Christi Smith, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Oberlin College, has just published a most timely monograph, Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Education (University of North Carolina Press). At a moment when researchers are detailing the full emergence of a dual-track higher education system which funnels whites towards one set of selective colleges and universities and minorities towards under-funded open access schools, Smith examines the nineteenth-century struggle for racial integration on U.S. college campuses. Leading this effort was the American Missionary Association, founded in 1846 by Protestant abolitionists. The AMA envisioned a network of integrated, co-educational colleges designed to educate African American and white students together, both male and female. These would be the centers from which the leaders of a racially integrated democracy would emerge. Smith provides case studies of three colleges (Berea College, Oberlin College, and Howard University) to explore the administrative strategies used to achieve these goals as well as the challenges college leaders faced. As the title suggests, Smith’s study also explores how an expanding number of higher education institutions ultimately led to the differentiation and exclusion of African Americans, Appalachian whites, and white women from coeducational higher education. Reparation and Reconciliation highlights the ultimate and persistent salience of race over other social boundaries in higher education.
What We’re Reading & Watching
A recent article by James Lang in the Chronicle of Higher Education on “The Distracted Classroom,” points to a new book by Adam Gazzaley (neuroscience) and Larry D. Rosen (psychology) on The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (MIT 2016). Distraction, as Lang summarizes, is not about looking up from reading the newspaper when something interesting is happening on the subway on the way to work. Distraction is basically when you’re trying to reach a goal that matters and something gets in the way: constantly checking Facebook when you’re trying to finish writing a review that’s due in three hours. As Gazzaley and Rosen write, “The reason why goal interference in particular is so prominent in our lives, is the inherent complexity of our goals and the limitations we have in fulfilling them. Our ability to establish high-level goals is arguably the pinnacle of human brain evolution. Complex, interwoven, time-delayed, and often shared goals are what allow us humans to exert an unprecedented influence over how we interact with the world around us, navigating its multifaceted environments based on our decisions rather than reflexive responses to our surroundings.” Although our brains are limited in their ability to pay attention, the authors offer suggestions for changing them to better cope with these challenges.