While higher education is still far from universal in the United States, it plays an increasingly large role in shaping our collective understanding of what knowledge counts as legitimate and important. Therefore, understanding the college curriculum and how it is changed and shaped helps us to understand the overall dynamics of knowledge in contemporary society. This book considers the emergence of three curricular fields that have developed and spread over the past half century in American higher education - Women's studies, Asian American studies and Queer/LGBT studies. It details the broader history of their development as knowledge fields and then explains how, when, and why individual colleges and universities may choose to adopt such innovations. Based on in-depth case studies of curricular change processes at six colleges and universities across the United States, the book demonstrates that social movements targeting colleges and universities play a major role in curricular change and sets forward a new model for understanding what it takes for social movements targeting organizations to make an impact.

While higher education is still far from universal in the United States, it plays an increasingly large role in shaping our collective understanding of what knowledge counts as legitimate and important. Therefore, understanding the college curriculum and how it is changed and shaped helps us to understand the overall dynamics of knowledge in contemporary society. This book considers the emergence of three curricular fields that have developed and spread over the past half century in American higher education - Women's studies, Asian American studies and Queer/LGBT studies. It details the broader history of their development as knowledge fields and then explains how, when, and why individual colleges and universities may choose to adopt such innovations. Based on in-depth case studies of curricular change processes at six colleges and universities across the United States, the book demonstrates that social movements targeting colleges and universities play a major role in curricular change and sets forward a new model for understanding what it takes for social movements targeting organizations to make an impact.

Beginning with the premise that a comprehensive understanding of American life must confront the issue of race, sociologist David Yamane explores efforts by students and others to address racism and racial inequality—to challenge the color line—in higher education. By 1991, nearly half of all colleges and universities in the United States had established a multicultural general education requirement. Yamane examines how such requirements developed at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison during the late 1980s, when these two schools gained national attention in debates over the curriculum. Based on interviews, primary documents, and the existing literature on race and ethnic relations, education, cultural conflict, and the sociology of organizations, Student Movements for Multiculturalism makes an important contribution to our understanding of how curricular change occurs and concludes that multiculturalism represents an opening, not a closing, of the American mind.

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.

Based on in-depth case-studies of curricular change processes at six colleges and universities across the United States, the book demonstrates that social movements targeting colleges and universities play a major role in curricular change and sets forward a new model for understanding what it takes for social movements targeting organizations to make an impact.

Student Activism in the Academy: Its Struggles and Promise is a wide-ranging, provocative survey of student activism in America’s colleges and universities that critically analyzes the contentious problems and progress of a movement that has stirred public reaction in and out of academe. Its fundamental purpose is to engage diverse publics in both reasoned and passionate reflection and soul searching on vital issues that surround campus protest, including: strategies for student activism the role of social media and technology legal questions on campus speech the dilemmas of political correctness generational differences among student activists and various forms of student protest related to race, class, gender, and disabilities. Administrators, faculty, students, and student life personnel in higher education—indeed, all those interested in today’s colleges and universities--will want to participate in the timely and productive dialogue within these pages.

The 1960s was the most transformative decade in the history of American higher education—but not for the reasons you might think. Picture going to college in the sixties: the protests and marches, the teach-ins and sit-ins, the drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll—hip, electric, psychedelic. Not so fast, says bestselling historian John R. Thelin. Even at radicalized campuses, volatile student demonstrations coexisted with the "business as usual" of a flagship state university: athletics, fraternities and sororities, and student government. In Going to College in the Sixties, Thelin reinterprets the campus world shaped during one of the most dramatic decades in American history. Reconstructing all phases of the college experience, Thelin explores how students competed for admission, paid for college in an era before Pell Grants, dealt with crowded classes and dormitories, voiced concerns about the curriculum, grappled with new tensions in big-time college sports, and overcame discrimination. Thelin augments his anecdotal experience with a survey of landmark state and federal policies and programs shaping higher education, a chronological look at media coverage of college campuses over the course of the decade, and an account of institutional changes in terms of curricula and administration. Combining student memoirs, campus publications, oral histories, and newsreels, along with archival sources and institutional records, the book goes beyond facile stereotypes about going to school in the sixties. Grounded in social and political history, with a scope that will appeal both to a new generation of scholars and to alumni of the era, this engaging book allows readers to consider "going to college" in both the past and the present.