A New Book

Dear Friends,

One of my favorite texts to teach is an essay written by the poet, essayist, and educator Adrienne Rich, first given as a speech in 1978, called “Taking Women Students Seriously.” As a diagnosis of the ways that the college classroom is constructed with certain students in mind, it remains bracingly relevant nearly half a century later. Among the piece’s claims is that equality between men and women within the classroom is impossible “because outside the classroom women are perceived not as sovereign beings but as prey.” Rich asks: “If it is dangerous for me to walk home late of an evening from the library, because I am a woman and can be raped, how self-possessed, how exuberant can I feel as I sit working in that library?”

When I teach it, as students make connections between Rich’s trenchant ideas and their own experiences both inside and outside the classroom, I take a step back and marvel at the impact those connections have. Many of the students visibly become more awake, more present, as they share with each other aspects of their selves that they had never before voiced in class. My students, because they can see themselves in Rich’s account of her students, are suddenly able to bring their whole selves to bear on the discussion. It turns out that this is one of Rich’s main points in the essay itself.

The essay details Rich’s experience teaching at the City College of New York (CCNY), in its SEEK program, a hugely significant initiative in the history of the diversification of American higher education. SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge), launched in 1965, in response to a wellspring of pressure to open up CCNY, long an engine of social mobility for poor white and European immigrant students, to a more diverse student body—in particular, the Black and Puerto Rican students who now made up half of all New York City public school students. The conventional wisdom at the time was that these students could not succeed in college and that CCNY, then approximately 95 percent white, could not admit them in large numbers without significantly lowering its academic standards. Setting out to prove this wisdom wrong, CCNY professors Leslie Berger and Allan Ballard created a pre-baccalaureate program that would admit these students and prepare them for success at the college. They focused on good teaching, hiring great instructors and trusting them to get through to students. Seeing the names of those who were hired to join SEEK’s writing program is astonishing now, knowing what these figures went on to achieve in the years afterward: in addition to Rich, there was Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Barbara Christian, among others. According to Rich, SEEK classrooms were characterized by “a deep commitment on the part of teachers to the minds of their students; a constant, active effort to create or discover the conditions for learning, and to educate ourselves to meet the needs of the new college population; a philosophical attitude based on open discussion of racism, oppression, and the politics of literature and language; and a belief that learning in the classroom could not be isolated from the student’s experience as a member of an urban minority group in white America.”

By all accounts, the SEEK program was a huge success, influencing countless other institutions to launch what became known as equal opportunity programs (EOPs). The initial class of 113 students grew to 732 students in 1966, expanding to 1,600 students by the 1968–69 school year. Of the students who were admitted during SEEK’s first three years, 40 percent graduated by mid-1972, a remarkable accomplishment for students who had been thought to be not cut out for college at all. SEEK became, according to the scholar Sean Molloy, “a model of success for college racial and social justice programs nationwide.” That model was fueled by instructors like Adrienne Rich, who understood that the standard way of teaching college students would need to be changed to better suit these new students. That change, according to Rich, was prompted by a series of questions:

Rich and her colleagues, faced with the problem of some groups of students not performing as well as others, began by trying to better understand those students and changing their pedagogy in response. They understood that the roots of the problem grew out of the way these students had been treated, both in the proximal context of school and in the wider world of a racist and sexist society. Further, they sensed that their teaching needed to change in a way that would restore to these students the psychological wholeness that would allow them to be active agents in their own education, in their own lives. These students deserved to own the classroom every bit as much as their more privileged peers, and it was up to the instructors to make sure this happened.

More than half a century later, our institutions of higher education are still struggling to provide an equitable education to a diverse student body. Since the SEEK experiment, American colleges and universities have opened their doors to a much broader cross-section of American society, filling their classrooms with students of every race, from every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, at every point on the gender spectrum, with every kind of body and mind. And yet this increase in access to college has not been accompanied by a proportionate increase in success at college, which remains markedly more likely for privileged students. Whether along the axis of race, class, gender, or disability, a student’s demographic characteristics are still a shamefully good predictor of whether they’ll graduate. It’s still the case that white students graduate at substantially higher rates than Black and Hispanic and Native American students. It’s still the case that well-off students graduate at higher rates than economically insecure students. It’s still the case that men persist in STEM majors and graduate with STEM degrees at higher rates than women and trans and nonbinary students. It’s still the case that able-bodied students graduate at higher rates than students with disabilities. What’s more, these disparities have been known about for decades, and institutions have made concerted efforts to address them, with, it must be said, only modest success.

My new book, One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable began with my desire to find out what researchers knew about how to create more equitable outcomes in college courses. After reading countless studies, I learned that we know quite a lot about how to help marginalized students succeed in individual classes; I also learned that institutions have been doing very little to act on this knowledge. The efforts of colleges and universities to close the gaps in the graduation rates between their privileged and marginalized students too often completely ignore the classroom, and with it those best placed to change what happens there: professors. This book makes the case that the classroom must play a central role in efforts to remedy the inequities that continue to plague higher education. This is not to say that better student services, more mental health counseling, increased funding for students, attempts to reduce college’s hidden costs, and other initiatives are useless. But if we are ever going to solve this most per­sistent of problems, it will be because we take a long, hard look at our status quo pedagogies and revise them to better teach our marginalized students.

The book follows the model of Adrienne Rich and the other instructors at SEEK: it argues that our pedagogy must change in response to a changing student body, that we must understand the ways our students have suffered at the hands of an unequal society, that we must seek to restore to our marginalized students “that sense of self which is necessary for active participation in education.” These students deserve to own the classroom every bit as much as their more privileged peers, and it is up to instructors—and the institutions that presumably support those instructors—to make sure this happens.

I wrote the book for professors who want to help every one of their students succeed, and for administrators who want to recommit their institutions to equitable education. At a moment when many academics cannot even say the words that have long referred to equity efforts in higher education, it’s time for a new approach, one that does not require another associate dean or strategic task force. The classroom is the heart of any educational institution; it needs to be at the center of any educational reform.

In the years that followed the birth of the SEEK program, activists and students continued to lobby CCNY and the broader City University of New York (CUNY) system for further changes to better serve New York’s extremely diverse community. These efforts soon led to the introduction of open admissions, the policy that ensured that almost every high school graduate who applied for admission would be accepted. This program, which began in the fall of 1970, soon swelled the ranks of CUNY students, nearly doubling enrollment overall and tripling the enrollment of Black and Hispanic students. Before the decade was even half over, a backlash to this ambitious experiment had firmly taken hold, the product of the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis and a corresponding change in the political winds. In the words of Mina Shaughnessy, who directed SEEK’s writing program and was central to efforts to make open admissions a success, “The times have shifted and allowed the society to settle back into its comfortable notions about merit, notions which have produced a meritocratic scheme that perpetuates the various brands of race and class prejudice that have pervaded this society since its creation.” Nonetheless, in the years when CUNY was “the most open and perhaps most envied public higher education system in the country,” it made a substantial difference in the lives of marginalized students who otherwise might not have gone to college.

In addition to the sheer impact of the huge increase in access to higher education, open admissions at CUNY was a model for how an institution of higher education can remedy societal inequities. According to research carried out in the 1990s by David Lavin and David Hyllegard, the open admissions program was responsible for a threefold increase in bachelor’s and associate’s degrees for Black students, a doubling of those degrees for Hispanic students, and a doubling of postgraduate degrees for minority students as well. These degrees translated into jobs that lifted many students out of poverty; the researchers estimated that CUNY graduates from the first half of the 1970s earned a total of $2 billion more over their lifetimes than if open admissions had not been implemented. In Shaughnessy’s opinion, these hard-won successes were a result of the university’s commitment to teaching and to a conception of teaching that insisted that professors adapt to students rather than the other way around. “The decision to open a college to a more diverse population,” reflected Shaughnessy in 1976, “commits that college to becoming a teaching college, a college where everyone, not just the remedial teachers, accepts the responsibility of teaching rather than merely presenting a subject.”

I’m excited for you all to read the book, which I spent more than four years working on. I’ll be sharing more ideas from the book in this space over the coming month. It comes out on August 12; you can pre-order it here.