Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education

Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409409342
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317048961
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

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.

PART I
Introduction

Chapter 1
The Promise (and the Threat) of Curricular Change

On May 3, 1999, Junaid Rana and ten other students were led away from a University of Texas Austin administrative office building in handcuffs. Rana had helped draft a proposal for Asian American studies at UT Austin the prior year and had served as one of two student members on a search committee charged with hiring a director of the fledgling program. Students had been pushing for an Asian American studies program since at least 1992 by forming committees, creating proposals, and lobbying the university administration (Kennedy 2000b). In 1998, they had started to feel like they were getting somewhere. But during the spring semester, the search effort had rapidly deteriorated. Bitter disappointment followed in the wake of the search committee’s inability to hire a director and the weeks of fruitless meetings. Finally, the announcement that the interim Dean of Liberal Arts decided to reject the leading candidate for the position triggered a sitin and Rana’s arrest for criminal trespass. Was this the end of the effort to bring Asian American Studies to the University of Texas?

Rana’s arrest record and those of the other students were expunged after they all performed community service and avoided getting arrested again for a period of time. In response to the sit-in, the administration agreed to establish an Asian American Studies advisory council with both students and faculty as members, a speakers series, the hiring of a one-year visiting faculty member, and a new search for a permanent director and tenure track professor. A series of interim directors and faculty hires were appointed beginning shortly thereafter. Junaid Rana went on to earn an assistant professorship in Asian American studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. By 2005, the Center for Asian American Studies at UT Austin (officially founded in 2000) offered an undergraduate major; an honors program; an established group of core and affiliated faculty as well as lecturers and instructors; and about 20 academic courses a year (Kennedy 2000a).

The events at the University of Texas illustrate a successful initiative on the part of students to effect curricular change. Much of the same support exists at Wesleyan University for a program in queer studies¹. Since approximately 1991, students had been pushing the administration to develop such a program and to hire more faculty to teach courses focusing on issues of sexuality. Students were not even able to convince the university to retain the faculty they had already hired—noted queer theorist Judith Butler began her career at Wesleyan and was turned down for a permanent position. Students at Wesleyan even had formal faculty support—the American Studies program had submitted a formal request to hire a faculty member with expertise in queer studies for at least four years. In 2001, after students organized a “kiss-in” during an event for prospective undergraduates to demand increased access to courses in queer studies, the hiring of a tenure-track faculty member to offer these courses, and the development of a major within five years (Silbergeld 2001), the administration agreed to fund a queer studies faculty member in American Studies, which now allows students to develop queer studies concentrations within the department. But as of this writing, students at Wesleyan still can neither major in queer studies nor have a queer studies minor recorded on their transcripts.

Why were the students at the University of Texas Austin so much more able to reach their goals than the students at Wesleyan? And why does the process of curricular expansion that enabled the development of the Asian American studies program at the University of Texas remain so contentious? This book seeks to answer these questions by drawing on case studies of six colleges and universities in the United States and focusing on the emergence of curricular programs in women’s studies, Asian American studies, and queer studies.

Contentious Politics at College

As the stories of Asian American studies at the University of Texas Austin and queer studies at Wesleyan College highlight, individuals often seek to change the organizations that they are part of by engaging in contentious politics. The term “contentious politics” refers to a broad range of activities beyond but also including social movements that involve public, episodic contestation around issues that affect the interests of the claimants and/or their targets (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Morrill, Zald, and Rao 2003). This concept is more expansive than the concept of a social movement because most definitions of social movements require that movements consist of those who are outside of “politics as usual” or do not have access to institutionalized forms of political action (Snow, Soule, and Kriesi 2004), while the concept of contentious politics does not require this outsider status.

Because of the high likelihood that at least some individuals involved in any given episode of contentious politics within a college or university are positioned as insiders, much of contemporary social movements scholarship has precluded consideration of these episodes of contention as social movements. However, insiders can indeed be part of social movement activism (see, for instance, Katzenstein 1998; Santoro and McGuire 1997; Wilde 2004). These insiders are typically those who can and do participate in “politics as usual” while simultaneously facing structural exclusion from decision-making processes (Grossman 2005), as students might, or being rendered invisible by the cultural politics of the organization (Slaughter 1997). Where insiders are marginalized in these ways, they can and do turn to activism and indeed to social movements as they attempt to create the change they desire. Though some of the campaigns covered in this book clearly involve social movement organizations and others might be further along the spectrum towards contentious organizational politics, I will refer to all of the contentious campaigns as social movements. Regardless of whether the individuals participating positioned themselves as insiders or outsiders, these contentious campaigns occurred when change could not be or was not won through the conventional decision-making process, and thus participants turned to alternative forms of action as they sought to change their organization.

While contentious politics and social movements within colleges and universities have never been limited to student movements, they are the most widely known example. Student movements have always had a presence in higher education (Boren 2001) and in curricular debates, particularly in the late 1960s and the early 1970s when the curricular changes studied here emerged (Degroot 1998; Foster and Long 1970; Glazer 1970; Levitt 1984; Lipset 1967). Scholars have often suggested that student movements may be more likely than other types of movements to arise, perhaps because students are more “available” to protest (Lipset 1967, 1976), because students are less mature and more “irrational” (Smelser 1963), or perhaps because students (as relatively privileged members of society) have access to more of the resources necessary for organizing and sustaining movements (Jenkins 1983; McCarthy and Zald 1977, 2002; Zald and McCarthy 1979). Movements targeting educational institutions are quite common—of 4,656 protest events between 1968 and 1975 that were reported in the New York Times, 24 percent targeted educational institutions (Van Dyke, Soule, and Taylor 2004), while between 1960 and 1990, 18 percent did (Walker, Martin, and McCarthy 2008).

However, scholars studying student movements have often discounted the role of political context and opportunities leading to movement emergence and have ignored the study of movement impacts. More contemporary social movement theories have emerged that are grounded in an understanding of the role of political contexts and opportunities and attempt to understand how movement impacts come about (Amenta, Caren, Fetner et al. 2002; Amenta and Young 1999a; Goodwin and Jasper 1999; Kriesi 2004). But these models have generally specified their propositions as applying specifically to social movements who name states as the targets of their activism and have not considered the dynamics of social movements that target organizations (Arthur 2008). As Mary Katzenstein (1998) writes, organizations are the nexuses for conflicts over status and resources in the contemporary political world; in addition, much of the impact of social movements is about influencing organizational practices (Rao 2009), and thus movements in the organizational sphere deserve a politically-oriented framework for understanding their outcomes. Indeed, “it is rather easier to change the world than to change the university” (Glazer 1970: 193).

In addition, few commentators on movements within colleges and universities have seriously considered the role that non-student members of college and university communities may play in contentious politics. Many instances of contentious politics involve the coordinated action of students, faculty, and or staff. Each group has access to a different set of resources and faces a different set of costs from their involvement in contentious politics. While it may be true that only a few faculty members are involved in any given episode of contentious politics (Bayer 1972), that does not mean we should discount their role entirely (Riesman 1973). The important thing to recognize here is that faculty involvement in a curricular change campaign does not preclude the possibility that contentious politics are at work. Not all faculty members have the same access to and not all changes are adopted through the regular shared governance procedures—some require contention to be adopted.

Understanding Social Movements

If we assume that social movements are responsible for changes in colleges and universities, we are arguing that change happens inside educational institutions due to the pressure created by activists’ articulated demands and their participation in organized and perhaps disruptive contention. This contention then functions as a “bargaining chip” (Burstein, Einwohner, and Hollander 1995) that causes those in power to believe it would be easier to approve new courses and programs than to continue facing activism and protest. There are, of course, a number of different models that aim to explain how and when social movements are able to reach their goals.

Classical social movement theorists did not devote much attention to understanding the outcomes of social movements. Indeed, early commentators saw social movements as irrational attempts to engage in social and political change that were unlikely to succeed (Smelser 1963). Perhaps the most traditional model for explaining student movements is the resource mobilization perspective (Jenkins 1983; McCarthy and Zald 1977, 2002; Zald and McCarthy 1979). The resource mobilization perspective proposes that those movements that have access to a sufficient quantity of resources (usually defined in terms of money and time) will be those most able to accomplish their goals. The resource mobilization model would thus predict that colleges and universities which adopted new programs experienced organized student movements with access to significant financial resources, human resources, time, and/or allies or “conscience constituencies” (those who will not be beneficiaries of the movement but who nevertheless actively support it [Jenkins 1983]). However, though student movements do vary in terms of how much money and time they have (students working their way through college differ from students attending elite schools debt-free), the differences in financial and time resources among student movements is less significant than the differences in other types of resources, particularly what Edwards and McCarthy call “human resources”—“labor, experience, skills, and expertise [and] leadership” (2004:127). This means the resource mobilization perspective is less likely to explain the differences between student movements than it is to be useful in other domains.

A second perspective is that of frame theory. The frame theory model suggests that movements which choose frames that resonate with their constituency and which clearly specify the appropriate ameliorative action (Benford and Snow 2000; Cress and Snow 2000; Snow, Rochford, Worden et al. 1986) will be most able to have an impact on their targets. These frames include diagnostic frames, which explain what a problem is and where it comes from; prognostic frames, which propose a solution to the problem; and motivational frames, which encourage individuals to become involved in activism. Framing models often fail to provide a mechanism by which the “successful” framing strategy is in fact translated into “success,” however. Perhaps a way to approach this question would be by understanding the factor that leads to movement impacts as instead the “strategic capacity” (Ganz 2000) that leaves a movement able to create and utilize appropriate frames. The frame theory perspective would thus propose that colleges and universities would be more likely to enact curricular change when they experienced movements that developed the strategic capacity to create and deploy frames that resonated with the campus community and which left the administration feeling that program creation was the only way to respond.

The third set of explanations is rooted in a political understanding of social movements, including political opportunity theory and political mediation theory. The political opportunity model suggests that movements will be able to have an impact when the political structure is open to the demands of the movement and when it has the capacity to implement them (Kitschelt 1986; Meyer 1993; Meyer and Minkoff 2004). The political mediation model builds further on this framework to say that it is not only that the political context of a movement matters, but rather that movements must align their organizational form and strategic choices to that political context (Amenta and Caren 2004; Amenta, Caren, and Olasky 2005). Even more than framing and resource mobilization models, political models were developed to apply to states—particularly democratic states. Therefore, the assumptions about what an open and supportive political context might be are rooted in understandings of the way that states operate, focusing on the role of political parties and the nature of governmental bureaucracy. However, these political models can be used to build predictions about when curricular change campaigns are likely to make an impact on colleges and universities. The political mediation model would predict that the organizational context varies from organization to organization and that in order to create new programs, student movements must choose organizational forms and strategies that fit these contexts. In general, we would hypothesize that in supportive contexts (those where colleges and universities are open to interdisciplinary work, are not experiencing significant outside constraints, and believe in the role of students in influencing the direction of the curriculum), social movements would be able to demand and achieve new programs through institutionalized action like creating course proposals and signing petitions as part of an informal campaign coordinated by existing or loosely affiliated student organizations. However, in unsupportive contexts (those where colleges and universities have reason to be hostile to the particular curricular change in question, where budgets are extremely tight, or where students have traditionally not played much role in determining the direction of the curriculum), social movements would need to engage in concerted and assertive action such as holding demonstrations and calling on allies to put pressure on the administration as part of a strategy that would include creating new organizations or coalitions specifically for the purpose of demanding curricular change.

Social Movement Outcomes

When social movement scholars began to address movement impacts, many developed fairly simple formulations that relied on few variables (such as strategy, opportunity, repression, and bureaucracy) to explain outcomes in terms of a binary success-failure framework (Gamson 1990; Jenkins 1983; Tarrow 1998). But movement outcomes are much more complex than simply success and failure. Movements can have impacts that create real change in their targets but fall well short of their intended goals (for instance, a movement could intend to reconstruct the curriculum of an entire university to make it more inclusive of women’s perspectives and pedagogical needs, but end up gaining only a well-funded minor in women’s studies). They can also have unintended consequences, or even consequences that they see as negative (for instance, a movement could intend to create a minor in queer studies but end up creating a film and lecture series as well as the eradication of a special-interest housing program for queer students). Perspectives on social movement outcomes that only look at success and failure, therefore, fall well short of a complete understanding of what movements do. In order to develop this more expansive understanding of social movement impacts, we can turn to the collective goods framework (Amenta and Young 1999b). The collective goods framework abandons the notion that social movement impacts can only be understood in terms of movements’ own perceptions of success or failure. Instead, we can consider the various impacts—intentional or unintentional, small or large—that have stemmed from movement activism.

The collective goods framework is an important part of the advance offered by political models of social movements. While political context and political mediation approaches provide significant advances in terms of understanding when movements are most able to have an impact, there are two significant limitations facing these perspectives. First, their focus on when impacts happen precludes significant attention to how these impacts are produced. Movement impacts could occur directly due to the influence of the movement, indirectly by influencing the opinion of decision-makers and the general public, or simultaneously through direct and indirect influence (Guigini and Yamasaki 2009). Guigini and Yamasaki found that social movements on their own are neither necessary nor sufficient to create policy change. Instead, where public opinion and political allies (in the ideological rather than the structural sense) are already favorable to social movement goals, the social movement is largely unnecessary in creating the desired change. Where public opinion and political allies are not already favorable, the role of social movement activism is to create the change in the opinions of both the general public and of decision-makers such that the desired change will ultimately stem from these forces (Guigini and Yamasaki 2009).

Second, political context and political mediation models, as noted above, are designed to explain the outcomes of social movements that target the state. Scholarship on the outcomes of movements targeting organizations, while a growing presence (Binder 2002; Eisenstein 1996; Grossman 2005; Katzenstein 1998; Meyerson 2001; Raeburn 2004; Rao 2009; Van Dyke et al. 2004), has not yet developed a comparable theoretical model to explain what such movements do and do not accomplish. Armstrong and Bernstein (2008) have taken a major step in the right direction with their multi-institutional politics perspective on social movements. They understand that social movement activism can—and indeed often must—include insiders and that movements target a wide variety of non-state institutions. However, Armstrong and Bernstein’s model is focused on movements that target institutional fields rather than on movements that target individual formal organizations². Furthermore, their model focuses on why movements develop and why they make particular strategic choices; it is less interested in explaining how movements are able to have an impact. This book, then, develops a model—the organizational mediation model—to explain when and how social movements that target organizations are able to have an impact. It does so by exploring the dynamics of a series of campaigns for curricular change within colleges and universities.

Why Curricular Change Matters

Colleges and universities serve as “site[s] where legitimate knowledge is created, transmitted, and sanctified” (Stevens, Armstrong, and Arum 2006:17), they define which “knowledge is authoritative” (Meyer, Ramirez, Frank et al. 2005:30) based on cultural principles, and they serve to arbitrate what knowledge is necessary and/or useful (Clark 1996; Gumport and Snydman 2002; Hefferlin 1969; Maher 1993; Meyer et al. 2005; Rudolph 1989). This function of universities in governing and regulating knowledge also includes structuring the status of different sorts of knowledge (Gumport 2000), determining what knowledge people should be familiar with as members of modern society (Hefferlin 1969), and credentialing and regulating access to professions (Meyer 1977). Colleges and universities provide the credentials which individuals need in order to be accepted into desirable careers—credentials which are becoming only more valued as our economy continues to transition away from manufactured goods and towards service and knowledge as its base. In addition, as ever-higher percentages of students go on to college, colleges and universities have come to serve important socializing functions for a broader swath of young people. We look to colleges and universities to teach students how to write and speak formally, how to work in teams with others, how to manage an independent life, and most relevant for this research, how to cope with diversity.

Yet despite all of the expectations we have of tertiary education and the myriad roles it plays in contemporary society, colleges and universities remain a distinct type of organization. Though critics worry greatly about the blurring borders between colleges and universities and the corporate sector (Kirp 2003; Slaughter and Leslie 2001; Slaughter and Rhoades 2005), and though the higher education news is filled with stories about the penetration of business onto the campus (refer, for instance, to the student loan scandals of 2007), colleges and universities maintain formal autonomy from other social se...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• PART I INTRODUCTION
• PART II SIX CASES
• PART III ANALYSIS
• Methodological Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index