Bound by the Past: Knowledge, Power, and Race in American Universities, 1636 - Present
This module examines the historical roots of American universities and their entanglements with systems of enslavement, colonialism, and segregation. It examines how universities served as intellectual engines that legitimized racial hierarchies and economic oppression. Through critical readings and case studies, this course also unveils those who fought back against segregation, carving spaces within Higher Education. Through this course, students will explore the complex relationship between education, power, and social justice, and consider how universities today confront - or fail to confront - their complex pasts.
*I independently designed and delivered this course as an MSt Options course at the University of Oxford in 2025/2026.
This course offers a critical history of American higher education, tracing its development from colonial colleges to contemporary research universities through the key lenses of race and resistance. Rather than understanding higher education as a neutral conduit for knowledge production and social mobility, students will interrogate universities as historically constructed institutions shaped by slavery, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. By analysing the broader racial, political, and social forces embedded in the academy’s foundations, students will learn to understand the campus not as a world apart but as a mirror on the underlying struggles, contradictions, and aspirations of the American project.
The course begins by exploring contemporary interventions that examine how slavery structured the foundations of American higher education, drawing particularly on transatlantic perspectives. Students will examine how enslaved labour, stolen land, and imperial ambitions shaped American academia and structured hierarchies of race, gender, and class therein. Subsequent weeks turn to the university as a site of resistance. We will study the formation and transformation of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as spheres of both constraint and creativity before tracing how universities confronted, managed, and accommodated the diverse student protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, the course concludes by examining contemporary critiques of the neoliberal university—on both left and right—including debates around campus policing, debt, privatisation, the sports-industrial complex, and discourses of diversity and decolonisation.
Core Questions Include:
In what ways have racial and colonial foundations shaped the development of American higher education?
What is the relationship between universities and state power?
How have students, faculty, and local communities resisted and reimagined higher education, contesting the university’s structures and purposes?
How have capitalism and neoliberalism shaped the priorities of contemporary universities, and how has this affected what it means to work and research within higher education today?
General Readings
Shepherd, Lauren Lassabe, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
Stein, Sharon, Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University, 2022)
Williams, Tuitt, and Squire, eds. Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (SUNY, 2021).
Additional General Readings
Dorn, Charles, For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America (Cornell University Press, 2021).
Geiger, Roger L., American Higher Education since World War II: A History (Princeton University Press, 2019).
Goodwin, John, Without Destroying Ourselves: A Century of Native Intellectual Activism for Higher Education (University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
Harris, Leslie; Campbell, James T.; and Alfred L. Brophy eds. Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019).
Kirby, William C. Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022).
Schrecker, Ellen, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (Chicago University Press, 2021).
Wilder, Craig Steven, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Class Descriptions
Week 1: Confronting the Past: Reckonings and Reparations in the Transatlantic University
This class introduces critical and historical approaches to studying higher education within the United States. It principally examines the historical entanglement of universities with slavery, colonialism, and dispossession, on both sides of the Atlantic. Through case studies and theoretical interventions, students will consider how institutions have grappled—or failed to grapple—with their legacies of violence, and what “reckoning” and “reparation” might mean in practice.
Core Readings
Boggs, Abigail, ‘Educational Pasts, Enduring Colonial Presents: Indigenous Student Conscripts and the Foundation of the US University,’ History of the Present 13, no. 2 (2023): 141–165 [26].
Exeter College, Oxford, Exeter College and the Legacies of Slavery Project Report (2023) [36].
Tuck, Eve and Yang, K. Wayne, ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,’ Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40 [41].
Zacek, Natalie, ‘The Price of Knowledge: Universities and Slavery in Anglo-American Perspective,’ American Nineteenth Century History (2025): 1–20 [20 pages].
Additional Readings
Advisory Group on Legacies of Enslavement Final Report (Cambridge, 2024).
Ahmed, A. Kayum, ‘#RhodesMustFall: How A Decolonial Student Movement in the Global South Inspired Epistemic Disobedience at the University of Oxford,’ African Studies Review 63, no. 2 (2020): 281–303.
Harris, Leslie; Campbell, James T.; and Alfred L. Brophy eds. Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019).
Mulle, Stephen, ‘British Universities and Transatlantic Slavery: The University of Glasgow Case,’ History Workshop Journal 91, no. 1 (April 2021): 210–233.
Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy, ‘“As Characteristic an Institution in America as the Church was Three Hundred Years Ago”: New Perspectives on Higher Education’s Past and Present,’ Reviews in American History 50, no. 3 (2022): 324–334.
The Princeton & Slavery Project [Online Exhibition].
Willoughby, Christopher D. E., Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools (University of North Carolina Press, 2022)
Week 2: Built to Exclude? The American University in the Age of Slavery, c.1636–1863
This session focuses once more upon the formative roles of slavery and racial hierarchy in the early U.S. university system. Students will interrogate how elite institutions accrued wealth, prestige, and legitimacy from these systems, while also examining how racial capitalism structured higher education institutions throughout the nineteenth century.
Core Readings
Jordan, Mount, and Parker, ‘“A Disgrace to All Slave-Holders”: The University of Chicago’s Founding Ties to Slavery and the Path to Reparations,’ Journal of African American History 103, no. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2018): 163–178 [16].
Wilder, Craig Steven, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (Bloomsbury, 2013) esp. Chp. 1–4, pp 15–148 [134 pages].
Williams, Bianca C., and Frank. A Tuitt, ‘Introduction: “Carving out a Humanity”: Campus Rebellions and the Legacy of Plantation Politics on College Campuses' in Williams, Tuitt, and Squire, eds. Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education, (SUNY, 2021) pp.1–32 [33].
Additional Readings
Baker, Elias J. ‘The University of Mississippi, the Board of Trustees, Students, and Slavery: 1848–1860,’ Journal of Mississippi History 79, no. 3 (2017):137–161.
Brent, Morris J. Oberlin, Hotbed of Abolitionism: College, Community, and the Fight for Freedom and Equality in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
Cohen, Michael David, Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2012).
Givens, Jarvis, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press, 2021).
Oast, Jennifer, ‘Forgotten No Longer: Universities and Slavery in Twenty-First-Century Scholarship and Memory,’ The Journal of the Civil War Era 13, no. 3 (2023): 369–391.
O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson, The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University (University of Virginia Press, 2021).
Williams, Timothy J., Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
Week 3: Land, Extraction, and the Settler Colonial University: Racial Capitalism in the Morrill Era, c.1850–1900
This class examines the material foundations of U.S. higher education in Indigenous dispossession, particularly examining those land-grant institutions established on Western land provided by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. Students will analyse how universities functioned as engines of dispossession and resource extraction, while also discussing the ongoing consequences of these colonial foundations for Native communities and students.
Core Readings
Lee, Robert and Ahtone, Tristan ‘Land-Grab Universities,’ High Country News (2020).
Nash, Margaret, ‘Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession,’ History of Education Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2019): 437–467 [31 pages].
Stein, Sharon, Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education (University of Minnesota Press 2022), Chp. 1 – 3, pp.50–162 [113].
Additional Readings
Givens, Jarvis, and Ashley Ison ‘Toward New Beginnings: A Review of Native, white, and Black American Education through the 19th Century,’ Review of Educational Research 93, no. 3 (2023): 319–352.
Goodwin, John, Without Destroying Ourselves: A Century of Native Intellectual Activism for Higher Education (University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
Harper, Liz and Adam Thomas, ‘“Woven into the Fabric”: The Legacy that Built a University,’ Journal of Appalachian Studies 30, no. 1 (2024): 8–28.
Misplaced Trust Project [Online investigative journalism project].
Parmenter, Jon, ‘Confronting Cornell University’s Origins in Indigenous Dispossession,’ The William and Mary Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2024): 123–134.
Stein, Sharon, ‘What Can Decolonial and Abolitionist Critiques Teach the Field of Higher Education?’ The Review of Higher Education 44, no. 3 (2021): 387–414.
Philip J. Stevens et al. ‘Tribal Nation Building and the Role of Faculty: Paying the Debt on Indigenous Well-Being in Higher Education,’ Journal of American Indian Education 60, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 13–43.
Week 4: Shelters in a Time of Storm: HBCUs Between Resistance and Reproduction, c. 1900–1960
This week explores Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as complex institutions of both empowerment and constraint. Students will study their origins in post-Emancipation philanthropy, their radical intellectual traditions, their role in producing Black leadership, and how HBCUs navigated segregation, state neglect, and institutional racism throughout the twentieth century.
Core Readings
Dumas, M. J. ‘Against the Dark: Anti-Blackness in Education Policy and Discourse,’ Theory into Practice 55, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 11–19 [9 pages].
Givens, Jarvis, ‘Black Education as the General Strike: The Radical Origins of African American Teaching and Learning,’ Journal of African American History 109, no. 2 (2024): 231–259 [29].
Gasman, Marybeth and Esters, Levon T. HCBU: The Power of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), Chp. 2–3, pp. 18–65 [58].
Favors, Jelani, Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Intro and Chp. 1-2, pp. 1–69 [70].
Additional Readings
Jones, Brian, The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History (New York University Press, 2022).
Gasman, Marybeth, ‘Swept under the Rug? A Historiography of Gender and Black Colleges,’ American Educational Research Journal 44, no. 4 (2007): 760–805.
Perkins, Alfred, Edwin Rogers Embree: The Julius Rosenwald Fund, Foundation Philanthropy, and American Race Relations (Indiana University Press, 2011).
Rose, Deondra, ‘Race, Post-Reconstruction Politics, and the Birth of Federal Support for Black Colleges,’ Journal of Policy History 34, no. 1 (2022): 25–59.
Savage, Barbara, Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (Yale University Press, 2023).
Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities [Documentary].
Williams, Zachery R. In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970 (University of Missouri Press, 2009).
Week 5: Student Revolt and the University in Crisis: From Free Speech to Third World Liberation, 1960–1980
Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, this session examines student protest as a transformative force in higher education. From Free Speech movements to Black and Third World Liberation struggles, students will trace how activism reshaped the university and contested its complicity in racial and imperial projects.
Core Readings
Biondi, Martha, The Black Revolution on Campus (University of California Press, 2017), esp. Chp. 1–3, pp. 13–113 [111 pages].
Bradley, Stefan, Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s (University of Illinois Press, 2009), Chp. 6–7, pp.110–154 [45].
Additional Readings
Cheng, Wendy, Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (University of Washington Press, 2023).
Cole, Eddie R., The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the 1960s Struggle for Black Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2020).
Ferguson, Roderick, We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California Press, 2017).
Lee, Sharon S. An Unseen Unheard Minority: Asian American Students at the University of Illinois (Rutgers University Press, 2022).
Rooks, Noliwe (2006) White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education (Beacon Press, 2006).
Rojas, Fabio, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
Ryan, Angela, ‘Counter College: Third World Students Reimagine Public Higher Education,’ History of Education Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2015): 413–440.
Week 6: The Neoliberal University: Crisis, Debt, and the Politics of Privatisation
In the final class, we assess the present and future of the American university in a neoliberal era. Students will explore the rise of tuition debt, the corporatisation of college sports, campus policing, and the limits of diversity, while also considering radical refusals of the neoliberal model and recent conservative attacks upon the sector.
Core Readings
Ahmed, Sara, On Being Included: Racism & Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012), Intro, pp.1–18 [19].
Cooper, Melinda, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2019), Chp. 6, pp.215–258 [44 pages].
Grange, Sandy, ‘Refusing the University’ in Eve and Yang eds., Towards What Justice? Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education (Bloomsbury, 2018), pp.47–65 [19].
Hawkins, Billy, The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly White NCAA Institutions (Palgrave MacMillan 2010), Intro and Chp. 1, pp.1–40 [41].
Shepherd, Lauren Lassabe, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Chp. 5–7, pp.99–151 [52 pages].
Additional Readings
Binder, Amy J. and Jeffrey L. Kidder, The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Boggs, Abigail and Nick Mitchell, ‘Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus,’ Feminist Studies 44, no. 2 (2018): 432–463.
Conner, Jerusha Obsberg, The New Student Activist: The Rise of Neoactivism on College Campuses (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).
Darian-Smith, Eve, Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why it Matters (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025).
Williams, Jeffrey J. ‘The Post-Welfare State University,’ American Literary History 18, no. 1 (2006): 190 – 216.
Williams, Teona, ‘For “Peace, Quiet, and Respect”: Race, Policing, and Land Grabbing on Chicago’s South Side,’ Antipode 53, no. 2 (2020): 497–523.
Yalile, Suriel ed., Cops on Campus: Rethinking Safety and Confronting Police Violence (University of Washington Press, 2023).
header image: image from william t. alexander, History of the colored race in america, via wikimedia commons