Abstract
Some of the most thought-provoking and action-oriented studies have come from social science researchers turning their gaze inward to study their workplaces, that is, colleges and universities. These studies have shed light on student mobilizations and their aftermaths (Ferguson 2012; Okechukwu 2019); universities’ ties to slavery, settler colonialism, and U.S. imperialism (Chatterjee and Maira 2014; Grande 2018; la paperson 2017; Wilder 2013); the growing prerogatives of campus police forces and the anti-Black campus climate (Mahadeo 2019; Pagan et al. 2020; Suriel et al. 2024); and the forced displacement of residents who live in “the shadow of the ivory tower” (Baldwin 2021; Bradley 2012). In academic spaces, students and precarious faculty have called attention to the harms the university has inflicted on racialized communities, and some have begun plotting its collective takeover (Abolitionist University Studies 2023; Boggs et al. n.d.; Reed 2021). Thus, it seems imperative to welcome these conversations into our classrooms. How do we create hospitable and generative learning spaces for students to engage critically with their education? One way is to encourage them to dive into the institutional histories and politics of higher education. The CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA) is an accessible and rigorous place to start.
The CDHA is an open-access online repository of artifacts spanning a century of studying, teaching, and organizing at the City University of New York (CUNY). Also known as “the people’s university,” CUNY is New York City’s public university. Its seven community colleges, 11 four-year colleges, and seven graduate schools are located across the five boroughs; its 250,000 students are mostly working-class students of color, and its history features social upheavals and insurgent struggles. In 2011, a collective of faculty and graduate students imagined the CDHA as a participatory project designed to collect and digitize materials about CUNY history (a page of the CDHA is dedicated to its origin story; see “Project History”). Their goal was to locate and catalog unofficial documents, such as student-run publications, photographs, petitions, flyers, drawings, correspondence, and press clippings, to account for the ways working-class, Black, Puerto Rican, Jewish, and queer New Yorkers have shaped the institution “from below” since the 1930s. Documents were sourced from personal archives as well as municipal, state, and college libraries. The result is a polyvocal and multisited harvest of over 1,000 artifacts that provides counterhegemonic perspectives to the sanitized neoliberal narratives about CUNY and that raises important sociological questions about power and collective resistance, racialization and labor exploitation, the roles of institutions, and the possibility of turning the social order upside down.
The CDHA’s commitment to documenting history from the ground up means that each of the 30 collections was assembled by individual curators with deep knowledge of the covered topic. It is significant that many of these curators are former CUNY students who were directly involved in the campus struggles of the past few decades. For instance, Linda Luu, Hunter College alum and former member of the Coalition to Revitalize Asian American Studies at Hunter, curated the collection “The Fight for Asian American Studies at Hunter College,” which documents the student-led struggles to establish and empower the first Asian American studies program at CUNY and on the East Coast. Luu’s experience in this struggle allows for a very careful selection of 26 items, such as student-run publications, letters from faculty, curriculum proposals, the minutes of the first community advisory board, conference programs and posters, and more, that offer important insights into the student activists’ strategies. Another CUNY alum and a participant in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Conor Tomás Reed, curated the collection “Occupy CUNY” about the anticapitalist mobilization at CUNY in the years 2011 to 2012. The 38 items in this collection document the blossoming of artistic and pedagogical actions on and off campus. There are hilarious caricatures and songs, as well as videos, educational leaflets, blog posts, and flyers, that highlight the creative and militant spirit of this movement for liberation and public education as well as its violent repression. Also a CUNY alum, Katherine McCaffrey retrieved 33 documents from her personal archives to curate the collection “The Student Strikes of 1991,” about the building takeover she contributed to organizing at the Graduate Center as a PhD student in the Anthropology Department. The collection immerses the reader in the ups and downs of the one-week building occupation in April 1991 and its aftermath. The many flyers, lists of demands, and newspaper articles reveal how the doctoral students organized the takeover to show solidarity with the CUNY undergraduate students who were leading the movement against tuition hikes and racist austerity measures. These collections, alongside others also curated by student activists turned archivists, prominently feature student-produced materials (see also the collections about the COVID-19 pandemic and the budget cuts of the 1990s). Taken together, they affirm the centrality of students’ writings in the struggles for educational justice, which composition scholar Zeemont (2022) calls students’ insurgent rhetorics.
CUNY faculty with intimate connections and political commitment to their campus have also assembled collections about the early days of the institution. The late Carol Smith, a counselor and professor at City College (CCNY) and a committed internationalist who spoke up against U.S. military invasions and coups in Latin America, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and whom CCNY pressured into early retirement, curated the collection “Free Speech at CCNY, 1931 to 1942.” The collection chronicles how CCNY, a hotbed of antifascist organizing throughout the 1930s, became the target of a government-led anticommunist witch hunt. This resulted in the firing of 40 faculty and staff, which Smith called the dress rehearsal for McCarthyism. The 60 items (photographs, news clippings, pamphlets, and flyers) Smith garnered from several libraries in New York document the students’ rallies and marches against U.S. militarism as well as the activities of the New York State–appointed Rapp-Coudert Committee hearings on “subversive activities.” Another CUNY professor and the first chair of the local chapter of the Professional Staff Congress (the union of CUNY faculty and staff) at Hostos Community College, Gerald Meyer, curated the collection “Save Hostos!” This collection retraces the 1970s mobilizations to save Hostos from closure and obtain funding to convert office spaces for educational use. Meyer selected 65 items (leaflets, meeting notes, mission statements, and photographs) from the hundreds of documents he had amassed during those years. They show the growing involvement of South Bronx residents to defend CUNY’s first bilingual college, which Meyer argues was instrumental to the success of the Save Hostos! campaigns. For the CDHA, radical CUNY professors have also curated collections on the early days of the Borough of Manhattan Community College and the founding of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Each of these collections illuminates a part of CUNY’s popular history, locating its campuses at the intersection of city mobilizations and international solidarity networks.
If you are teaching in the CUNY system, the CDHA offers opportunities for your students to learn about their campus history as well as contemporary struggles at CUNY. Select a few items and dedicate 30 minutes on the first day of the semester to an introductory module. For the CUNY students of the 2020s who must endure degraded learning conditions (crumbling infrastructure, police surveillance, underpaid adjunct faculty, lack of response to the COVID-19 pandemic), a look at some CDHA artifacts can help them locate their individual degree-seeking journey within CUNY’s longer history of budget cuts and student-led movements for educational justice. Regardless of their majors—sociology, biology, business—students will appreciate this moment of collective grounding. Alongside your selection, invite students to explore the CDHA’s latest offspring: “The CUNY 1969 Project,” an interactive narrative of the struggle for open admissions. The project was developed by the Baruch Center for Teaching and Learning and features sample assignments and classroom activities to facilitate conversations about the pivotal year of 1969 (Sindhi and Graves n.d.). From student zines to photographs, the artifacts are likely to spark conversations about student power, institutional changes, and political tactics. For CUNY students who often do not have the time and financial means to visit physical repositories, the CDHA constitutes an exciting alternative. It is unfortunate that many of the photographs and scanned materials do not come with screen reader–friendly alternative text for disabled students. I hope that, given the CDHA’s commitment to participation and accessibility, such features will soon be added.
In the shift from rigid textbook- and lecture-based teaching toward inquiry-based learning, the CDHA is also a precious resource for sociology classrooms beyond CUNY. Educators can prepare open-ended questionnaires or reading guides to encourage students to familiarize themselves with a collection and develop close reading skills. As students develop questions about specific artifacts, ad-hoc prompts can invite them to make connections across collections and campuses using the classification system. The tags make it possible to group the items by themes and subthemes. Such groupings will allow students to locate the items within a geographical landscape and a timeline and to look for artifacts that support or contradict each other across collections.
As an example, students in urban sociology courses could pick one of the collections that focus on the early years of the youngest CUNY colleges to explore the relations between college campuses and local residents, for example, in Jamaica, Queens (“York College and the Jamaica, Queens Community”), in the South Bronx (“Save Hostos!”), in Long Island City (“LaGuardia Community College: The Early Years of Adult and Continuing Education”), or in Central Brooklyn (“The Founding of Medgar Evers College”). To explore further questions of community control over the education of youth, pair the collection with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s archive on the 1964 Summer Schools (SNCC Legacy Project 2016) or with Ewing’s (2018) Ghosts in the Schoolyard, notably, chapter 1, “What a School Means.”
Courses about race and racism could dive into the collection “SEEK’s Fight for Racial and Social Justice (1965–1969)” to dissect how college admission procedures and traditional remedial courses reproduce racist patterns and learn how pedagogues attempted to disrupt these practices at CCNY in the 1960s. Pair the collection with an analysis of the June 2023 U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to outlaw consideration of race in college admissions or with Ahmed’s (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life to consider the contemporary management of racialized students on campus.
Students in courses about labor, workers, and capital could look at the collections on CUNY adjuncts or on the Professional Staff Congress, the union that represents 30,000 CUNY faculty and staff. Pair these collections with Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, by McMillan Cottom (2018), or with field notes and analyses from rank-and-file participants in the 2020 University of California–Santa Cruz and the 2021 Columbia University graduate students’ strikes (Carr 2019; UC Wildcats 2021) to further examine questions of profit and exploitation in higher education.
The CDHA has also encouraged scholars and artists to make their primary sources available, allowing us to see the backstage of their research. For students in qualitative methods courses, it is an opportunity to understand how archival materials and oral history interviews can be mobilized in sociological thinking. For instance, the collection “The Story of the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM!)” features the oral history interviews that Okechukwu (2019), professor of sociology at George Mason University, conducted with CUNY student activists for her book To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions. Studying the book alongside the audio recordings (or the transcripts) of the interviews can provide insights into Okechukwu’s sensitive approach to data collection. Sociology students interested in filmmaking can explore the collection “Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College,” about the student-led struggles to establish Puerto Rican studies at CUNY. The collection features the primary sources (drawings, photographs, press releases, announcements, lists of demands, open letters, and flyers) behind the 2021 documentary Making the Impossible Possible, codirected by Tami Gold and Pam Sporn and coproduced by Gisely Colón López. Exploring the collection after viewing the film will illuminate how collaborative and public-facing research can be accountable to communities.
As educators embark on the task of identifying a coherent pedagogical path for their students through the CDHA, here is a caveat. The CDHA offers a periodization of CUNY history (available under the heading “Browse by Time Periods”) based on historians Fabricant and Brier’s (2016) Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education—Steven Brier is the lead historian and founding codirector of the CDHA. This periodization corresponds to the dominant narrative in the field of critical university studies. It presents the post–World War II expansion of higher education in the United States as a formidable time of redistribution and “upward mobility,” followed by a period of neoliberal “retrenchment” in the 1980s to 1990s. Abolitionist scholars have criticized this periodization for its lack of attention to modes and regimes of accumulation and its nostalgia for a “golden era” of the university that “neglects the ways [the post–World War II] expansion was underwritten by militarized funding priorities, nationalist agendas, and an incorporative project of counterinsurgency” (Boggs et al. n.d.:5). For an alternative account of CUNY/higher education history that positions the university as an enduring target of racialized counterinsurgency, as well as a site of groundbreaking resistance, read New York Liberation School (Reed 2023), Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions (Williams, Squire, and Tuitt 2021), and No Study without Struggle (Patel 2021).
Educators who teach (with) primary sources will benefit from engaging with archivists early in the course development process (Tanaka et al. 2021). As you design courses with CDHA materials, you should not hesitate to reach out to the CDHA team of curators, who will provide essential insights about how collections were put together, what was left out, and what remains to be collected. In a paper delivered at the Living Archive conference organized by the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive in 1997, sociologist and cultural theorist Hall (2001: 89) talked about “the task . . . . of bringing to the surface for critical attention what has existed, hitherto, only ‘in solution’—as it were, within the flow of the work itself.” Prior to becoming items in the CDHA collections (and objects of study and teaching), the artifacts circulated on campus. They were distributed in the hallways, photocopied, cut, folded, sung, or hidden. They were part of a whole, “in solution . . . . within the flow of the work itself.” This has an important implication: When reading through the CDHA collections, you are only looking at the surface. In that sense, archiving is akin to chemical decantation; it calls for both caution and humility when we teach these collections.