Welcome back to campus! Now that you’ve had your fall semester orientation, our magazine is offering up an alternative education: The New Voices Disorientation Guide, where Jewish student activists and organizers give the low down on today’s hot-button campus issues, including the tips and tricks that university administration might not want you to know. Read more Disorientation Guide articles here.
In 2018, a group of student activists were advocating for racial justice at the University of Wisconsin. They’d known that the university’s policies had been historically discriminatory against students of color and that the administration had made racist statements, but needed specifics, as well as some examples of effective organizing from Black activists of the past. When they turned to their school’s archives, they found materials about the UW Black Student Strike of February, 1969. After reading the list of demands from previous generations of student organizers and even articles about state violence perpetrated by the University against protesters, these modern-day activists found the inspiration they needed to tighten their demands, pointing to the real history of these campus issues and building a reparations platform to rally the student body.
As Jews, we have an oral tradition of stories, wisdom and teachings that have been passed down from generation to generation; communal memory is the name of the game. From that perspective, colleges are strange places: a large group of people arrives, and four years later, they’re gone. Maintaining memory within the student body is incredibly difficult due to constant turnover every semester. That also means that when issues arise on campus (and they always do), administrators can afford to wait a few years for an entirely new population to wash away the memory of whatever problems they’d rather not address, and watch student movement momentum fizzle out and forget as each class graduates while issues persist. Administrators can play a long game that student organizers can’t afford.
Just like Jews have turned to Torah and Talmud and centuries of commentaries when we need advice or context for the diaspora world we find ourselves in, Jewish student organizers should put another wisdom tool into their toolbox: the college archives.
What’s an archive? Most see archives as shelves and shelves of boxes filled with old papers. But the truth is that archives are an often semi-secret repository of documents, materials, items, and stories that have been kept for decades, waiting for you to make meaning from them.
Colleges can have archives related to particular subjects in history, such as second-wave feminism, the civil rights movement or American Jewish novelists, but they all have archives related to the history of the institution itself, such as old school newspapers and yearbooks. For a student organizer, these histories are personal, local, and immediate. Knowing what happened on campus before you got there can be the difference between making your campus a better, more equitable place – or surrendering the issue to the next generation of students who either accept the status quo or feel they must entirely reinvent the wheel to change it.
The School Archive and You
Almost every major institution, whether a school or a business, will keep an archive. At larger universities, archives will have entire staffs who maintain the collections and can point curious students in the direction of the materials they’re looking for. Archives are usually housed under your school’s library system. Most campus archivists will be extremely excited to see you – they usually interact with administrators or researchers working on high-tower dissertations. You don’t have to be a history major to find a home here. Before you reach out, try doing an online search for archives and the name of your college, and see what resources immediately pop up.
Entering the Archives
Figure out where your school’s archives are housed and what their hours are. Some may be by appointment only. Calling or sending an email ahead of time with information about your quest can give the receptionist or archivists time to gather some materials to help you find what you’re looking for.
There will probably be a reading room where they’ll bring up materials for you to look through, while elsewhere in the building are shelves filled with boxes. At many schools, archives are underfunded, so searching systems may still be analog. Materials aren’t always cataloged or digitized; don’t expect most of what you’re looking for will be viewable online (that costs money your archive doesn’t have). That also means it may take a few different searches to find the kinds of history you’re looking for – but it also means you might find some things that surprise you, even pieces of history that haven’t been seen since they were “accessioned,” or brought into the archives. Give yourself at least an hour or two to dig around. Think of it as a treasure hunt. Who knows – you may unearth something fascinating and long forgotten.
Learning About The History of A Campus Problem
Knowing how long a problem has persisted on campus can be key to fighting for a solution. Whether by learning about the ways earlier generations of students dealt with or tried to change the issue or what things looked like before the issue began, archives can get you that information and help you and your comrades brainstorm next steps in your fight.
If you attend a school with a campus newspaper, your archive might have a collection of old editions. Read through the front pages and see what the hot-button issues were back then. Student newspapers are often rich with details about campus struggles.
Some prescient history students have also occasionally gathered and donated protest materials to school archives, especially at schools that have long histories of organizing during the anti-Vietnam War era or Black Power movement. Asking archivists to view materials related to these general periods in history can lead to finding materials addressing other more specific campus issues. Just like broad social issues like racism, misogyny and ableism affect every part of the world, you may find that larger social movements focus on specific details like campus housing, dining halls, academic discrimination, hate crimes and more.
You may even want to ask for a book that someone’s written about the history of your campus and see if the topics you’re looking for are listed in the index. Once you find some dates and specific moments in history, you can go back to the newspapers, lists of clubs and courses, oral histories, photographs – or even administrative files.
Digging up Dirt On Your Administration
When you’re angry at your campus administration, there’s nothing more vindicating (and upsetting) than finding proof of their unfixed apathy or malignance dating back decades or even centuries. Historically, archives have been used by the powerful to make a record of their power. But that also means that all of their mistakes, prejudices and unjust decisions are just sitting in boxes, waiting to be read.
You can find campus budgets to see how long something was underfunded or understaffed. If you know the dates when a particular issue was heating up, you can often find board meeting minutes or administrative notes discussing the topic (and occasionally, punishments for pesky students speaking out against it). You’re going to want an archivist’s help, but these documents are eminently findable and can be shared with school newspapers.
If you’re a protest organizer, it may also be useful to use archives to find information about the history of campus policing. If you’re worried that police will show up to your actions, it’s good to know if your campus or local police have a violent streak and to prepare accordingly for those outcomes, especially to protect students of color involved in your movement.
Share Your Findings
Using history and precedent in your arguments to change policy can be an extremely effective rhetorical tool, especially in speeches, town halls and editorials in your campus or local newspaper. It’s important to let your school community (and its alumni) know that this has gone on for too long – and demonstrating that the administration knew about it the whole time? If you make enough noise about your issue, maybe some big donor will stop giving them money until they fix it!
Gaps In The Archives & Reading Between The Lines
Since school archives are usually maintained for the purposes of the administration, you may find that the materials tend to have an ideological slant: they serve the people in power, and all of the social identities that come along with them. The field of archival justice has a lot to say on this, but on the campus level, that also means there will be fewer materials from student perspectives. Administrators rarely care what undergraduates think, so most of what has historically been documented may not necessarily be by or for students, with the exception of school newspaper catalogs and other student publications that may have a more “official” history. Given that student perspectives are rare to begin with, marginalized student voices are exceptionally hard to find.
Even so, one can understand the absences in the archives as proof and information itself. Calling your school out for ignoring Black student cries for housing justice in the 1990s by refusing to document them in the university archives might be one more rallying point on for your anti-racist dormitory platform. Whose voices are not present in the archives can speak just as loudly as whose are, and a thoughtful student researcher can use those clues as tools – and even begin gathering today’s materials to do teshuva, or make reparations for the absence of student voices in eras past.
Documenting Your Movement
Even if your school archive lacks the juicy details you’re craving, you can be that historian for future generations of students – and those generations are only a year or two away! Gathering posters, flyers, articles, editorials, photographs and even memes can go a long way to transmit your own campus organizing history to future students who may inherit versions of the same issue. Folders like these can be donated to your school’s archives. L’dor v’dor, from generation to generation, isn’t just a Jewish concept. Student organizing causes historical change. Documenting how you did it makes history.
