An in-depth ethnography of Black engineering students at a historically White institution, Black Campus Life examines the intersection of two crises, up close: the limited number of college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, and the state of race relations in higher education. Antar Tichavakunda takes readers across campus, from study groups to parties and beyond as these students work hard, have fun, skip class, fundraise, and, at times, find themselves in tense racialized encounters. By consistently centering their perspectives and demonstrating how different campus communities, or social worlds, shape their experiences, Tichavakunda challenges assumptions about not only Black STEM majors but also Black students and the “racial climate” on college campuses more generally. Most fundamentally, Black Campus Life argues that Black collegians are more than the racism they endure. By studying and appreciating the everyday richness and complexity of their experiences, we all—faculty, administrators, parents, policymakers, and the broader public—might learn how to better support them. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org, and access the book online through the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7009

This edited volume explores the history of student life throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter authors examine the expanding reach of scholarship on the history of college students; the history of underrepresented students, including black, Latino, and LGBTQ students; and student life at state normal schools and their successors, regional colleges and universities, and at community colleges and evangelical institutions. The book also includes research on drag and gender and on student labor activism, and offers new interpretations of fraternity and sorority life. Collectively, these chapters deepen scholarly understanding of students, the diversity of their experiences at an array of institutions, and the campus lives they built.

The Blackademic Life critically examines academic fiction produced by black writers. Lavelle Porter evaluates the depiction of academic and campus life in literature as a space for black writers to produce counternarratives that celebrate black intelligence and argue for the importance of higher education, particularly in the humanistic tradition. Beginning with an examination of W. E. B. Du Bois’s creative writing as the source of the first black academic novels, Porter looks at the fictional representations of black intellectual life and the expectations that are placed on faculty and students to be racial representatives and spokespersons, whether or not they ever intended to be. The final chapter examines blackademics on stage and screen, including in the 2014 film Dear White People and the groundbreaking television series A Different World.

Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize in African Diaspora History from the American Historical Association and the Benjamin Hooks National Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work on the American Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Winner of the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Nonfiction Nominated for the Evergreen Award A powerful, moving memoir about what it's like to be a student of colour on a predominantly white campus. A booksmart kid from Toronto, Eternity Martis was excited to move away to Western University for her undergraduate degree. But as one of the few Black students there, she soon discovered that the campus experiences she'd seen in movies were far more complex in reality. Over the next four years, Eternity learned more about what someone like her brought out in other people than she did about herself. She was confronted by white students in blackface at parties, dealt with being the only person of colour in class and was tokenized by her romantic partners. She heard racial slurs in bars, on the street, and during lectures. And she gathered labels she never asked for: Abuse survivor. Token. Bad feminist. But, by graduation, she found an unshakeable sense of self--and a support network of other women of colour. Using her award-winning reporting skills, Eternity connects her own experience to the systemic issues plaguing students today. It's a memoir of pain, but also resilience.

This book proposes a pedagogy of black urban struggle and solidarity.

This book provides the first national study of this intense and challenging struggle which disrupted and refashioned institutions in almost every state. It also illuminates the context for one of the most transformative educational movements in American history through a history of black higher education and black student activism before 1965.

Explores how race and gender matter on campus and how Black males navigate college for academic and personal success. This work marks a radical shift away from the pervasive focus on the challenges that Black male students face and the deficit rhetoric that often limits perspectives about them. Instead, Derrick R. Brooms offers reflective counter-narratives of success. Being Black, Being Male on Campus uses in-depth interviews to investigate the collegiate experiences of Black male students at historically White institutions. Framed through Critical Race Theory and Blackmaleness, the study provides new analysis on the utility and importance of Black Male Initiatives (BMIs). This work explores Black men’s perceptions, identity constructions, and ambitions, while it speaks meaningfully to how race and gender intersect as they influence students’ experiences. “Well written and informative, this exciting project cuts across many of the strengths of previous publications and fills significant theoretical and methodological gaps by focusing on authentically voiced Black men who are finding and making their way in higher education and in life.” — James Earl Davis, coeditor of Educating African American Males: Contexts for Consideration, Possibilities for Practice

Every generation of college students, no matter how different from its predecessor, has been an enigma to faculty and administration, to parents, and to society in general. Watching today’s students “holding themselves in because they had to get A’s not only on tests but on deans’ reports and recommendations,” Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, author of the highly praised Alma Mater, began to ask, “What has gone wrong—how did we get where we are today?” Campus Life is the result of her search—through college studies, alumni autobiographies, and among students themselves—for an answer. She begins in the post-revolutionary years when the peculiarly American form of college was born, forced in the student-faculty warfare: in 1800, pleasure-seeking Princeton students, angered by disciplinary action, “show pistols . . . and rolled barrels filled with stones along the hallways.” She looks deeply into the campus through the next two centuries, to show us student society as revealed and reflected in the students’ own codes of behavior, in the clubs (social and intellectual), in athletics, in student publications, and in student government. And we begin to notice for the first time, from earliest days till now, younger men, and later young women as well, have entered not a monolithic “student body” but a complex world containing three distinct sub-cultures. We see how from the beginning some undergraduates have resisted the ritualized frivolity and rowdiness of the group she calls “College Men.” For the second group, the “Outsiders,” college was not so much a matter of secret societies, passionate team spirit and college patriotism as a serious preparation for a profession; and over the decades their ranks were joined by ambitious youths from all over rural America, by the first college women, by immigrants, Jews, “townies,” blacks, veterans, and older women beginning or continuing their education. We watch a third subculture of “Rebels”—both men and women – emerging in the early twentieth century, transforming individual dissent into collective rebellion, contending for control of collegiate politics and press, and eventually—in the 1960s—reordering the whole college/university world. Yet, Horowitz demonstrates, in spite of the tumultuous 1960s, in spite of the vast changes since the nineteenth century, the ways in which undergraduates work and play have continued to be shaped by whichever of the three competing subcultures—college men and women, outsiders, and rebels—is in control. We see today’s campus as dominated by the new breed of outsiders (they began to surface in the 1970s) driven to pursue their future careers with a “grim professionalism.” And as faint and sporadic signs emerge of (perhaps) a new activism, and a new attraction to learning for its own sake, we find that Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz has given us, in this study, a basis for anticipated the possible nature of the next campus generation.