This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education features an excerpt from the book that introduces some of the particular challenges universities face when establishing cross-discipline projects.

Big, complex problems require the work of multidisciplinary teams. Consider prostate cancer. Decades of research and billions of dollars have led to the understanding that neither doctors, chemists, biolo­gists, nor engineers can arrive at a cure on their own. That multifaceted approach is gaining acceptance among the vari­ous individuals and organizations concerned with solving great problems. When giving research money to colleges, founda­tions and government agencies often require that investigators come from multiple academic disciplines as a condition of financial support.

Yet inside higher education, it’s hard to talk about a college’s impact on the world’s great problems without getting im­mersed in a conversation about institutional structure and faculty rewards. The silo mentality and viciousness of academic infighting in higher education are legendary. Discussions of innovation and how to attack big problems often bring up questions about how the college should be organized, whether the new pro­gram ought to report to a dean or the provost, or if the leader should be a center director or a department chair.

Of course, actually dealing with the issue of global warming is more important than determining who gets credit for it or whether to create a new unit to house the project. Creating the right culture and the right team with the expertise, resources, and passion to tackle a problem will certainly have greater impact than arguing about de­velopmental structures or the overhead allocation for a particular grant or contribution. But while academics usually agree in the abstract that solving crucial problems is more im­portant than debating organizational issues, putting that belief into practice is difficult. [Read the full article.]

So where to begin if an institution wants to transform its culture to better facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration? Thorp and Goldstein offer a few suggestions in the article, and there’s more, of course, packed into their slim but meaty book. You can learn more about innovative universities, watch video interviews with innovators, and more at the RevUpInnovation website.

Also, President Obama recently named Chancellor Thorp to the newly formed National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Thorp blogged about the group’s first meeting.

Now go read and then get to innovating!

They received national attention in June when the Los Angeles chapter lodged a protest against a Hallmark card with a recorded message that they thought somehow insulted black women. Then in July, the national meeting of the NAACP issued a  statement calling on the conservative Tea Party movement to “repudiate racist factions” in their midst, one year after many in the media and blogosphere had already pointed out evidence of racism during the health care reform protests. Then NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said they were “snookered” by a video posted by right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart that purported to show civil rights veteran and USDA official Shirley Sherrod “revealing her past racism.” Sherrod was really telling a story about her own transformation, from a person who wanted to aid poor black farmers, to a person who wanted to assist poor farmers no matter their race. The NAACP of today should be celebrating the work of people like Sherrod, not misunderstanding who she is.

Students frequently ask me questions about today’s NAACP. They ask if I think the NAACP is still necessary in today’s “post-civil rights” world. They ask what work the NAACP should be doing now. Many students dismiss the NAACP as old and ineffectual, out of touch with their generation. These incidents seem to reinforce this notion that the NAACP is spinning its wheels, late to point out injustice, or failing to address real crises while targeting the wrong people or imagined problems.

Part of the problem is that in contemporary conversation it seems like the NAACP has been painted into a racialized corner as an all-black organization that is somehow “reverse racist,” selfish, and self-interested.  Many accuse the NAACP of lacking new ideas and new energy that can address what social justice should be in the 21^st century. It might be a good time for the NAACP to remember its own history.

The NAACP grew out of the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the foremost African American scholar and activist, who started his own civil rights organization called the Niagara Movement. Du Bois created an all-black organization determined to ensure “every single right that belongs to a freeborn American—political, civil, and social.” Although Niagara struggled to survive, a white ally, Oswald Garrison Villard, owner of the New York Evening Post and the Nation and grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, tapped into the dissent of Du Bois’ Niagara Movement, and sent out “The Call” for activists both black and white to found an organization that could effectively contest the rise of lynching, segregation, and disfranchisement.

So from the very beginning, the NAACP was an interracial coalition of the very best activists and scholars addressing the crises that faced black Americans. It was this interracialism that got the NAACP off the ground, helping to prove their call for justice was a universal one, reviving the spirit present in the abolitionist movement of a prior generation. It was precisely this coalition that allowed the organization to weather its earliest storms. They could benefit from this same kind of coalition building today, as they attempt to articulate the challenges facing Americans in the age of Obama.

In the forty years after its founding, the NAACP has attracted powerful advocates to its ranks. Historian Patricia Sullivan’s Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement reminds us that the best and the brightest Americans joined the Association’s ranks, sacrificing their time and risking their lives to work on behalf of the organization. Early stalwarts like Joel Spingarn, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Ella Baker, and Charles Hamilton Houston, and lesser know figures like May Childs Nerney and Kathryn Magnolia Johnson, traveled from place to place, chapter to chapter, building networks, investigating injustices, and supporting local struggles. These activists were grounded in the notion that they had a duty to use their education, opportunity, and talent on behalf of others. While they often bumped heads, disagreeing on tactics and approaches, their efforts were focused on building a responsive and powerful organization. Perhaps today’s NAACP should attempt to do the same, drawing on talents of a broad group of young activists and scholars who might help create a vision for a new century.

Throughout the group’s history, the real strength of the NAACP’s organizational base has come from the work of local chapters, everyday people who used the NAACP as a vehicle for change in their own communities. The NAACP’s greatest success, the case of Brown v. Board, grew out of communities of struggle–places like rural Summerton, South Carolina, where black parents united to improve conditions for their children.

Local chapters of the NAACP are still involved in meaningful struggles throughout the country. For example, the North Carolina NAACP has been involved in contesting the erosion of integration in Wake County Schools. Wake County’s large and ever-growing school district had been heralded by educators around the nation for achieving success in blending poor and working class children of all races into classrooms throughout the district through a busing and magnet school system based on economic diversity. A newly elected, majority white school board has pushed for “neighborhood schools” that would in fact be much more economically and racially homogeneous. The local NAACP co-sponsored an interracial, inter-generational march this week to contest these new policies. In order to protect the gains of the past fifty years of struggle, school integration in the 21^st century must be part of the “national conversation.”

NAACP President Ben Jealous featured William Barber, the head of the North Carolina NAACP, at the national convention last week. Perhaps Jealous could do more. Perhaps he could come to North Carolina, meet the young students and activists of all backgrounds, and seek to recruit them and young people like them across the country into the Association. Perhaps this generation should be central, forming the leadership of a new movement that draws on the lessons the NAACP’s own history.

Blair L. M. Kelley is associate professor of history at North Carolina State University and author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson.

Image from brownvboard.org

It is night. A lone black woman walks through a cornfield in South Carolina. The stars wink above her. Crickets and cicadas grow quiet as she passes and then resume their orchestral humming, now punctuated by the sound of rustling leaves a little farther off. She moves toward an unpainted one-room building. When she gets there, she will have to rely on oil lamps for light. A group of African American adults will be waiting, eager to learn what she has come to teach them. It could be 1863 or 1916 or 1935. She could be a slave from the big house whose mistress taught her to read, a recent graduate of an American Missionary Association teacher training institute, or an instructor in the New Deal-era adult education program. Instead, it is 1964, and she is a Citizenship School teacher.

There are hundreds like her conducting classes in the southern states. Each one has received a week’s worth of training in a program designed by Septima Poinsette Clark. . . . Their training has taught them that grassroots civil rights activism remains inseparable from grassroots education. In this process, Clark has guaranteed that each Citizenship School teacher carries forward an organizing tradition forged by countless southern black women activist educators before her.

So begins the introduction to Katherine Mellen Charron’s book Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark. Clark was born 112 years ago today, on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina. Charron’s biography of Clark places the educator and civil rights activist in the long tradition of African Americans in the South who took up the cause of educating fellow blacks in the Jim Crow era, tracing Clark’s life from her early time as a student, teacher, wife, mother, and community member in rural South Carolina, through her growing involvement in the NAACP during the 1940s and her increasing radicalization as an activist in the years that followed. Charron argues that Clark’s later activism was a logical extension of her earlier life and career, providing a way for her to channel her lifelong dedication to education into something larger.

To see the Table of Contents and read the full introduction, click “view inside” on the widget at left. If you are a librarian, a professor, or a graduate student, you are eligible to view the entire book online, thanks to the Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement project. Visit LCRM’s page for Freedom’s Teacher to request access.

Happy birthday, Septima. And thank you.

–ellen

A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county’s only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced. (read the whole story here)

When I saw the story yesterday headlined “Miss. county schools ordered to comply with desegregation order,” my first thought was, “Really? In 2010?” How could it have taken that long to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act? Well, it didn’t. What happened between then and now has happened in school districts beyond Mississippi, too: resegregation. I turned to some of our own experts on school resegregation to get insight on how the Civil Rights Act will affect twenty-first-century school segregation. I’m pleased to pass along the following comment from Gary Orfield, coeditor (with John Charles Boger) of School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? –ellen

School districts–in the South and elsewhere–are under the false impression that desegregation law no longer exists and, as this Mississippi case shows, they may run into serious problems as a result. The Supreme Court has limited the duration of desegregation orders–if they are fully carried out–and allowed school districts to return to neighborhood schools, even though they may be segregated. It has not, however, released all school districts from existing plans and orders, and it has not changed the legal principle that actions which obviously increase segregation can be new violations producing new orders either in an existing case or in a new case. School districts that have quietly taken a number of actions that violate these principles need to clean up their acts or face a real risk that someone else may force them to make changes that are out of their control.

During the Bush years there was no civil rights enforcement to speak of. The Office for Civil Rights and the Justice Department were in the hands of active critics of civil rights law who gave top priority to rolling back its requirements. Though the Obama Administration has taken no dramatic steps in this area, there are now officials who are going to look much more carefully at potential violations.

Most southern school systems desegregated not under court orders but under Office for Civil Rights plans negotiated under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Many of those districts have been unilaterally changing those plans in ways that increase segregation without gaining the permission of federal officials, tacitly assuming that they had the freedom to do that. They do not. They could be required to reverse those actions and take additional steps to make up for the harm they have caused.

If school districts systematically take actions that have the impact of creating segregation and they reject alternatives that would produce integrated schools, they are engaging in the kinds of actions that triggered far-reaching desegregation orders in many northern cities and were found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1973 Denver (Keyes) decision. The Supreme Court has not overruled that decision and it is the law of the land.

I encounter many Keyes violations as I look around the country, and I think the violations may be especially common in the South, where people seem to assume that the civil rights rollback has gone much further than it actually has. If districts are going to go back into court, many will also face questions about what they have done about the exploding population of Latino students, who also have desegregation rights under Keyes–rights which were never acknowledged in most southern desegregation plans. These students are often in highly segregated and unequal schools. If the pattern shows that it was done intentionally or it violates the Keyes standard, that could become another major issue.

The time for sleepwalking through resegregation–which is clearly related to diminished educational success–is over, and school authorities need to take this into account for both legal and educational reasons.

–Gary Orfield
professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and codirector of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA
coeditor of School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back?

Two weeks ago the media reported the apparently shocking news that the Kansas City, Missouri School District (KCMSD) school board voted 5-4 to close nearly half of its schools, 28 of 61 schools in the district. But those familiar with the district were not surprised.  The real question is not why the school board has decided to close so many schools but why it took them so long.  In Complex Justice I describe the long, agonizing, and costly desegregation case of Missouri v. Jenkins. It is that case which delayed this day of reckoning.

Unfortunately most coverage of the current situation has neglected to mention the role Missouri v. Jenkins played in leading to these mass closures.  The New York Times, for example, addressed the district’s long history of dysfunction but did not explain how the case aided and abetted that dysfunction.

In the mid 1980s, federal district court judge Russell Clark ordered a complete overhaul of the school district.   No expense was spared.  All told, the court spent more than $2 billion in its quest to improve the KCMSD.  Every high school and middle school and half the district’s elementary schools became magnet schools with special themes such as classical Greek, Slavic studies, and agribusiness.  Special themes required special facilities, such as petting zoos, robotics labs, and a model United Nations facility with simultaneous translation capability.  One high school was so extravagant it was dubbed the “Taj Mahal.”

When Judge Clark’s remedial program began in the mid 1980s the school district enrolled 35,000 students, compared to more than 70,000 in the late 1960s. (Today it enrolls just over 17,000.)  During the 1970s the school district had experienced a massive exodus of students.  Most importantly, a series of destructive and divisive teacher strikes undermined parental confidence in the school system.  Thousands of students left the district after each strike.  Of course, most of them were white, but a significant number of African American students left as well.  Everyone who could afford to escape fled to the suburbs or to private schools. However, because of ineffectual leadership, the district maintained a large stable of partially filled buildings.  No one was willing to make the politically unpopular but necessary decisions to close underused schools.  Once the case got underway, the plaintiff’s attorney, Arthur Benson, and his expert witnesses assured Judge Clark that if he ordered the requested improvements, the school district would draw tens of thousands of white students from the suburbs back into the district. Much like the Field of Dreams, the premise was “If you build it they will come.”

But the students never came.  Sadly, at the same time that Judge Clark was pouring money into the district, the quality of education declined for Kansas City’s minority students. Test scores fell and levels of racial isolation increased.  African American parents grew so disillusioned that many formed an organization devoted to taking over the school district and ending the case.  Despite the academic failure of students in the system the school district was kept afloat by judicially mandated largesse, allowing it to avoid the difficult decision to close largely empty schools.  In fact, the schools closed last week received tens of millions of dollars under the desegregation plan.  Absent Missouri v. Jenkins, the school district would have been forced to gradually close schools and would have avoided a wrenching and traumatic mass closing.

Ironically, the board member casting the decisive vote to close the 28 schools was Arthur Benson, the same attorney who led the Missouri v. Jenkins lawsuit from 1977 to its conclusion in 2003. While many, including myself, have criticized his counterproductive educational proposals, he has tried to put his hard-won knowledge to good use by joining the school board two years ago.  Instead of focusing on exotic but educationally distracting programs, he has spent his tenure on the board trying to focus on providing a good and fiscally sustainable education for the district’s students. One wishes Benson well in his effort to help the children of Kansas City in the twilight of his career. But it’s difficult not to think of what could have been if he had he used his formidable gifts and intellect to help the school district in more productive ways than litigation over the past three decades.  In the many years I studied the case, I never found a single person, even among his most ardent opponents, who questioned Benson’s integrity or sincerity.  He always had the best of intentions.  But good intentions do not guarantee good public policy. Certain roads, as Missouri v. Jenkins reminds us, are paved with them.

–Joshua M. Dunn
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
author of Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins

In this post Ramos marks the anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo,  addresses the decisions now being made about how this history will be taught to the state’s children, and explores both how these decisions arise from Texan culture and how they help shape it. –beth

This Saturday marks the anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, the battle that ended the 13-day siege on the fort by the Mexican Army.  The date carries added meaning this year as the Texas State Board of Education decides on the social studies standards affecting the education of the state’s public school children.  Debates over the standards have garnered national attention especially since they impact how textbooks will be written for the nation’s largest market.  It was the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine cover story.  When it comes to Texas history, few if any events carry the emotional weight of the Alamo.  The governor even invokes the memory of Texas Independence to score political points with the anti-Washington crowd.

It seems like, 174 years later, battles over the Alamo’s meaning and significance rage on, reflecting contemporary debates as much as commenting on the past.  This has been the backdrop for writing my book, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1861.  The book reframes events during the period from the perspective of Mexican people in San Antonio.  In a sense, the book serves as a narrative intervention into the immensely strong dominant narrative that places the Battle of the Alamo at the center of the region’s history.

The Alamo story itself shines so dominates the historical landscape that any broader context for understanding these events is practically wiped out.  I often use what I call the “postcard” image of the Alamo as a metaphor to illustrate this point.  The image of the Alamo is often presented without people or surrounding buildings.  The icon has become timeless in more than one sense.  Reinserting this context meant shifting the focus away from the battle and recasting events and people.

At times this meant using new terminology to escape the baggage traditional labels have acquired over time.  Stephen F. Austin and his settlers were immigrants rather than merely colonists and the Texas Revolution is now the Texas War of Secession.  This latter example allowed me to situate the war in Texas as a civil war within Mexico.  In this light, the meaning of the war to Mexicans can be better understood.

Commemorating the Battle of the Alamo itself brings up personal memories for me and many other ethnic Mexican people in Texas.  At school we learned the “official” version of events, while at home we heard our parent’s perspective.  In school, the Texas Revolution was a war for liberty and freedom.  At home, it was about stolen Mexican territory as part of the land grab of Manifest Destiny.  Writing the history of Texas then means understanding where each of these perspectives came from, how they have been reproduced and where they have been deployed to shape power and relations in the state.

As the State Board of Education now deliberates over how this history will be written, taught and tested for children from first grade through high school, understanding these multiple perspectives becomes even more important.  Early in the process, Patricia Hardy, the board member representing Fort Worth, made clear her concerns with emphasizing Mexicans in Texas and American history.  She noted, Hispanic children “want to see some brown faces and in Texas there are a lot of people with Hispanic surnames who are a part of Texas history. So that’s easy to come by.”  She continued, “But you cannot distort Texas history. You cannot give people an elevated place in history when their place was not elevated.”  Such is the tenacity of the dominant narrative in the popular culture of Texas.  When a more expansive narrative is presented, it is dismissed as representing the present rather than reflecting the past in order to diminish it.

While the answer is not necessarily to “Forget the Alamo” as in the poignant (and ironic) closing of John Sayles’s film Lone Star.  Rather, it takes expanding its historical context to make it more meaningful to all Texans and to those outside of the state as well.

All of the sessions made substantial efforts to propose changes to the ways in which the story of the civil rights movement is traditionally understood and taught, and the question-and-answer sessions were lengthy and lively. Several attendees said it was the best conference they had ever attended, and they hoped to carry on the discussions sparked by the sessions.

Videos of several conference panels are now available online at the LCRM’s website and comments and discussion are encouraged. Five of eight panels are already up; the rest will come soon. Visit LCRM’s Common Room to check them out.

Taylor, chair of the religion department at Columbia, offers six big ideas for revamping universities for the 21st century. He touches on several issues of particular interest to university presses – including the publication of dissertations – and proposes major reforms for graduate curricula and professional development, department structures, inter-institutional collaboration, and, the real zinger at the end: the abolition of tenure.

Worth reading and talking about.

–ellen

So what are fraternities made of?

Nicholas Syrett, author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, will be talking about the long and secretive history of male fraternities  on WUNC’s The State of Things at noon (and 9pm) today. You can listen live online or catch the podcast later (it will be archived here by the end of the day).

The Washington Post’s book blog, Short Stack, recently featured one of the most sordid tales of deadly shenanigans and protective social networks that Syrett discusses in his book. See: The Dartmouth Letter Sweater Case.

Considering the upcoming election season, significant change seems possible, but what are we voting for? Schools are integrated, the Iraq War is nothing like the Vietnam War, women are no longer discriminated against in the workplace, and only people in other countries have scary diseases. Right??

A project called “Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement” (LCRM) seeks to expose the ongoing nature of many of these pushed-aside, “past” struggles. With a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, UNC Press is collaborating with the UNC-Chapel Hill University Library, the UNC-Chapel Hill Center for Civil Rights, and the Southern Oral History Program on a three-year project “to expand the understanding of the civil rights movement with a focus on broad chronological, demographic, geographic, and thematic conceptions.” Ultimately, the goal of this digital and print publishing venture is to provide interdisciplinary content about the civil rights movement in a variety of formats, most notably via a large digital database that will be the first of its kind in this field.

The LCRM project’s director is Sylvia K. Miller, who has more than twenty years’ experience in scholarly publishing — with Macmillan, Scribner, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, and Berg, mostly in the humanities and social sciences. Over the years she participated in or supervised the publication of several encyclopedias that won the Dartmouth Medal, reference publishing’s highest honor. Mark Simpson-Vos, LCRM editor, has been an acquiring editor for UNC Press for six years, working mainly with books in Native American Studies, environmental studies, and regional general-interest. Kenneth Reed, LCRM digital production specialist, will be working (mostly with XML) to develop workflows and practices for the creation and ingestion of content into the project’s publishing platform. LCRM project assistant Russ Damian has experience working with UNC Press as well as with a software developer.

The LCRM project hopes to “widen the window of civil rights scholarship to include contemporary issues such as school resegregation, environmental and economic justice, and related movements such as the women’s and gay rights movements.” UNC Press is excited to be part of this momentous project. Work began in January 2008 and will continue through December 2010. To learn more about Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement, visit the LCRM website.

-Rachel