Professor: Use Social Unrest to Change Admissions Policies
By Christina Asquith
New York City
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 yet diminished.
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 Dr. Jerome Karabel during the lecture.
With a burgeoning immigrants’ rights movement afoot, Karabel’s diagnosis is both a recipe for activism and a portent of vigilantism. He 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 neither race nor ethnicity, but money, he says. Even as discontent over tuition costs swell, Karabel says 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.
