this way meant that the literate slave was a fugitive slave: to secretly acquire literacy—for religious, practical, and intellectual ends (or, perhaps, especially as leisurely activity)—was akin to black flight from the sites of their enslavement.

Antiliteracy laws targeting black people were older than the United States itself. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. This code, which was meant to improve surveillance of the enslaved, listed writing among other illegal activities. Black people’s disallowance from the realm of educational opportunity anteceded the birth of the nation. This prohibition was absorbed into the dominant ideology of the nation, even as American common schools were established after American independence for the purpose of training a responsible citizenry; thus, conceptions of citizenship emerged as a metonym for whiteness. The antiblack sentiments that justified slavery justified excluding black Americans from citizenship and from schools—this antagonism was not an anomaly but was, in fact, a structural feature.

Antiliteracy laws and the intellectual surveillance that accompanied them left great marks on the politics of black education. They enforced the idea that blacks were outside the social contract of American society—inconceivable as fully human, citizen, or student. Many enslaved and free blacks subverted these legal mandates by acquiring literacy through fugitive tactics—leaving a mark of equal or greater consequence.While the overwhelming majority of blacks were illiterate under slavery, approximately 10 percent learned to read and/or write; suggesting that literate slaves were not so unusual as to be unknown to other blacks. These literate slaves were recognized as leaders with a practical skill set that benefitted their community.

How did the 10 percent of blacks who learned to read and write in the South before Emancipation gain the gift of literacy? As Woodson recounted time and again in his writings: “Negroes themselves…stole away to secret places at night to study.” The historical record documents black Americans climbing into holes in the ground under the cover of night, attending schools run by free blacks, “playing school” with white children, “stealin’ a meetin’” in the woods, and trading food for lessons, among other covert means. In her remarkable narrative of black education in the antebellum South and early in Emancipation, Heather Williams reveals that black people were self-taught and their own biggest advocates for education, in slavery and in freedom.

Frederick Douglass, raised in Maryland between the 1820s and 1830s, represents the best-known example of learning in secret. Left alone to look after the master’s house, he employed his own version of fugitive pedagogy. He spent his time “writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy book, copying what he had written.” Douglass wrote in the margins of the Webster Spelling Book, populating these in-between spaces with words he appropriated and mimicked, turning them toward his own semantic and political ends. Woodson’s nearby home state of Virginia passed laws prohibiting education for enslaved and free blacks as early as 1819. This legal precedent was reinforced through subsequent acts passed in Virginia leading up to Emancipation. In April 1831, for instance, an act was passed declaring “that all meetings of free negroes or mulattoes, at any schoolhouse, church, meetinghouse or other place for teaching them reading or writing, either in the day or night, under whatever pretext, shall be deemed and considered as an unlawful assembly.” The law then authorized whippings “at the discretion of any justice of the peace, not exceeding twenty lashes.” Such legislation, and the sentiments of antiliteracy ideology, became nearly universal in the South. When the Civil War began, black Americans challenged the prohibition of their mental elevation. Their efforts to learn expanded in formal and public ways; they initiated “native schools” in the Contraband Camps, which prefigured the Freedmen’s Bureau schools, and then the first public school system in the US South.

With the end of the Civil War came “jubilee,” as the formerly enslaved described the biblical time of freedom. No longer in bondage, black people across the South performed their first acts of freedom by occupying the classroom. Booker T. Washington recalled a “whole race trying to go to school,” and he noted: “Few were too young, and none were too old, to make the attempt to learn. As fast as any kind of teachers could be secured, not only were day-schools filled, but night schools as well.” The rush to the schoolhouse transcended any single location. Washington’s narrative described blacks’ quest for education throughout all the Southern states.

Once legally permitted to become educated in the postbellum South, black Americans continued to experience violence and other forms of opposition to their efforts. Yet they continued to resist in the best ways they knew how. Even as black education developed institutionally through the endeavors of blacks themselves and also in conjunction with white northern church denominations and philanthropists, black Americans nonetheless pursued critical parts of their educational lives in secret. As a class of political actors, black students and teachers emerged as persuasive advocates in fundraising for their respective institutions. And like black preachers, teachers (or, more expansively, Negroes “who had some learning”) were important leaders in black communities, not just because of their professional status but also as stokers and caretakers of the freedom dreams that helped initiate their escape from bondage. Black Americans shared an “equal rights” vision that remained unfulfilled. This vision fueled the emergence of black equal rights leagues and other organizational entities representative of black life during Reconstruction and the decades to follow. Black teachers’ associations reflected this collective drive on the part of a segment of leaders who signified the living history presented in Carter G. Woodson’s first classrooms.

Black people’s fugitive pedagogy lent itself to an origin story of black freedom. It was a central part of the general strike initiated by the absconded slaves who refused the political economic arrangement of slavery when they fled the plantations during the war. As a framework for learning, it contested ideas of black inferiority, while rejecting the superexploitation and ownership of black people as fungible laborers. The black schools and teachers after the war, by their very existence, symbolized the refutation of a knowledge realm that debased them, educational institutions that excluded them, and curricula that portrayed them as always already subjugated and “narratively condemned.” Fugitive pedagogy framed black educational life from the time of slavery through Jim Crow as a narrative plot that transcended the limited world in which black folks found themselves. It became more than a teaching method—more than utilitarian skills to be learned. Instead teaching and learning themselves continued to be “a means of escape,” as Woodson wrote. Education would guide blacks in pursuit of a new world and a new way of being; it was a total critique of the current order. Black Americans passed this narrative on as a panacea for social ills, and it heavily informed both politics and values after Emancipation. Carried over from slavery, fugitive pedagogy reflected the general story of black people’s shared past and present. In the postbellum era, black Americans continued to live their educational lives through the frame of this origin story. It continued to structure the relationship between education and the black political struggle more broadly. Woodson himself contributed to this long memory of education’s role in black America’s quest for freedom and justice.

Celebrating University Press Week

In celebration of the tenth annual University Press Week, we are sharing the “famous last words” from ten of our most noteworthy books of the last ten years. This listicle represents the depth and breadth, not to mention the surprising variety, of titles we’ve published. Whether in the fields of philosophy, history, economics, art, education, or social science, the words of these authors are the final statement from their critically acclaimed works.

Sianne Ngai / Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) 

“By paying closer attention to the aesthetic categories that speak to the most significant objects and socially binding activities of late capitalist life—our affectively complicated relation to commodities, information, and performing, the ways in which we labor, exchange, and consume—one can at least make a start at closing the gulf between aesthetic theory and practice that began to open in the twentieth century, reenergizing the former by ensuring its continued relevance to the making, dissemination, and reception of culture in the present.”

Sunil S. Amrith / Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013)

“Oceanic history is itself a kind of cartography. By foregrounding the Bay of Bengal—linked by journeys, memories, and the sinews of power—we can see beyond the borders of today’s nation- states, beyond the borders imposed by imperial mapmakers and immigration officials, to a more fluid, more uncertain world: a world that resembles our own. As the furies of nature grow clamorous, the fortunes of migrants are ever fickle.”

Thomas Piketty / Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)

“To be sure, the principle of specialization is sound and surely makes it legitimate for some scholars to do research that does not depend on statistical series. There are a thousand and one ways to do social science, and accumulating data is not always indispensable or even (I concede) especially imaginative. Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.”

Pat Shipman / The Invaders (2015)

“We may be more successful at preserving biological diversity and truly wild places as we see more clearly the factors that diminish them. We may be able to envision more accurately humans’ place in nature, for the good of all. I think it is time we recognized ourselves for what we are: the invaders. If one day we can meet the enemy of the earth and he is not us, it will be a triumph. But a big change in our behavior must happen first.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen / Nothing Ever Dies (2016)

“I think back to my father’s father and what happened to his remains. The Vietnamese believe a person should be buried twice. The first time, in a field removed from home and village, the earth eats the flesh. The second time, the survivors must disinter what remains. If they have timed it correctly, there will only be bones. If they have timed it wrong, there will still be flesh. Regardless of what they find, they must wash the bones with their own hands. Then they bury the bones once more, this time closer to the living.”

Mehrsa Baradaran / The Color of Money (2017)

“Modernity will inevitably bring us closer together, which can lead to either greater resentment or greater cooperation. Perhaps more people will realize that what benefits a minority will also benefit the majority. Full racial integration will eventually remove pockets of blight, crime, and deprivation across the country. This will advance the entire American population. Integrated schools will improve education for all students, and increased equality will spur economic growth. We must shed the destructive myths that separate can equal, that a segregated economy will reach prosperity on its own, or that black banks can lead to black prosperity without fundamental economic changes. We cannot deflect the responsibility of economic equality onto black communities alone. W. E. B. Du Bois declared in 1948 that the problem of American democracy was that ‘we have not tried it.’ Perhaps it’s time to try.”

Donna Zuckerberg / Not All Dead White Men (2018)

“Feminists deserve a better internet. And future generations of readers deserve a better kind of discourse about the ancient world: one that is free of elitism and neither uncritically admiring nor rashly dismissive.”

 

 

Anthony Abraham Jack / The Privileged Poor (2019)

“My work at Midtown College and Renowned University provides strong evidence that the differences I have observed between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged has to do with their disparate precollege experiences rather than with differences between them before high school. This work points out the shortcomings of treating lower-income undergraduates as a homogenous group of at-risk students. Studies that do so cannot properly measure the effects of inequality and poverty on college experiences, and as a result, they lead to biased understandings of how class and culture reproduce inequality in college. I have documented large differences between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly disadvantaged, and both groups are represented in increasing numbers at elite colleges and universities. It is important for scholars to fully explore and document their experiences and recognize their distinctiveness.”

Nicole R. Fleetwood / Marking Time (2020)

“Smith and other artists whose work interrogates incarceration are involved in relational practices that put them in conversation, in connection, in community with Ojore Lutalo, the Fariton collective, Tyra Patterson, Deal Gillispe, Lisette Oblitas, Eddie Kates, Tameca Cole, fathers and mothers, siblings and cousins, friends and activists, and others held in captivity, excluded from civil society, public life, family structures. The works of these artists and activists extend radical imaginaries and relational practices beyond the regulatory and isolating structures of imprisonment to envision and help create a world without human caging.”

Marie Favereau / The Horde (2021)

“There was as much a Jochid way of empire as there was a Roman way, an Ottoman way, and a British way. When we think about the legacy of empires, we of course recognize the cosmopolitan effects of the Mediterranean, European, and Ottoman powers that made the world smaller through practices of tolerance, coercion, exploitation, protection, investment, and conquest. These empires are credited with driving global history. But nomads drove global history, too, and none more so than the people of the Horde.”

What would you add to the list? Visit our website to explore many more extraordinary books published by Harvard University Press over the last decade. Sign up to see what's around the corner. 

Book Club Spotlight: The Privileged Poor

As students around the world deliberate their options for further education, only made more challenging in a pandemic, we’re reminded that getting in is only half the battle. In The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, Anthony Abraham Jack asks how—and why—do disadvantaged students struggle at elite colleges? What can schools can do differently if these students are to thrive? As back to school season begins, we spoke to two university book clubs that read and discussed The Privileged Poor this summer.

Here’s what the entomology graduate student reading group at Michigan State University had to say about the book:

 

“Reading The Privileged Poor helped open my eyes to my own privilege and realize issues in academia that I hadn’t even considered. Jack directed my attention to barriers to a meaningful education that some students face, and I hope to improve these inequities when I become an educator myself.”

—Ellie Camarato

 

“Many of us grad students are lab instructors and teacher assistants to hundreds of undergrads that come from different backgrounds. And as an international grad student, there are many social issues that I wasn’t aware of. This book was eye-opening about how students experience the college life and all the ‘unwritten rules’ that many of us follow without even knowing it. Thanks to this book, I am changing some of my teaching approaches, and I now am aware that I can’t assume that all my students know how to navigate college.”

—Elizeth Cinto Mejia

 

“Reading The Privileged Poor has opened my eyes to the extent of socioeconomic imbalance in our upper education system. As a graduate student, it has made me re-evaluate how to mentor undergraduates most effectively and to make sure that I am reaching out to students, not waiting for them to come to me with questions or concerns. It has deepened my understanding of the hidden curriculum and puts into words things that I have noticed in passing, but not fully appreciated the importance of, such as faculty connections and familial economic support.”

—Kayleigh Hauri

 

“After I read The Privileged Poor, I could articulate parts of the unspoken guidelines of college, such as how to network and build references from faculty, that needed to be stated and incorporated explicitly while teaching and mentoring undergraduate students. Discussing this book with other students from all over the country and world has promoted honest discussions about how our personal backgrounds contribute to our participation and success in academia beyond ‘traditional’ classroom learning.”

—Daniel Turner

 

“For me, reading The Privileged Poor has reinforced that while we are coming into the same campus, college, or department, our different backgrounds and lived experiences strongly influence how students perceive and experience college and university life. Discussing the topics in this book with other graduate students in the department has been a huge eye-opener for me and has helped me better understand my peers and their experiences.”

—Allison Zahorec

 

At East Carolina University’s Brody School of Medicine, the Office of Faculty Development created a virtual book club this summer and chose to read The Privileged Poor to assist faculty members talk about the issues of race, social class, and education in a way that they could directly recall in their own academic careers. Several members of the group are working to make changes at the medical school based on ideas sparked at the book club meetings.

 

 

“Reading this book has made me acutely aware of this distinction in background of our students that I never truly recognized before. More importantly, our group has used the book as a basis for discussion of how we can do better for our own students, discussions that have spilled over beyond those immediately involved in the group, with programs for real changes already being developed.”

—Kori Brewer, Associate Professor and Associate Chief, Division of Research, Department of Emergency Medicine

 

“I find I’m now more sensitive to the issues raised in The Privileged Poor than I was before. In the last week I’ve encountered two applications of points made in the book. The first is an article forthcoming in Academic Medicine on the way medical students learn the language of medicine. The authors, a few of whom are medical students, contend that medical students from more privileged backgrounds have an easier time picking up the silent messages and explicit language of clinical medicine. The other example relates to a student who is the first in the extended family on both sides to go beyond high school. This is a very capable student who did well on the first quiz last week, but still worries. Interesting how, now that I’m aware of something, I see examples of that something I’ve missed before.”

—Todd Savitt, Professor, Department of Bioethics and Interdisciplinary Studies

Thanks to the members of both reading groups for sharing their thoughts and comments.

Remembering Vivian Gussin Paley

Renowned educator and author Vivian Gussin Paley died recently. Her former editor at Harvard University Press, Elizabeth Knoll, looks back on her life and work, which emphasized storytelling as an important tool in children's learning.

Vivian Gussin Paley was a small, gray-haired schoolteacher with a sweet smile and a powerful personality. She could sit on a floor telling stories with five-year-olds or dominate a lecture hall packed with adults. White Teacher, The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter, and the unforgettably titled You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, along with ten other books published between 1979 and 2014 (eight from Harvard University Press, five from the University of Chicago Press), are classics in education and enduring provocations for developmental psychology. Each shows Paley’s innovation as a teacher: encouraging children to tell stories, listening and talking to them about their stories, and—most significant for our knowledge of cognitive development—making those stories a way to encourage children to learn. Their close observation, insight, humor, and vivid characterizations make them unforgettable. Their sales numbers make her one of Harvard University Press’s bestselling authors of all time.

Given this impact inside and outside of the academy, perhaps the most surprising part of Paley’s story is how much trouble she had getting published at all. By a perfect coincidence, the person who finally opened the door for her was a student: an eager first-year graduate student in Education and Psychology at the University of Chicago, Gillian Dowley McNamee.

McNamee was fresh from New York, where she had been researching children’s learning in Head Start preschools in Harlem, with Michael Cole, then of Rockefeller University. At that time, Cole and other developmental psychologists were becoming impatient with the rigid, rationalist, hyper-individualist, and supposedly culturally universal Piagetian hierarchies that then dominated academic theories of cognitive development. Far more suggestive and fruitful were the radically different views of Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky, whose essays Cole and his colleagues translated and edited and eventually published as Mind in Society.

For Vygotsky and the psychologists he inspired, minds are always embedded in culture. It’s simplistic to think of learning as something that goes on in your own head and that you do entirely on your own. For Vygotskians, little children aren’t individualist and independent “scientists in cribs,” each one figuring out how the world works from scratch. (Even adult scientists work entirely in groups!) They are more like new homeowners, figuring out the personalities and habits of their new neighborhood from what the longtime residents say and do.

What that means for education is that to learn anything really new, you need other people, or at least one other person—someone just enough ahead of you to help you build a bridge from what you already know how to do, or how to understand, to something much harder. If you want to envision what students are capable of learning, don’t just look at what they can do alone. What counts is what they can do in a social setting.

When McNamee started at the University of Chicago, Cole was still unpacking Vygotsky’s ideas and corresponding with McNamee about them. McNamee walked to the other end of the Education building, into the Lab School, and saw it all happening in front of her in Vivian Paley’s kindergarten.

Or rather, she heard it. “I had never heard such a din in a classroom! Every principal then and now thinks that a quiet room in which the children are sitting down, each doing something individually, shows they are learning. But I never heard children talk the way I heard them talk in 1974—because Vivian was listening to them. I knew I had found Vygotsky in action as Vygotsky himself could probably hardly imagine.”

Paley had been teaching for years and thinking about the effectiveness of play as a teaching tool, not just as didactic instruction. She was a passionately committed teacher. In moving from her home in an overwhelmingly white, middle-class town to Chicago and the Lab School, a multiracial school in the largely black South Side, during a turbulent period of enormous racial wariness and fear, she had to listen and understand the emotions and beliefs of all the children in her classroom. She did it by asking them to tell her stories, and by listening to their stories, and by encouraging them to listen to each other’s stories.

In the process, she had to think about her own stories, and what she had to learn about her own blind spots. She had to realize that she wasn’t just “a teacher”: she was a white teacher.

And she had to write it all down to make sense of this demanding, humbling, mind-expanding experience.

She tried some commercial publishers, with no luck. That’s where she got help from McNamee, by then her student teacher. She was “jumping up and down about Vygotsky,” she says, but “Vivian didn’t know what I was talking about and she didn’t care. She just couldn’t keep her eyes and ears off the children.” McNamee sent Paley’s much-rejected manuscript to Mike Cole, an editorial consultant to Harvard University Press, and he and Eric Wanner, himself a psychology PhD and one of HUP’s most visionary acquisitions editors, were transfixed by this vivid account of real children’s complicated, elaborate classroom stories that helped them absorb complicated, new ideas and relationships

According to HUP lore, the faculty board was considerably chillier. One eminence is said to have demanded, “Why are we publishing a book by a kindergarten teacher?” Another skeptic went out to observe Vivian’s classroom and came back a convert: she had never seen a teacher make possible such discussion among such young children.

So Harvard University Press published White Teacher in 1979. Then, and now, it has given teachers the teaching they needed about a hard subject: how to handle conversations among children when talk about racial differences emerges. Now Director of Teacher Education at the Erikson Institute of Chicago, McNamee sees its very personal story, from forty years ago, as only growing in importance now. “It was written when you couldn’t talk about race, and paradoxically teachers still feel they can’t—even though we’re talking about race all the time—and teachers still are without the vocabulary and strategies to manage it.”

In 1993, Vivian and HUP took on the even bigger and harder subject of inclusions and exclusions in You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. What happens when you make a new rule in kindergarten—no excluding someone who wants to join in. This time, Vivian brought in some advisors experienced in social interaction: fifth graders. They were, at best, wary. As one said,“It will be fairer, but how are we going to have any fun? What happens when you tell each other stories? When you suggest new rules? When you watch and see what happens when you try something new? How does it feel to be the person who’s shut out? How does it feel to have let someone in?”

I was Vivian’s last editor at Harvard University Press, working with her after she’d retired from the Lab School on books about classrooms other than her own. Those last books took Paley and her readers on journeys to classrooms outside the U.S., as in Kindness of Children, and to an impoverished neighborhood in an American city, In Mrs. Tully’s Room, where she saw to her awe how the pseudonymous Mrs. Tully used simple stories about animals with children younger than three to help calm and comfort them in times of loneliness, confusion, and fear and to give them a vision of kindness and community.

Though different in approach and character, these later books, like all of Vivian’s books, focus on children’s desire for connection and their empathy with one another, as well as their apparent instinct for narrative.

A few summers ago, as she was sitting on her porch with McNamee, Paley told McNamee that she had realized that in all of her books she had left out the four most important words. “That reminds me of….” That’s the way you open a conversation with children, Paley said: you make a connection between their stories and their play, or their conversation yesterday, or other stories they’ve heard and told. You remind them of how something new connects to things they’ve already thought about.

That’s what Paley herself was doing with her books. Her writing was a way of thinking for her, a way for her to understand how five-year-olds themselves were thinking, and what it was like to be them in their little classroom community.

“She could start today and write all of them again and they would still be brand-new,” McNamee says. “They would still give us a blueprint for what education should be—to teach people to ask questions and listen to others as they answer.”

School Is Her Refuge

ref • uge
noun
A condition of being safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble.

If we want girls to succeed, we need to teach them the audacity to transgress. Through the lives of students at three very different schools, Sally A. Nuamah makes the case for “feminist schools” that orient girls toward a lifetime of achievement. In How Girls Achieve, Nuamah advocates for creating feminist schools that will actively teach girls how and when to challenge society’s norms and allow them to carve out their own paths to success. She says in the book, “The goal must be for girls everywhere to have the power to end up wherever it is that they want to be without bearing significantly different costs than their peers for doing so.”

 

 

 

 

 

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To show how educational institutions can make changes to help all students, regardless of their gender, Nuamah provides a feminist school tool kit:  

Feminist School Tool Kit

Is your school a gender-equitable institution? Assess your school’s policies and practices using this checklist. If you find that you are saying “no” to some of these, then your school may be engaging in biased gender practices. Work with your students to become a feminist school!

Physical Environment

• Does your school have flush toilets?
• Are there separate bathroom facilities, and are they open to students based on their preferred gender identification?
• Are there gender-neutral bathrooms?
• Do you provide free sanitary pads?
• Does your school maintain its supplies of toilet paper?

Classroom Instruction

• Do you ask students what pronoun they identify with?
• Do your textbook examples defy gender-based stereotypes?
• Are girls and boys grouped together on projects?
• During gym or dance class are gender-neutral roles promoted?
• Do you ensure that girls and boys are participating in class at similar levels?
• Do you openly talk about menstruation and puberty in sex-education courses?
• Do you teach students to recognize abuse and give them the resources to respond?

School Policies

• Is there a specific place for students to report sexual abuse or misconduct?
• Are students reprimanded for reporting what happened to them?
• Are girls and boys able to wear the school uniform option that is most comfortable to them?
• Are girls and boys held to the same standard in terms of their body language?
• Do your curricula and policies account for those who may be differently abled, trans, queer, or gender-fluid?

Research and Data

• Do you ask students about their needs annually?
• Do you make this data available to all stakeholders—parents, teachers, community partners?
• Do you regularly assess your policies and design interventions to respond to them?

Let’s continue to build this assessment together. Send your ideas to [email protected].

 

The Shape of Things to Come

We’re going to be talking about 2016 for a long, long time. Like, forever. But time doesn’t stop, and history doesn’t end, and 2017’s already got a look about it. Here, then, is a slate of new and recent books fit for the shape of things to come.

In Democracy: A Case Study historian David Moss demonstrates that American democracy has survived and thrived from one generation to the next on the basis not principally of harmony but of conflict—sometimes intense conflict—mediated by shared ideals and a common faith in the nation’s system of democratic self-governance. For Moss, the important question is never whether there is tension in our politics, but rather whether that tension is constructive or destructive. But if those shared ideals erode and that common faith starts to go? Buckle up.

Speaking of Russia, Gregory Carleton lays bare how war is the unifying thread of their national epic. Outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, but in Russia: The Story of War Carleton shows how Russians see themselves as surrounded by enemies, defensively fighting off invader after invader or called upon by history to be the savior of Europe or Christianity or civilization itself, often at immense cost.

From the story of Russia to the notion of the “Muslim World,” the longstanding misconception that 1.5 billion Muslims constitute a single religio-political entity. As Cemil Aydin asks in The Idea of the Muslim World, how did such a mistaken belief arise, why is it so widespread, and how can its grip be loosened so that a more fruitful discussion about politics in Muslim societies can begin?

Misconceptions make the world go round, though, and that of the “Muslim World” has helped make the West go right. For that we’ve got Far-Right Politics in Europe, a critical look at the far right throughout Europe that reveals a prehistory and politics more complex than stereotypes suggest and warns of the challenges posed to the EU’s liberal-democratic order. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg make clear that these movements are determined to gain power through legitimate electoral means, and that they are succeeding.

The European far right represents a confluence of many ideologies, but nationalism and anti-immigrant fervor are big in the mix. The movement of peoples rouses passions, but many are actually very confused about how to feel about immigration—they are sympathetic to individual immigrants and their reasons for wanting to migrate, but concerned about the overall impact that immigration is having on their society. In Strangers in Our Midst, political theorist David Miller seeks to balance the rights of immigrants with the legitimate concerns of citizens, and defends the right of democratic states to control their borders and decide upon the future size, shape, and cultural make-up of their populations. But those rights don’t mean that just any border regime is fair or acceptable, so Miller also explains what is owed to different categories of immigrant, and what their responsibilities are once admitted.

Debates over immigration are of course often tied to squabbling over the proper role of the state in providing for those within its borders. The increasingly familiar idea of an unconditional basic income is meant to alleviate the pressures mounting on the traditional welfare state, and two world authorities outline the concept in Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. With trials underway or in the works in Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, France, and even Oakland, basic income seems like an idea whose time has finally come.

Part of the argument for basic income is that it could help to alleviate the economic inequality that characterizes our nations and our world. A couple of years back, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century helped to thrust income inequality into public debate, and now a new volume, After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, is coming to both kick the tires on Piketty’s argument and help steer us towards means of addressing the seemingly intractable problems that he highlights. Edited by Heather Boushey, Brad DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, the book includes work from Paul Krugman, Robert Solow, Branko Milanovic, Emmanuel Saez, and others, along with a substantial new contribution from Piketty himself.

Here in the U.S., every day brings news of how radically president-elect Trump may shift the nation’s course. Healthcare reform has of course been a pillar of his platform, which makes Miriam Laugesen’s Fixing Medical Prices ever more relevant. Fees charged by physicians in the U.S. are the most expensive in the world, and Laugesen uses the book to introduce readers to a largely unknown group called the Relative Value Scale Update Committee, whose periodic advisory recommendations to Medicare set off chain reactions across the entire health care system. Why would a hugely powerful group carry a name so plain? Because if you’re an interest group stealthily controlling American healthcare policy you’ve every interest in bureaucratic cover.

A few more books for Trump’s America: Sam Abrams’s Education and the Commercial Mindset is a careful study of the benefits and limits of applying market solutions to improving education, a cause to which incoming education secretary Betsy DeVos has devoted her life. Carol Sanger’s About Abortion explores the emotional cost and social consequences of terminating pregnancy in the United States, a subject about which there’s loud and contentious public argument but great silence at more intimate levels; the book connects abortion secrecy to the distorted political conversation that results in this flood of state laws attempting to limit abortion access by increasingly bolder means. Lisa Goff’s Shantytown, USA was written as a history but may yet become a travel guide. And Yascha Mounk’s The Age of Responsibility, which shows how the notion of personal responsibility has become central to our moral vocabulary, political rhetoric, and public policies, aims us towards a more equitable future by forcing us to rethink our mutual responsibilities as citizens.

A lot to think about, a lot to read, and much more to come. Be excellent to each other.

Why Read yet Another Book on Higher Education?

Practice for Life: Making Decisions in College begins with the observation that college doesn’t just start one day during orientation week and then end ceremonially some years later. Instead, argue authors Lee Cuba, Nancy Jennings, Suzanne Lovett, and Joseph Swingle, college is “a liminal space and place in which students make lots of decisions that serve as practice for the many more they will make as older adults.” The case they make for the enduring value of liberal education is novel and unconventional, but—as they acknowledge early on—their book enters a not-uncrowded space. So why read yet another book on higher education? In the brief excerpt below, they address the question head-on.

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Over the past twenty years, many thoughtful, insightful, and field-changing books have been published on virtually every aspect of the college experience. While we have learned much from these and use them throughout to contextualize our own analysis, we believe that our research makes a number of unique contributions to the field of higher education that will interest parents, students, faculty, administrators, and researchers. Our analysis is based on narratives of the student experience that we constructed from repeated interviews with a diverse group of over 200 students who thrived, struggled, or stalled at various points during their college years. Because we interviewed students every semester while they were in college, we were able to gather enormously rich and detailed information about student decision-making. Why did you choose this course, this major, this advisor? Why did you choose to live with these friends, join these organizations, or study abroad? What is most on your mind as you start the school year? And because we asked these questions (and many others) in “real time,” we believe that the answers students gave constitute a valid account of their college experience.

Although you will hear from over one hundred students in this book, you will get to know a much smaller number—around twenty—fairly well. The longer narratives we have written about this group demonstrate that students find engaging academic experiences, advisors, friends, balance, or a sense of home in different places and via different routes. They also demonstrate that students’ academic engagement, friendships, advisor relationships, experience of time and balance, or sense of home often change over time. We chose some of these students because their narratives were similar to those of many of their peers. We chose others because they were in many respects outliers. Regardless of their typical or atypical nature, each of these students’ college experiences offers something instructive about the process of becoming liberally educated.

Minority-Serving Institutions in Illinois and Beyond

The state of Illinois has been without a budget for nearly a year, as Republican Governor and private equity titan Bruce Rauner remains at odds with the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature. As reported last week by Marketplace, the absence of funding has many of Illinois’s 57 public universities and community colleges on the brink of collapse. Some of the larger among them are able to tap endowments and other sources to stay afloat, but the looming closure of schools like Chicago State University—a drastic measure one cannot imagine being easily reversed by any eventual provision of funding—signals a distinct threat to the minority communities frequently served by such smaller institutions. Even if larger schools could increase enrollments to absorb the students of shuttered colleges, to conceive of such a shift as merely a zero-sum reshuffling, or, worse, an efficiency-achieving shakeup, is to fundamentally misunderstand the challenges of twenty-first century higher education.

Marketplace quotes higher ed expert Clifton Conrad on the cultures and practices of minority-serving institutions like Chicago State, schools that have long been invisible across much of the landscape of higher education. Along with Marybeth Gasman, another leading scholar of higher education, Conrad is the author of Educating a Diverse Nation: Lessons from Minority-Serving Institutions, for which the pair conducted extensive studies of a dozen high-achieving MSIs across the country. As they explain in the book, we’ve passed the moment when providing equal access to educational opportunities hinges on getting diverse students through the door—they are coming. Rather, the difficulty “lies in providing students with access to institutions that understand and value their experiences and resources, challenging them with the obligation and the opportunity to learn what really matters to them, and getting them to a degree.”

In the following excerpt from Educating a Diverse Nation, Conrad and Gasman detail the missions of MSIs, and the methods they employ to meet the challenge of educating many whose needs are often overlooked by mainstream institutional models—a challenge greatly exacerbated by the kind of budget conflict that Illinois currently represents so extremely.

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Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) are a diverse collection of colleges and universities. Although they continue to remain invisible to many both within and outside of higher education, MSIs—Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs)—have become an increasingly important part of American higher education, especially as a gateway to higher education for many traditionally underrepresented students across our country.

In 2011, degree-granting MSIs enrolled 3.6 million undergraduate students—one-quarter of all undergraduate students in the United States and a disproportionate percentage of students of color.

Designed with the needs of minority students at the forefront, MSIs provide culturally relevant opportunities for students who have historically been marginalized in our nation’s mainstream colleges and universities. In so doing, MSIs have called out, disrupted, and questioned the historical roles of race and class with respect to student access and success in higher education. As institutions that are relevant to the students who matriculate at them, their relevance finds expression in their missions, environments, programs, and practices.

Missions

The long-standing mission of MSIs has been to increase the capacity of higher education to serve students whose earlier educational experiences have been shaped by such life experiences as poverty, immigration, and life on reservations. In turn, MSIs have been designed to play a major developmental role: to provide a sound education and, in so doing, call attention to the barriers that communities of color face as they seek to participate in American social institutions as equals. In recent years, many MSIs have begun to play that role for communities other than the one for which they were originally designed.

Putting the First Amendment Second: The Censorial Impulse in the 21st Century

Many would be surprised by the charge that American schools are engaged in the widespread and court-sanctioned denial of the constitutional rights of their students. Yet as Catherine J. Ross demonstrates in Lessons in Censorship: How Schools and Courts Subvert Students’ First Amendment Rights, that is precisely the case. In an address this week to the annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers, Ross, Professor of Law at George Washington University and Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, laid bare the decades-long campaign against free speech in American schools and its implications for democracy, as well as its significance for the publishing industry, a long-standing bulwark against assaults on First Amendment rights. The text of her address is below.

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Publishing is a key institution for realizing the values of free expression. This organization—through the Freedom to Read Committee and other activities designed to combat censorship—plays a leadership role, and it is an honor to address you today.

It’s no secret that in many—even most—parts of the world principles of free speech have never been accepted or are not currently being honored. The most dramatic, and certainly best known incidents, involve the assassin’s veto: private persons killing those who publish ideas some find offensive, exemplified by the threats following depictions of the prophet in Denmark and the Charlie Hebdo attack.

But that is the tip of the iceberg, as the New York Times pointed out in an editorial yesterday, in which it condemned recent developments in Western Europe where anti-terrorism laws are being used to prosecute puppeteers, tweeters, and peaceful demonstrators.

In other parts of the world:

• Liberal bloggers are murdered in Bangladesh,
• India arrests student protesters,
• And the highest court in Malaysia held last week that a yellow t-shirt calling for clean government could be banned as a threat to national security.

But we should not be smug, or assume our own house is in order. I’ll begin by reminding you about some of the fundamental precepts of the First Amendment’s Speech Clause, before turning to the state of free speech on American college campuses. Then I will share my research on the fragile state of expressive freedom in public schools, grades k-12. I’ll close with some reflections on the special role the people in this room play in preserving First Amendment freedoms.

I. First Amendment Freedom of Speech

The Speech Clause of the First Amendment is very concise: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”

This means the government—at every level, from small towns to the federal government, and anyone acting on behalf of the government—may not silence speech because of its content or viewpoint. The First Amendment does not limit the ability of private individuals or organizations to limit expression.

The books your companies put into circulation enter a civic culture that may be more or less receptive to discord, dissent and unsettling ideas some would prefer not to be exposed to.

Culinary School

One can hardly fling a mortarboard these days without hitting someone decrying the state of American higher education. And there’s much to decry. One particular strain of critique centers on the issue of choice, with students suffering from either too many or too few options. The problem apparently lends itself to gastronomic metaphor, as two recent takes make clear.

First there’s the cafeteria. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, which we published last month, seems to have been the right book at the right time, coming just on the heels of President Obama having introduced a $60 billion initiative to make two years of tuition-free community college accessible to everyone. That plan essentially bolsters what the community college system was designed to do: expand college enrollments, particularly among underrepresented students, and to do so at a low cost. As authors Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins explain, though, while community colleges have been extraordinarily successful in increasing access they’ve not excelled at ushering their students along to graduation. “Colleges designed to maximize course enrollment,” they write, “are not well designed to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study.”

The root of the problem is that students face a clutter of choices in an absence of guidance:

The emphasis on low-cost enrollment has encouraged colleges to offer an array of often-disconnected courses, programs, and support services that students are expected to navigate mostly on their own. Students are confused by a plethora of poorly explained program, transfer, and career options; moreover, on closer scrutiny many programs do not clearly lead to the further education and employment outcomes they are advertised to help students achieve. We refer to this as a cafeteria-style, self-service model.

We argue that to improve outcomes, colleges need to move away from the prevailing cafeteria-style model. Instead, they need to engage faculty and student services professionals in creating more clearly structured, educationally coherent program pathways that lead to students’ end goals, and in rethinking instruction and student support services in ways that facilitate students’ learning and success as they progress along these paths. In short, to maximize both access and success, a fundamental redesign is necessary. We refer to the resulting strategy as the guided pathways model.

At the same time, Fordham University prof and Chronicle of Higher Education columnist Leonard Cassuto takes aim at the choices offered to graduate students, framed again as foodservice. Cassuto, whose The Graduate School Mess we’ll publish this fall, declared last month in a CHE piece that “Graduate Students Cannot Live by Pimentos Alone”:

Imagine a distant grocery store that advertises that it can meet all of your cooking and eating needs. You make the trip, and when you get there you discover that you can only buy lemon grass, pomelos, and Sriracha sauce. You ask about the limited selection, and the manager tells you to wait till next week, when they’ll be selling pimentos, artichoke hearts, and brandied cherries.

That’s what it’s like to pick your courses when you’re a beginning graduate student in the humanities. Term by term, year by year, the graduate course offerings in humanities departments don’t make sense together. They’re a hodgepodge of specialized inquiries: snapshots of books and articles in progress by professors who know what they’re teaching, but aren’t much aware of what’s being taught in colleagues’ courses alongside their own.

He continued:

Humanities graduate students pick through the eccentric course offerings on the buffet table and try to make a balanced meal out of them. They know that they have to nourish themselves for the comprehensive exam that’s ahead. But how do you gather together a bunch of specialized inquiries into preparation for a general and comprehensive one? Graduate students in the humanities usually solve that problem—that is, they pass their comps—but it takes time, and they have little of that to spare.

In each case it falls to the student to create a coherent program of study, or—to continue the theme—a balanced diet. Community college students are presented with a wide range of courses but relatively little help in translating those options into a specific career goal or the path to achieve it; graduate students are given a clear goal of comprehensive competence, but a slate of courses too specialized to help them prepare.

Both Cassuto and the authors of Redesigning America’s Community Colleges recommend moving to a more student-centered model that helps learners toward their goal, be it an associate’s degree or a PhD. Despite any limits such restructuring may appear to impose on the freedom of faculty to pursue their interests, “doing right by our students,” Cassuto concludes, “is a form of academic responsibility.”