Student activism, diversity, and the struggle for a just society.

Abstract

Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 2016, Vol. 9, No. 3, 189 –202 © 2016 National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education 1938-8926/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000039 INTRODUCTION Student Activism, Diversity, and the Struggle for a Just Society Robert A. Rhoads This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. University of California, Los Angeles This introductory article provides a historical overview of various student move- ments and forms of student activism from the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement to the present. Accordingly, the historical trajectory of student activism is framed in terms of 3 broad periods: the sixties, the postsixties, and the contem- porary context. The author pays particular attention to student organizing to address racial inequality as well as other forms of diversity. The article serves as an introduction to this special issue and includes a brief summary of the remainder of the issue’s content. Keywords: student activism, student movements, student organizing, social justice, campus-based inequality During the early 1990s, as a doctoral student in sociology and higher education, I began to systematically explore forms of activism and direct action on the part of U.S. college stu- dents. My dissertation work focused on gay and bisexual males, including most notably their coming out experiences and the subsequent en- gagement by a subpopulation of my sample in queer politics and related activism. As I noted in Coming Out in College: The Struggle for a Queer Identity (Rhoads, 1994), the book ver- sion of my dissertation, identifying as “queer” was in part a recognition of “a political effort designed to create greater awareness and achieve increased rights and visibility for all queer people” (p. 113). The queer students in my study engaged in a variety of direct action strategies, most notably organizing coming out rallies, queer pride events, protest demonstra- tions, and facilitating “straight talks” (con- sciousness raising presentations) throughout the Editor’s Note. This is an introduction to the special issue “Student Activism.” Please see the Table of Contents here: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/dhe/9/3/.—RLW Correspondence concerning this article should be ad- dressed to Robert A. Rhoads, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los An- geles, 3321 Moore Hall, Box # 951521, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1521. E-mail: rhoads@ucla.edu campus, including in classrooms and residence halls. The students also participated in the 1993 March on Washington for lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights. I too joined the march and re- corded many of the students’ experiences and reflections, some of which are included in Com- ing Out in College. Studying gay and bisexual males was just the beginning of a long research journey focused on the role college students play in addressing a range of diversity issues. In Freedom’s Web: Student Activism in an Age of Cultural Diversity (Rhoads, 1998), I centered the struggles of stu- dents to address a variety of multicultural con- cerns that emerged on U.S. campuses during the 1990s. Cases of student activism included in Freedom’s Web represented an array of issues related to race, gender, and sexual orientation, primarily in terms of campus opportunity struc- tures that may promote or limit diversity. Around this time, I also conducted research on student outreach in the form of engagement in community service projects, leading to the book, Community Service and Higher Learn- ing: Explorations of the Caring Self (Rhoads, 1997). More recently, my work in the area of student activism turned to student-initiated re- tention and recruitment projects in which I ex- amined race- and ethnic-based student organi- zations and their contributions to strengthening college access and success (Maldonado,