Professor: Use Social Unrest to Change Admissions Policies
In 1960, the “big three” universities —Princeton, Harvard and Yale — admitted only a handful of Black students each year. But the rioting sparked by the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King forced the schools to rethink their admissions policy. By 1970, all three were integrated, with Princeton admitting 103 Black students. The gains made at those schools haven’t diminished yet.
A recent lecture at New York University’s Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy explored how the societal unrest of that period helped open the doors of Ivy League universities to Black students, and how it could serve as a blueprint for future social activism.
“Movements and struggles sometimes do lead to social change and tangible differences,” said professor Jerome Karabel during the lecture.
With a burgeoning immigrants’ rights movement afoot, Karabel’s diagnosis is both a recipe for activists and a portent of vigilantism. Karabel sees the recent predominantly Hispanic protests as having strains of a new civil rights movement, but without the same social pressures or headline-grabbing violence, they may prove ineffective. Furthermore, the barriers to college today for immigrants are not race or ethnicity, but money, he says. Even as discontent over tuition costs swells, colleges seem less responsive than ever.
The heart of Karabel’s thesis is that the violent riots in Los Angeles, Newark, N.J., Washington, D.C., and other cities were the catalyst for change in the ‘60s. Using charts, Karabel showed that the enrollment of Blacks at Harvard, Princeton and Yale went almost unchanged throughout the late 1950s despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Brown v. Board of Education, ending official segregation. Enrollments also remained unchanged throughout much of the ‘60s, even as civil rights legislation, sit-ins and peaceful protests swept the country.
However, after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 sparked rioting in 125 cities across the country, the universities took heed and in the following two years, Black enrollment shot up. In 1960, the big three universities enrolled a total of 15 Black students. Ten years later, more than 280 Black students were part of the freshman class.
