[music playing]
JOHN WRIGHT: Been
able to, or been
asked to talk about the Morrill
Hall Takeover in this context,
in different settings and
to different audiences.
So I'll try to focus
on what I think
are some of the kind of
questions and concerns
that this audience might have.
I was a student here, an
undergraduate student,
from 1963 to 1968.
And those years were years of
tremendous excitement and hope
on the part of the student
cohort I was part of.
And they were also years
of tremendous turbulence
and political chaos.
The fall semester of my
freshman year, John Kennedy
was assassinated in Dallas.
In February of 1965,
my junior year,
Malcolm X was assassinated
in New York City.
In, as we know,
the spring of 1968,
my year I graduated as a senior,
Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy were both assassinated.
Between those years, we
experienced a succession
of what were called
long, hot summers--
major urban rebellions in
African-American communities
that far exceeded the capacity
of local police forces
to address, and required the
US Army and the National Guard
to deal with.
And again, they
spanned the country.
They ultimately
led to the creation
of a presidential commission,
the Kerner Commission,
whose report came
out in 1967, and said
that we had created two separate
societies, white and black,
and unequal, and that
the current round
of civil disorders were part
of a cycle that went back
to the First World War, where
in fact, the third major cycle
of national urban civil disorder
centered on race-- again,
going back to the
post-World War One era.
We were also, of course, engaged
in an expanding war in Vietnam.
And because we still then
had a selective service
draft, all young men,
college men of adult age
were subject to that draft.
All these forces
combined, of course,
with the ongoing civil rights
movement and the crisis
that it had entered
in 1966 and 1967,
as some of the limitations and
failures of the civil rights
movement became more apparent,
again, in the wake of the 1963
March on Washington, as a new
generation of young, college
educated black students
began articulating
the call for black
power, and for replacing
the ministry of Dr.
Martin Luther King
and his associates, the
ministry and the quest
for a beloved community,
with realpolitik
in the university
and the larger,
broader institutional context.
And that all was part of the
backdrop of what happened here
on campus in terms of the
Morrill Hall Takeover.
The immediate stimulus for
it was the assassination
of Dr. King on
April 4th of 1968,
which took place on
a Friday afternoon.
I and some of my associates
from the Afro-American Action
Committee were on the West
Bank in the old Sgt. Preston's
at Seven Corners when the
national news came over
that Dr. King had
been assassinated.
Over the course of that weekend,
over 100 American cities
were in flames.
Massive civil
disorder sprung up,
and again, the US Army
and the National Guard
had to be called out to try
to address the circumstances.
I was a member of what then had
become the Afro-American Action
Committee, which was a new
name for the black student
organization on campus
that had preceded it,
which was called Students
for Racial Progress,
nicknamed STRAP.
It had been closely
tied, many ways,
to the tactics and outlooks,
again, of the civil rights
movement, under the
leadership of Dr. King.
We had changed the
name from STRAP--
Students for Racial Progress,
to the Afro-American Action
Committee in part in response
to the shift in outlook,
philosophical and
strategic, that
marked, again, the
transition from civil rights
to black power.
And Malcolm X and the Nation
of Islam and the groups that
would soon become
the Black Panthers
and so forth were part
of a whole spectrum
of radical new
African-American organizations
that, in many ways, repudiated
the older, non-violent,
civil disobedience,
pacifist orientation
that Dr. King represented.
We had chosen Afro-American
Action Committee
in that spirit.
We were, like most of our
peers at the time, caught up
in both the ideological
and pragmatic battles
over these different
approaches, these differing
views of history, and so forth.
And we had changed
our name, again,
to the Afro-American
Action Committee.
We decided, after some intense
discussion over that weekend,
following Dr. King's
assassination,
that we should make a decision
about what response we might
provide that would honor Dr.
King's philosophy and outlook,
however much we might disagree
with some of his strategic
and tactical stances.
And in that context,
I was asked to draft
a set of demands that
were then submitted
to the then president,
Malcolm Moos.
And those seven
demands, again, were
sent to the President
Moos's office
that week following
the assassination.
The university did what
universities characteristically
do, which is to create a task
force to study the scenario.
And the task force meandered at
its serpentine deliberations,
month after month, after
month, through the summer,
through the fall, to the
end of the year of 1968.
And when representatives
of our group
finally went to meet
with President Moos's
representatives, it was
clear that the task force had
made little progress indeed.
And we then decided, again,
in Dr. King's spirit,
to take non-violent
direct action
to occupy Morrill Hall
until the university dealt
in a straightforward way
with that set of demands.
The demands, again, that
I originally drafted--
some of them were
specific and tactical.
They called for a specific
number of 200 full scholarships
for African-American students
in the state of Minnesota,
at the University of Minnesota.
We called for the
review board to examine
the policies of the
athletic department
toward black athletes.
We asked that the new
West Bank library--
and the West Bank
was very new then--
and it hadn't been named, that
Dr. Martin Luther King's name
be given serious consideration
for naming the new West Bank
library.
We asked that admissions
and recruitment strategies
be developed, since none had
existed heretofore, to recruit,
admit and provide financial aid
for African-American students,
and counseling
services and advising
services, especially geared
to the needs of black students
be created.
And we asked that the
curriculum of the university
reflect the contributions
of black people
to the commonwealth and
culture of these United States.
Those were the demands,
essentially, in sum.
There was immediate
reaction that we
were trying to destroy the
university with those demands.
President Moos at
the time-- and he
was very straightforward
and honest,
a man of some integrity,
we all acknowledge,
said that to him, they
seemed eminently reasonable.
But the negotiations
had broken down
and we occupied Morrill Hall.
Out of the Morrill
Hall occupation,
a series of much more
narrow enterprises emerged.
There was agreement to create
a Department of Afro-American
and African Studies,
to fund a National
Conference of Black
Students on this campus,
and also to provide the
support to bring Muhammad
Ali to campus, who then was
touring the country, having
been stripped of his
heavyweight boxing championship
for refusing induction into the
Vietnam War and the US Army.
And he was touring campuses,
and so we brought Muhammad Ali
to campus.
That's right.
So that's the immediate
context for what happened.
But the demands
themselves-- some of them
had been stewing for a
very, very long time.
And I don't want to go
on at great length here,
but our student group
had a wide variety
of black student backgrounds.
Some of us, like Rosemary
Freeman and Horace Huntley, who
were two of our
group, were ultimately
indicted by the Hennepin County
attorney for the takeover,
were from the deep South,
from Mississippi and Alabama,
and had been involved
in the civil rights
protests and freedom
movements in the deep South.
Horace was also in the US Army.
He came here after doing a term
in the service and so forth.
A good number of us were
Minnesota born and bred,
and in my own case,
my father and aunt
had been students at this
university back in the 1930s.
My aunt was the
lone black student
at what was then called the
School of Technology, which
has ultimately become the
Institute of Technology,
and one of only a
handful of women students
who were in the School of
Technology at that time.
My father was a
lone black student
in the School of
Mortuary Science.
They were there as students when
Lotus Coffman was president.
And Lotus Coffman had created
a policy of de facto Jim Crow
on the university campus
that barred black students
from living in the
dormitories, that reinforced
segregationist policies
of fraternities
and sororities, that allowed
the athletic department to keep
black athletes from competing
against teams primarily
from the deep South, who did
not countenance competing
against black
athletes on the field.
So the Gopher black
athletes either had
to stay home, or
sit on the bench.
There were a long
list of grievances
that had emerged in the 1930s.
And my aunt had in fact
become the president
of the first black
student organization
on this campus, the
Council of Negro Students,
to confront President Coffman
and the deans and associates,
who included Nicholson
and Middlebrook and Coffey
and the others who had done so.
So in the times in my father and
aunt had been here, to 30 years
later, when I started,
there had been
comparatively little change in
the status of African-Americans
on this campus.
So in my case, and the case of
a number of others in our group,
after, in fact, we had
occupied Morrill Hall,
and we fully expected then
to be jailed in the process,
I called home-- some
other of my comrades
did-- and notified my father
that he needed to round up
some bail money, because
I expected to be in jail,
and asked for his
advice and counsel.
And they did not advise
us not to do this.
The advice was, be careful.
So I've rambled
on at some length.
I can come back in the
Q and A to some of this,
but that's, I think, a fairly
concrete attempt to sketch out
the context in which the
Morrill Hall Takeover emerged,
from which the Department of
Afro-American Studies emerged,
the creation of the Martin
Luther King Jr. Counseling
and Advising Program in the
College of Liberal Arts,
and in the wake of the takeover,
as David will explain here,
the creation of the American
Indian Studies Department,
the first such major
department in this country two
years later, the formation of
the Chicano Studies Program
and two years later after
that, Women's Studies.
So there are a variety of ripple
effects from the Morrill Hall
Takeover that dramatically
changed the culture
and, I think, the
sensibility of this campus.
KAREN HANSON: I think it would
be good to hear a little bit
more about those changes
that emerged afterwards
from both David and Lena.
Earlier, before
the session began,
we were talking about what
we remembered from that day,
because I think we were
both on campus as well.
But perhaps we should talk about
some of the positive things
that [inaudible] Then you
could talk a little bit about
[inaudible]
DAVID BEAULIEU: Sure.
I could do that.
Of course, American
Indian Studies
started, as you mentioned.
[inaudible] passed it on the
same day, on June 7, 1969.
I don't see the Indian Studies
necessarily emerging from that,
but happening because of it.
Let me put it that way,
because I knew then
that Indian Studies was
developing from 1964 under O.
Meredith Wilson and efforts of
the Bureau of Indian Affairs
that were connected to
the termination policy,
or the policy to attempt to
encourage self-determination
and education among American
Indians for the purpose
that they may ultimately
have to take over
their own affairs after the
Bureau sort of disavowed
the treaties and stopped
all the support guaranteed
by the treaties, would
no longer protect
the Indian lands from taxes,
and so on and so forth.
So that was a big issue
to tribal people then.
It was a policy
began in the 50s,
and it continued well up until
Nixon disavowed it in 1970.
So that was the umbrella
of what was the principle
concern of just about everybody,
and why we went to school.
There was something called
Education for Leadership.
There was a major focus
of what was going on,
and so scholarships and other
efforts were established.
I got a scholarship
grant to come here
for the Minnesota State Indian
Scholarship Program, which
was established in
1955 as a result
of that whole overall
policy thread.
The State didn't
know what to do.
What are we going
to do when Indians
are no longer under the
Bureau of Indian Affairs?
And so all these
things begin to happen.
In fact, when I
was driving here,
I drove by the Armory Building.
And I remember routinely
visiting that building,
because there was a
man in there-- in fact,
I still remember
his name, because he
was so important to me.
He was the man that handed
out my scholarship check
from the State Indian
Scholarship Program.
And his name was
Vance [? juelson, ?]
and I got to know that
guy real well, because I
needed to know him well.
And I asked him once, I
says, how many others here
are getting tribal,
federal or state
Indian Scholarship grants?
And he says, 38 in
the entire university.
I didn't see many of
them myself, you know.
There were a few around.
And so it was interesting to
understand that, at that time.
You know what a full ride
was 1966, when I entered?
Books, tuition and
fees, it was $340.
I thought it was a lot of
money, to tell you the truth.
A gallon of gas, a gallon of
milk and a pack of cigarettes
were all the same
price, around $0.30.
And so I mean, prices
were different.
But it was a huge opportunity
to go to college at that time.
And so that's how I got here.
And so I remember that.
And it's interesting.
I understand that
the fall of 1966
was the beginning of the Rough
Rock Demonstration School
on the Navajo reservation.
But I learned that here
when I was an undergrad.
I learned that from Roger
Buffalohead, who came here
to teach in Indian Studies.
And I still remember
some of my first classes.
And most of these classes,
where they're just starting,
had a lot of Indian
students in them.
I mean, relatively speaking.
Of course, we were getting more
and more students all the time.
But I never had a professor do
this before, or really since.
He came in and says, if
everybody here who's Indian,
would you raise your hand.
I never had anybody
ask that before.
And so I'm kind of
looking around the room,
and everybody's kind of looking
around, checking each other,
and saying, well,
you know, are you?
Are you not?
What's the story here?
And pretty soon, everybody
starts to raise their hand--
sheepishly at first, you know.
And pretty soon, they're
all up in the air.
That's more of a metaphor to me
of what was really happening--
people saying, yes, I am.
I'm an Indian person, you know.
And so that whole
feeling was happening
among the Indian
community on campus
that I started to
get to know then.
And we all had some very
interesting things in common.
It was an amazing
experience, which
I continued into graduate school
from, with the Indian Studies.
It was basically a program--
what do you call it--
that I took in addition to
my PhD program, you know.
And so I took a whole bunch
of courses from Roger,
and a bunch of other people.
Having a person
like that on campus,
who understood federal
Indian relationships,
and could contextualize it
for you as an Indian student,
and while you're being
educated at the same time,
was really fascinating
to me to do that,
and to be able to do that.
Just as the department
is established,
I was also working at the
State Historical Society.
And I had been doing this
since about 16 years old.
My mother got me the job there.
But I was working
there one day, and I
was told to stay late and
go get a particular box out
of the museum
vault, which I did.
I took it to the photography
section, opened it up.
There were two men
in that area, to take
a picture of what was in there.
I didn't know the one man,
but the photographer I did,
a guy named Gene Becker.
And I had to go
through the process
of taking what's in the box out
so it could be photographed.
What I saw was a human skull
and scalp and arm bone,
and learned in the
process of that
that was Little Crow, the
leader of the Sioux war
in Minnesota in 1862.
That transformed me as a
person and as a student,
to see that there, and
to ask the question, why?
Now, there was really
not too many people
in the university to
help me do that study.
But I did all the
research on that.
I learned that you could--
what was interesting to me,
because there was literally not
much in the university
about American Indians--
a lot was negative--
is that you weren't
necessarily dependent on it
to learn the past.
You just had to go
find it yourself.
And so I started researching.
And I found every dang
thing you could find
about that particular incident.
And I accomplished
something by it.
I actually accomplished,
ultimately,
the burial of Little Crow
in Flandreau, South Dakota,
though the state
didn't want to do it.
They were going to hold
him for an exhibition
in southern Minnesota, at
the Lower Sioux Agency,
and make a tourist
attraction out of it.
Nonetheless, he got buried.
And when I went to
graduate school,
my son Jim and
three of my students
were all Little Crow
descendants, relatives.
And so I was able
to accomplish that.
But I did that.
It's interesting--
I positioned myself
in the middle of what I needed
to know as an Indian person,
and I sought the information
I needed to have to do that.
Indian studies helped
with that process.
It helped with that
because we had instructors
who understood that, and in that
interaction of understanding,
the federal-tribal
relationship, understanding
all of that business about
your own sort of civics,
your own real civics,
what happened really.
Knowing that, it frees you up.
It positions you in the
center of who you are,
of who you can be, and it
sets you off in a direction.
University did that.
The environment
that I grew up here,
in the University of
Minnesota, did that.
And an absolutely
thrilling time.
And I remember a lot of
that whole time period.
I don't know if you know
much about Ada Deer,
but she was working
at the University,
and was involved with a
Center for Indian Affairs out
of the Training Center
for Community Programs.
I actually had an opportunity
to work on the National
Study of American
Indian Education,
funded by the
Office of Education
as an art grad in that program.
And so that was absolutely
a thrilling thing to do,
to be given that
kind of opportunity
to be connected to Indian
education, which was
interesting to do that here.
The department started off.
It had two language programs--
Dakota language and
Ojibwe language programs.
And as we understood,
the university
thought it was
worthwhile to do it,
because this was a significant
cultural heritage of Minnesota.
And it needed to be done.
It wasn't necessarily tied
to student enrollment.
It was something
the university had
to do, as a part of its
mission to the state,
to do what it could to
save those languages.
And so I could go on, you know.
[laughter]
KAREN HANSON: And
we want you to,
but we also want to make sure
that [inaudible] has a chance
to weigh in on this.
I was taken by what
you said, John,
about the shift in focus of
name [inaudible] black power,
and the anecdote of
raising your hands
and claiming the identity.
And I should say,
from the other side,
[inaudible] when I was in
Vincent Hall at the time,
when it was being taken over,
and we had a math professor who
was very--
I took about four
courses from him.
He was a wonderful guy,
[? phil rosenstein, ?]
who was helping
us learn about why
those of us who saw ourselves
on the left as students
needed to back off
from the takeover,
and leave that to the
African-American students.
I was in [? sds ?] at the time,
and there was a little bit
of [inaudible] in it.
It was another time when
we had to put our hands
in a different direction.
And I want to hear about
the formation of HECUA
and how it understands
its heritage
from its founding in '68, and
the way it's evolved over time.
LENA JONES: Yeah.
So, I'll be transparent
about a few things.
One, I wasn't alive in
1968, as many of you
have probably guessed.
[laughter]
So what I'm sharing
is part of the story
that's passed on within
the organization,
and what I've been able to find
in archives, and in articles
that have been written
about the history of HECUA.
But even though I wasn't
there, that legacy
is very much ingrained
in the program
that I ended up taking over
in 2006, which was then
called the Civil Rights Movement
History and Consequences
and now is called Race
in America Then and Now.
So a little bit of my second
and third hand knowledge
about the origins of HECUA.
So in the story of
the organization,
there are two key
figures that loom large.
One is a man named Joe Bash,
who was a Lutheran minister, who
did work and was embedded in the
community in North Minneapolis,
and amongst many other
things, did immersive youth
programs for young people
and for seminarians.
The other person who looms large
is a man named Joel Torstenson.
I always have to kind of
concentrate when I say it.
Right.
Joel Torstenson, who is one of
the founders of the Sociology
Department at
Augsburg University,
and a real pioneer in
experiential education
more broadly as well.
Torstenson, even prior to
1968, did a lot of work
around thinking through the role
of colleges and universities
in general in society, and in
particular, because Augsburg
was a religious-based
university, kind
of thinking about
the connections
between Christian liberal arts
education and social change
as well.
And so they both come
with this history of work,
and exploration
of these questions
about the power of
experiential education,
the power of not just
thinking about social issues
and social problems
in an abstract sense,
but immersing oneself, and
learning and experiencing
things, and thinking
through things,
and experiencing the
educational process in ways
that don't just
involve the brain,
but the body and
the spirit as well.
So of course, '68 comes.
And you've already heard
many of the things--
thank you for that
amazing context.
What happened in '68--
the story is that Joe Bash
was looking for people
to connect with within
universities and colleges
in the Twin Cities.
And fate led him to connect
with Mr. Torstenson.
I will get his name right.
And they joined together.
Torstenson too was frustrated
by the limits of education
within the walls
of a university,
within the walls
of the classroom.
And really thinking
through, OK, so what's
the role of the
university at this moment?
And he thought it
certainly wasn't just here
in the classroom, talking
about what's happening outside.
So the two of them got
together and came up
and developed something
called the crisis colony.
And it ended up being a
group of 18 students who
basically had this educational
experience off campus.
So they were off campus.
You know, different
versions of the story.
I guess at some moment,
they're in a synagogue,
and in other accounts they
were in an old Catholic house.
So they were housed
in North Minneapolis.
And they had this incredible
educational experience
that challenged many of the
normal ways of doing things
in colleges and universities.
For one, it
challenged the notion
that the important
things to learn
are the things that you
learn in a classroom.
It challenged the view that
the important things to learn
are the things that you
learn from folks who
are trained to be professors.
Many of the instructors
in the program
were community folks who
were actually doing the work.
And it challenged students to
think about, all right, so,
who am I as an
actor in this world?
How is my life connected to
these larger social forces that
are at work, and that
are causing and driving
these things that we are
experiencing right now?
And how do we think about
our educational experiences
in a way that challenges the
individualistic way that we
often think about the
educational experience
of personal achievement?
How do we see this
experience as being connected
to not only our fellow
students, but also the learning
experiences and growth
of our professors,
of our fellow
inhabitants of the city?
And because of the success
of this experience,
this experiment, it was expanded
to a semester-long program.
And then eventually,
it became the thing
that birthed the creation
of the Higher Education
Consortium of Urban Affairs,
also known as HECUA,
which incorporated
officially in 1971
as a non-profit organization.
Also what happened
too was, often,
this type of intensive,
deeply experiential education
requires a lot of resources.
So part of what happened
between '68 and '71 as well
is that Torstenson and Bash and
some of the other professors
who were involved
in the crisis colony
decided that we wanted
to build a consortium,
so to also connect with
professors from other colleges
and universities in the Twin
Cities who were really deeply
interested in this
transformational type
of education, and again,
formed this consortium.
The crisis colony
ended up becoming
a program called MUST--
Metro Urban Studies
Term, which is now
called Inequality in America.
And then after that,
HECUA formed a wide range
of programs,
domestic and abroad,
that embraced the same view
of education-- you know,
education as transformation,
education viewing
the world as your classroom,
education that challenges
these boundaries that
are inherent, often,
to the traditional and
dominant educational experience
in the United States.
So, yeah.
And I guess, at some point, I
could talk about the program
that I teach too, but
I'll see where you're
leading with the questions.
KAREN HANSON: Well,
we'd like to hear
about that, because the
program that you're doing now
presumably speaks to what
you think is needed now.
LENA JONES: Yes.
KAREN HANSON: And
I guess I'd like
to hear from everybody on the
panel about what you think
student activism
should look like now,
given the circumstances
we're in today.
So you want to continue?
LENA JONES: Yeah.
So I hesitate to
make some statement
about what I think student
activism should look like.
What I'd rather say is,
I have some thoughts
about the types of spaces that
I as an educator should create.
So I'll say a little
bit about my program,
and maybe I'll
lead into that bit.
So the program that I direct, as
I mentioned before, originally
was called Civil Rights Movement
History and Consequences.
It was created by
Duchess Harris.
I believe she was the
first director of it,
an amazing professor
at McAllister.
And originally, it
was a program that
was a January term program.
It was based in the Twin Cities.
So it would start
in the Twin Cities,
and then the students in the
program would get on a bus
and travel through the South
and connect with people
who were involved
in the civil rights
slash black freedom
movement in the 50s and 60s,
just taking advantage of
this amazing opportunity
to connect with people who
were central to one of the most
significant social movements
of the 20th century,
and getting students, and
creating space for students,
again, to connect
their own experiences
and lives as current and
emerging social change agents
to the experiences and
stories of these people
they have the
privilege of meeting.
And the power in that
experience is not only
in the interaction with
people, and the opportunity
to hear differing
perspectives on what happened,
the opportunity to bring to
life the things that you read
on a page, through not only
interacting with people,
but also being physically
in places as well,
which has its own power,
but also the opportunity
to create community with
people, and see your fates
and lives as being connected.
So in 2005, I cold called HECUA.
And a colleague of mine,
a guy named Stanley Hatch,
who's now at Metro State--
so, give props to Stanley.
You know, we were
talking about how
frustrated we were about how
little our students, and even
our African-American
students at MCTCE,
knew about the civil
rights movement.
And we had this
conversation around the time
that Rosa Parks
passed away as well.
And you know, we were
shocked by the fact
that we ran into a few students
who didn't know who she was.
Even though the simplest,
the most superficial accounts
of the movement have
Rosa Parks, right?
So I cold called HECUA.
I asked them, would you
be interested in doing
this civil rights course
during the summer,
because at MCTCE, we
don't have J-Term.
And interest was expressed.
And I ended up
teaching the program
for the first time in 2006.
Over time, for a while,
for several years,
we stuck to that model,
where we based it here.
We spent a week here getting
students grounded in theories
of social movements, social
change, history leading up
to the movement, and then spent
a week on the bus and kind
of wrapped things up here.
But after 2011, I thought
that, and in part inspired
by my experience in Oslo,
teaching the Divided States
of Europe program,
that this program
would be so much more
powerful if we were actually
based in the South.
And in some years prior, I
built some deep relationships
with people in
Jackson, Mississippi.
And through those
relationships, we
were able to anchor
the program there.
And so getting back
to the question of,
I guess what's needed right
now, and what types of spaces
are needed right now.
Spaces are needed where
students can feel--
I don't want to say comfortable,
but spaces where students can
grapple collectively with the--
how do I want to say it--
spaces where it's OK to grapple
with the messiness of change,
to grapple with the messiness
of, and the complexity of,
both our past and present,
to grapple with the ways
that our individual lives
and histories connect
with the past, spaces
where students can build
relationships with one
another and with others,
in a way that's not
just transactional,
that's not just about
networking, but that's again
about what do we all
bring to this world?
You know, what are
we passionate about?
What is the change we
want to see in this world?
And how do we all
fit in that picture,
and how can we create
this world together,
and start that
work in the class,
but continue that work once our
official time together is done?
And my experience with HECUA has
been a really powerful journey,
because I get to see
how much easier it
is to do that outside of
the structure of a higher Ed
institution, because I get to
contrast it with my experience
within teaching within a higher
Ed institution, my community
college, which I love.
But there are quite
a few barriers
to doing that really
deep type of experiential
transformational education.
And one has to always hustle
and find the cracks and spaces
to be able to do that in
a really powerful way.
KAREN HANSON: One of the
things that you pointed out
was that part of what you saw as
a responsibility was presenting
the history, which was
a typical thing that I
think any educational
institution would embrace.
But then the rest of
your answer seemed
to focus on creating the
conditions to determine
what they saw as the
next steps in it.
And I would assume that that's
something that the older
folks over here, those of us--
DAVID BEAULIEU:
Gently, please, Karen.
Gently.
KAREN HANSON: --want
to acknowledge
that it's not the old
telling the young how
to find the way forward.
It's the young finding the way
forward and telling the old
where they're going.
But I still want those of
us to remember the 50 years
ago to say a word about it.
So, John, do you want to
comment on what you think might
be productive paths today?
JOHN WRIGHT: One of the
reverberations of the Morrill
Hall Takeover on
this campus has been
that students in the
present, grappling
with contemporary issues,
have tried to make contact
with those of us from the
earlier generation about how
to deal with crises or
institutional issues
in the present, as if we
had a template for doing so.
And I've always been willing,
and those of us again,
who are survivors of the
Morrill Hall Takeover,
been willing again to talk with
them about what, in fact, we
did.
And I think one of the things
that one learns over time
is just how precarious
and provisional a response
to a particular historical
circumstance may be.
So my first response
is to suggest
that what's critical
here is that you
go through the same process
that we did of trying to develop
a mature historical
consciousness,
about the human movement
through space and time,
and the particularities
of this circumstance
that you're in here
and now, how do they
relate to the particularities
of circumstance
that our earlier generations
were in, and what usable
can you adapt from that?
One of the tremendous
differences
between 1968 and
2018 is the array
of technological tools
available for students
of this generation that were
not available to us then.
And it's a mind boggling
transformation in some ways,
but Alvin Toffler had talked
about, back in the 70s,
as the futurist
enterprise developed,
and future shock was the ways
in which the new technologies
could become historical
drivers in their own right.
And they had potential
outcomes that
simply could not be prophesied
from past vantage points.
So just simply grappling with
the issue about how do you
use contemporary
technologies in the course
of dealing with
institutional crises,
and the push for social justice
and social change on the campus
and off the campus.
You know, some of the
student led enterprises
that are operating now--
Black Lives Matter
amongst them--
have been trying to do
so, trying to incorporate
some of the new technologies.
But I think we're just at
a beginning stage in terms
of wrestling with that.
And of course, when one sees
how the new technologies can
be grotesquely
abused and misused
about the potential
dangers there also.
But really, for me,
it's always been
this matter of developing
a mature historical
consciousness.
And that was critical
for our generation.
And part of what's
significant to speak
to part of what
Lena was saying is
that a significant
part of our developing
historical consciousness took
place outside the Academy,
because there was
no discussion of
the African-American
historical experience
predicaments in the Academy.
We relied very heavily
on independent scholars
in the African-American
community.
They worked out of
community centers,
or independent
scholars and writers
and worked for newspapers,
and so on and so forth.
And we had an array
of study groups,
and we read
omnivorously an array
of texts that had
emerged in the early 60s
in this country and outside,
that were really critical.
I can recall when the
works of Frantz Fanon
were being translated from
French into English, maybe
in 1964 and 1966,
works like Black Skins
White Masks, The Wretched of
the Earth, Dying Colonialism
and so on.
And the works of so
many African writers
who had dealt with
issues of decolonization
and fighting against
European imperial powers,
and trying to make
the potential transfer
extrapolate from
one to the other.
And one of the motive forces
behind the black power
movement and key texts was
precisely that process--
Stokely Carmichael's and Charles
Hamilton's book, Black Power,
was a process of
basically changing
the paradigm in which we thought
about African-American life,
which had historically
been largely
about trying to draw analogies
between the African-American
experience and European
immigrant experiences
in this country.
What Black Power did
was say, the situations
of African-Americans
in this country
are more akin to those of
colonized peoples in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America,
than they are to those
of European immigrants.
And so the immigrant
analogy was starkly
cast aside and replaced
by the colonial analogy.
And as a consequence,
the theories
of praxis of liberation began to
be conceptualized more and more
in terms of the strategies
of decolonization
than they were in terms
of immigrant assimilation
over a generation.
That's just one example.
But again, this was being
done outside the Academy.
And part of the question we
were asking, why can't this
be done at this
university, which
is supposed to be a land
grant university, right?
And this is the point I beat
on in some of these talks
that I've given here recently,
because people don't seem
to understand this about
the origins of public
higher education
in this country,
and the foundation
of the land grant.
There was no public
higher education
in the United States of
America in the middle
of the 19th century.
Higher education was
for the manored classes,
the mercantile
classes of the South,
the plantation aristocracy in
the Deep South and so forth.
The moral acts that
created public colleges
and universities came out
of the battle over slavery.
And Justin Morrill was the
son of a illiterate Vermont
blacksmith who'd grown
up, essentially, doing
manual labor as a child,
until he and an associate
managed to have business
success and to succeed, then
in an early version
of the stock market.
And then with that
prosperity, devoted himself
to public service, and
to trying to create
a new kind of
possibilities for education
that his father had not had.
And the first attempts
to create the land
grant colleges came out
of legislative battles
in the 1850s, when President
James Buchanan, who
was strongly allied
with the slave power,
and who saw education for the
masses and the middle classes
as a threat to social order--
at any rate, the early attempts
at trying to create
public land grant colleges
and universities were held
down until the Civil War,
until the South
seceded, until finally,
when Lincoln became
president, Morrill
was able to get the
1862 Morrill Act passed,
that created land grant colleges
and universities like this.
And colleges and
universities, which
Morrill himself said, because
he was also an abolitionist,
ought to have front and foremost
the education of the sons
and daughters of toil,
which is a 19th century
euphemism for slaves.
The Morrill Acts created
public higher education.
They also created most of the
historically black colleges
and universities.
At any rate, in terms of
reimagining the kind of battles
that go on this campus--
because some of the battles that
students are dealing with now
in part are the reverberations
of the long battle over whether
education is going to be public
education--
who is it to serve?
And whether this
institution ought
to model itself on private
institutions, the Ivy League
schools of the East and
so forth, an education,
again, for the essentially
contemporary aristocracies
and elites, or whether, in
fact, the masses, the people,
the working classes, the middle
classes, the under classes,
ought to be its focus and
the primary beneficiaries.
Anyway, that kind of battle,
that kind of historical
conscious that we were
trying to cultivate,
and I again suggest that
students at this point in time
need to understand the
history at a deep level, far
beyond dates and places
and names and so forth--
the deeper structures
of history.
History may not repeat
itself, but it does rhyme.
[laughter]
KAREN HANSON: David, especially
following on the admonitions
that John has just
given us, I mean,
I'm sure there's a
different riff you may want
to give on the notion
of the land grant here,
and what it means for
activism today on this campus.
DAVID BEAULIEU: Absolutely.
I wanted to first mention,
because a lot of points
have been made, but I've been
a faculty member in a lot
of different institutions.
And I've almost always
did the same type of work
in that regard.
But I've never met
an Indian student
that didn't position his purpose
or reason for being at college
or university to be
not to go back home,
to do something to contribute
to his community and his people.
And they all have
different ideas about that.
Many don't understand how
they're going to get there,
and how their education is
going to matter to that.
But they explain that is a
reason why they're there.
The extent to which a
university such as this,
or other institutions
can help that student
get there is what
they're looking for.
And that has ebbed and flowed
in the history of Indian Student
Services and Indian Studies and
other efforts at this campus
and other places.
And I see just
generally a downturn--
generally, in the ability
of institutions to respond
to that overall need.
It is somewhat
discouraging in a way,
to realize that I remember
that when Indian students came
into colleges, they would
form student councils, clubs,
groups, to form community.
And we did that with our
graduate program here.
Indian students from
all over the country
coming together to
study something.
We all had experiences
in Indian education.
We're all Indian people.
And we were able to get together
and to go to graduate school
with an ambition
of going forward
into what was emerging as an
Indian education movement.
And we solved a
lot of the issues
by establishing our
own institutions,
in our own tribes, our own
schools, our own colleges.
All of that.
And one of the things that
I did when I left here
was, I went to work at
Rosebud, South Dakota,
to be with a student who also
came from that same graduate
program, who, by the way is
the longest serving president
of any college in
the United States.
He just celebrated his 48th
year of continuous service
as a president of
[inaudible] University.
I was there at the
time we developed it
towards the goal
of accreditation,
and we became the
first tribal college
to have a bachelor's degree.
I remember what
higher education was
like where the rubber meets
the road, so to speak,
when you're trying to
really meet community
needs with a higher
education program
to educate tribal
people locally,
and then to begin to have more
expansive view of that type
of education in terms of
doing research, of service,
and teaching that connects
directly to the community.
As a dynamic for
community development,
it's a dynamic for improving
the basic civic health
of the whole community, and
doing a number of things.
It's absolutely thrilling
to see that going.
That's, in a sense,
the land grant mission.
The ability of the
large institutions
such as this, which have a
tradition of a land grant
institution that is established
in the state of Minnesota,
at times stands in opposition
to tribal communities
because of the research they do,
because of the service they do,
and so on and so forth.
You just take a look at the
Anthropology Department,
and the professor
[? jinx ?] here,
during the time we went through
allotment on the White Earth
Indian Reservation.
He was doing research--
this is in the period my
father was a young man--
doing research by running
around White Earth,
pulling hair out of people's
heads, scratching their skin
and doing other types
of biometric measures
to determine who
was a full blooded
and who was a mixed blood,
because a law made full bloods
incompetent to make
their decisions.
And if you had some white
blood, you would be competent.
And too bad if somebody ripped
you off in the first place.
Basically, that's it.
And the biology lab was
used, and so on and so forth.
And so it rendered
a good service
to the state of
Minnesota, because
of all the white pine that
was taken and all of the lands
that were opened for
settlement in the North.
So how do you counter that?
How do you counter that type of
a position of research service
of a large institution,
when it comes
to real tribal communities,
reservations and so forth?
You do that by, first of all,
trying to do it yourself.
Have your own those
kind of functions
developed, which occurs in
the tribal colleges somewhat.
Or you develop a way of
articulating a relationship
with the existing institution
to control or regulate
the process of
doing the research.
Those are big issues.
But they're directly dependent
on the future of home,
of community, of tribal
interest and so forth.
Wild rice studies,
the modification
of the genome around wild
rice, issues of environment
and so on and so forth,
all directly important,
to which you could develop
research partnerships
with tribal colleges, with a
large institution like this,
or a number of other things.
But Indian students,
as I got to know them,
their activism was
focused towards that.
Towards that energy,
towards that.
And it requires
a real education,
not just passing
courses and being
qualified to get a degree.
I mean, real education.
[? larry aiken, ?] a good friend
of mine-- just passed away,
by the way, if anybody
even knew him--
wonderful man.
He said, Indian education
isn't going to school.
It's learning your creation.
And what he meant by that
is learning everything
you can about who you are,
about your position in life
and your purpose in life.
And that's a lifelong
occupation and purpose
for any human being.
And to learn that, it's
different than simply passing
a course about your tribe, or
about federal Indian relations
and so forth.
There is incredible
cultural heritage
that's available to be learned.
And to develop a
hunger for that.
And once you stimulate that
in an institution of higher
education, that sort of
hunger to learn that,
it becomes self-sustaining
all your life.
And that's what I
see has happened here
in various places,
and can happen.
I see it on the
decline in a way,
because there's not
enough energy in a way,
to continue that sometimes.
And yet, you know, it's funny.
I've been going to these forums
in Rapid City, South Dakota
with a number of
really old timers
who discuss, well,
where do we go now?
What do we do now
with all of this?
And we keep on thinking,
well, you know,
we don't see any
of the old timers
anymore when we
go to conferences.
You know, they're all
declining in number.
And they're just
not the same people.
Nobody's around anymore.
We don't know anybody.
And et cetera.
And they really
don't know anything
about the heritage
of what has been done
and what they're doing.
One of our people who spoke,
he says, you know what?
Neither did we when we started.
You know, neither did we.
And he says, I
remember how we were.
We just had a certain
confidence that we
were going to get things
done and learn what
we needed to do to get it done.
And he says, I have faith
that our young people
will do the same.
He says, if we just won't
be so worried about them.
KAREN HANSON: Thanks so much.
This old timer actually has
to go give an honorary degree.
And so I very much regret
leaving just at the point
where we were about to open
up for a broader discussion.
But I wanted to first make
sure that we thank you,
and then you're going to have
an open Q and A, I think,
for the audience.
So thank you.
DAVID BEAULIEU:
Thank you, Karen.
[applause]
JENNIFER GUNN: Thank
you, Provost Hanson.
And we are going to
open the floor now
for questions for our panelists.
I think you all have raised a
number of significant issues.
So it's always hard
to see, but questions?
The floor is open.
I'm going to stand here so
the light isn't in my eyes.
Yes?
MALE SPEAKER: Perhaps
it's a comment to make.
Might be a response.
I appreciate all your
comments and contributions.
But I think it's also important,
as one of the old timers,
for the younger timers here to
know how contentious everything
was at that time.
And I think the
divisiveness that we
talk about today
that seems to occur
through Twitter and Facebook,
and it's like behind a curtain.
But at that time, it was
war out on the streets,
whether it was white
kids with long hair,
or African-Americans, the summer
uprisings that Professor Wright
talked about.
The anger was, I
think, more palpable
in a very important way.
My take off point for that
was looking at that picture.
I mean, I believe
that picture was not
of supporters of the
takeover, but was
of the white students who
gathered outside the building
at that time.
I know Karen said
she stayed away,
but I was one of those students
that went into that building,
in a quaint way, with
one landline calling
another landline to
say, black students
took over Morrill Hall.
We need to go over there
to show support for that.
So I think there were
about 100 students, or 150,
I really don't remember, who
stayed on the first level.
And there was some
communication.
I wasn't among those--
where that role of the white
students on that first level
was just for support, not to
take over, or direct anything.
It was just to be
there and to be
a counter to the
students that were
gathering outside who showed up
with very angry, nasty signs.
JOHN WRIGHT: Your
point is very well
taken about the
conflicting forces.
We had both allies and enemies
in terms of the takeover.
Some of the allies came
particularly from the SDS--
Students for a
Democratic Society.
And as soon as the
takeover began,
opposition on the
outside began to form.
And indeed, in that photo, a
significant number of those
were part of the opposition
who quickly mounted
placards and shouted all
kinds of calls-- things that,
in some cases, involved a lot
of four letter and abusive words
about the takeover process.
SDS members tried to form
a barrier in between.
Ultimately, we had to
barricade the building in order
to keep some of
the forces outside
from breaking in and
generating some kind
of violent confrontation,
which we at all costs
wanted to avoid.
But again, the opposing forces
were palpable and powerful.
FEMALE SPEAKER: How
long were you in there?
JOHN WRIGHT: Overnight.
We came out the next day.
And again, to avoid
confrontation,
we went through the
old tunnel system.
You may not know,
but there are tunnels
under most of the
buildings and the
[? old sign and so forth. ?]
They're all closed off.
Almost all of them
are closed off now.
But we went through the
tunnels from Morrill Hall
down to Ford Hall.
And then came out at Ford
Hall up the old bridge
across to Coffman Union.
DAVID BEAULIEU: You knew the
tunnels when winter came.
JOHN WRIGHT: Yeah,
right, exactly.
Yes.
That was part of the context.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Thank
you all for your comments
and for telling these stories
and adding these perspectives.
And Dr. Wright, I appreciate
that you basically
gave us the syllabus that you
created for yourself in the 60s
to help form a mature historical
consciousness, as you put it.
I'm just wondering,
from the three of you,
since you're all
academics, if you
were to create a
joint syllabus, trying
to get us to form mature
historical consciousnesses now,
what else would you add to that?
JOHN WRIGHT: Well, this would
be a fascinating enterprise.
FEMALE SPEAKER:
Just a [inaudible]
JOHN WRIGHT: Yeah.
That would be a
fascinating enterprise.
FEMALE SPEAKER: There
that you couldn't,
that you have added in
these intervening years,
that you think speak to
these questions and issues.
JOHN WRIGHT: I mean, my
inclination would probably
be to try to find a set of
very specific current issues
to focus on, and then to
build a syllabus around trying
to create the context
for understanding
those particular crises or
debates or so on and so forth,
and the final process
would involve, again,
evaluating courses of
action to take once
some kind of holistic
study of context
and so forth had come out of it.
And clearly, one would want
to incorporate instances
that incorporate as wide a
range of cultural communities
as possible.
DAVID BEAULIEU: I wanted
to comment, if I might.
You had mentioned something
about the tension at the time.
And I think you made a
reference to today in a way,
if I'm not mistaken.
But you know, for
a number of years,
I was Commissioner
of Human Rights.
And I was doing that
work at a time when
the Super Bowl and
the World Series both
affected the Twin
Cities in Minnesota.
We had the Super Bowl,
which had one of the teams
as the Redskins.
And we had the World
Series with one
of the teams having the
Atlanta Braves, yeah.
So it got into that.
And of course, there's
protests and everything.
We had the Justice Department
show up and talk to me
with an interest to try to
calm things down, and so forth,
so nothing bad comes
out of all of that.
And it's interesting.
The kind of issues that
children faced in schools
during that period in terms
of hunting and fishing rights
were the walleye issues
and all these other things.
Incredible racism
right under the surface
in terms of how Indian children
were treated at schools,
and in the communities
and so forth.
And you come to a point
realizing that of course, it
never goes away, that the
act of what you need to do
is one of vigilance.
That you have to constantly be
present to it, all the time.
And you can watch
now commercials
changing, with images and
so forth reappearing again,
a number of things like
that, and the hostility
in the communities with regard
to Indian people and students
in schools and so forth
is reemerging as well.
It occurs in demonstration.
It also occurs in the context
of life and community as well.
And I think the
tension is building.
I just heard that there may be
a complaint against the Attorney
General, that Indian
education is discriminatory.
And that's going to heat up
things in the rural Minnesota
and around the Indian
community as well.
It's there.
And it's coming back again.
It's coming back with
some force, I think.
And so I think those challenges
are ever more present now,
because of that emergence.
And that one needs to in fact
have similar responses to them.
And I think every
generation faces
with trying to reignite
and recreate that response.
And it's going to happen anyway.
And I think knowing
that the past is
what it was, and realizing
it will happen again,
is an important
lesson of history.
You know, it really is.
And so, you know, we can
talk about it and so forth,
but it is still a
real act of vigilance,
learning and getting
people to understand
that's happening again.
Really, you know, in educational
settings all over the place.
LENA JONES: I'd like to address
your question, too, about what
to add to the syllabus.
So I don't have an idea
of any specific content.
But I think it's
important to not
think that I have to
figure out everything
myself as the instructor.
And as an instructor,
and as someone
that has some control issues--
like, that's a constant
challenge, right?
And so I would build in and
add to what you shared--
so who are, to actually
go off campus and interact
and if possible, do some
work with organizations
that are grappling with the
consequences of the past,
and working towards how to make
the lives of people better now,
again, with that sort of
historical understanding.
So for instance, in the course
that I teach in Jackson,
we not only talk to civil
rights people, people
who were involved in the civil
rights movement decades ago,
but we also spend a lot of
time talking and interacting,
and in some instances, doing
work with organizations
that are doing work now.
So for instance, we connect
with organizations in Alabama
that are doing some really
powerful environmental justice
work, and who really clearly
connect the work that they're
doing now, for instance,
around the emergence
of tropical diseases in
Alabama, and the threats
that have been made towards
black property owners because
of raw sewage on their lands,
to this history of racism
in the Black Belt of Alabama,
and the intentional disparities
between the infrastructure
that was built
in white communities
and the infrastructure
in black communities.
And hearing, creating
those spaces,
where people who were
doing this work, and again,
are in that space between past
and present can talk about it
and explain their work
in their own words.
Or, the work that we do with
a couple of organizations
in Jackson with
very similar names,
both with co-op in
their names, that
are doing some really
fascinating work around linking
health, linking property
ownership of land,
linking the creation of
jobs within communities,
and doing some
powerful organizing
work around how do we
really bring out the talents
that the people in
these communities have?
How do we discover that?
How do we build relationships
between one another?
How do we do the long
term work around building
our sense of agency to
create the communities
and neighborhoods and world
that will sustain us and allow
us to live in dignity
with one another?
So I guess the
short answer is, I'd
add in some sort of
experiential piece of that
to that, that would expose us
and create that space for us
to interact with folks,
and kind of contribute
to this collective
building of knowledge
about what we need to do
in our various contexts,
both shared and apart.
JOHN WRIGHT: One
thing to follow up
on part of what you're
suggesting right now--
I've been involved, the last
couple of years, in the Campus
Divided exhibit that the
emeritus professor [inaudible]
superintended,
which is an effort
to explore the institutional
history of this university
in ways that it hadn't
been done before,
and which takes us beyond the
way in which the university is
marketed to entering students
from abroad, which is largely
a Madison Avenue corporate
branding enterprise with all
the glossy brochures
and materials,
the online linkages, et cetera.
And all of the university's
dark side, and those things that
are bound to raise
controversy that remain
suppressed and out of view--
in this context, part
of the Campus Divided
was preceded by one
of the reverberations
from the Morrill Hall Takeover,
which we realized, when
we wanted to have reunions later
from the Afro-American Action
Committee, of participants
in the Morrill Hall Takeover,
and we started that
at about 2001, 2002,
we had a first major reunion.
That not only reconstructing
the history of the takeover
was a problem, but the
place of African-Americans
at the University of Minnesota
in general was a problem.
There was no such
history extant.
And the existing official
university histories
[inaudible] was
more comprehensive
and empathetic version went far
beyond the original university
history.
But African-Americans
were essentially invisible
in the early history, and
when addressed at all,
in the most perfunctory
and dismissive ways.
Anyway, we cobbled
together a history
that was published in a
series in the Minnesota Alumni
Magazine that tracked
African-American presence
on campus, from the late 19th
century up through the Morrill
Hall Takeover.
And a lot was uncovered
in that process that
in part would pertain to,
and would be picked up by,
the Campus Divided exhibit.
For instance, Lotus Coffman,
who was the longest serving
university president,
and began from 1920
to 1938, and for whom the
student union has been named--
as I mentioned earlier on,
he and lieutenants basically
instituted a policy
of Jim Crow practices
on campus that hadn't existed
prior to his presidency.
In 1924, for instance,
we turned up,
going through back
Gopher archives,
we turned up images from
the 1924 Homecoming Parade
which showed a Klu Klux Klan
float in the Homecoming Parade
from 1924.
Images of minstrel shows
at Scott Hall Theater.
Documents that have
remained out of sight
and out of mind for
a very long time.
The Campus Divided exhibit
probed anti-Semitism,
racism and government
surveillance in the 1930s, 40s,
and 50s on this campus, and the
complicity of administrators--
again, from President
Coffman's office on down--
again, with the first stirrings
of the Communist Witch Hunt
scare in this country
that demonized
both black students protesting
against Jim Crow policies
and Jewish students who
were pursuing social justice
initiatives on
campus and elsewhere,
that were hardly subversive,
but were being treated as such.
Anyway, that exhibit
itself is an example
of developing an alternate
kind of institutional history
and historical
consciousness to what
the official message has been.
DAVID BEAULIEU: It
makes some great sense.
I returned to the university
as a faculty member,
an associate professor
of Indian Studies
and chair of the department
for a period of time.
When I got back, it
was very much different
than the mission
it originally had.
But I spent my
productive creative time
as a professor studying
the university's treatment
of American Indians.
I had a wonderful
article published out
of that, which had
to deal a little bit
with that anthropology professor
I'm talking about because
of my personal connection to
White Earth and to my father
and to that whole
thing that happened.
But just imagine-- I was
an Indian Studies professor
studying non-Indians
at the university
in order to make
some sense of why
I was there in the first place.
It was such a contradiction,
or an irony in a way.
And I quit.
I gave up a tenured
associate position
to go work in the real world--
to work in Rosebud,
and to do that.
I think I needed to have it
no longer mean anything to me,
because it didn't
resonate that same mission
and vision anymore.
The department had
a unique vision.
In a sense, it was sort
of a miniature version
of an Indian
university, in a way.
It had that sense of it,
of community programs,
of connection to the community,
a focus to the community
and so forth.
It originally got
sort of spun off
into the training center
for community programs,
business and so forth,
and a non-Indian who
ran that program.
But that mission was still
stuck upon the department
by the university, to have that
community engagement, so forth,
without the resources or
the capacity to do that.
And it kind of basically
bid an impossible situation
for faculty--
both those who didn't resonate
to that, because they didn't
want to do anything with the
community in the first place,
and those who did.
And so you end up with
this crazy fight going on
over who's got the
more proper role
or vision for Indian
Studies at the university.
It's a perfect setup.
And I think it resulted
in the destruction
of a unique
possibility of having
a tenure-granting
independent department.
That vision is kind
of fulfilled now
in places like tribal colleges,
for one thing, because it
has that capacity to do it.
But in institutions like
Arizona State University,
that talks about these--
it's not
interdisciplinary studies,
but it's where you actually
create some new knowledge
by putting things together.
You create a whole new field
of thinking and studying
around an issue.
It's quite thrilling.
And I forget the actual
term that President Crow
uses for that.
But I understand this concept
of kind of bringing things
together from different
disciplines and perspectives
to create sort of a new way
of thinking about something.
That, I think, is still
very, very possible.
And people are
trying to do that.
It matters to community
to think that way--
people in community
to think that way
from a lot of
different perspectives.
And so if you have a
program or a university
that resonates that basic sense
of the nature of knowledge
as not being stovepiped,
categorized and so forth,
into these controllable
disciplines
by a few individuals, but
to a more expansive sense
of knowledge and thinking about
issues that matter to society,
to community and so forth.
That's a more productive
way of thinking
of what the university
is in the first place.
JENNIFER GUNN: So
it is my sad task
to pull this
conversation to an end.
And I want to thank
our panelists,
but before we give them
a hand, let me just
make an announcement.
Honor students who are going
to dinner with the speakers,
please gather in the
lobby immediately
outside on the east side of the
building, which is thataway.
Thank you all very, very much.
And let's give our panel
a huge round of applause.
[applause]
[music playing]
