History of Education (HSED-UE)

This course explores the metamorphosis of the US into not just a country of immigrants, but a country of intense nativism, suspicion and hostility to outsiders of certain stripes. We highlight how stakeholders in the American political project have used means both democratic and supra-democratic to impact the question of who can and cannot enter the country, pushing on one end to erect sturdier barriers to entry and on the other, to welcome migrants with more open arms.

This course will explore how college campuses became centers of political protest and cultural change. Topics include socialist and feminist student activism in Progressive era; 1920s Black student revolts, campus cultural ferment; 1930s Old Left-led mass student movements: 1960s New Left, antiwar, SNCC and Third World Student Activism, CIA infiltration; post-60s PC struggles, divestment movements, gay liberation, curricular change, unionization, conservative student activism from 1950s segregationists through YAF in and beyond the 60s.

The course will examine historical perspectives on the relationship between public schooling and the promotion of democratic ideals. Students will explore some of the central goals and purposes of American public education over the past two centuries, and the historiographical debates about those goals and purposes. In the second half of the course, students will consider the relationship between schooling and civic education, and between schooling and specific communities, in order to ask whether the goals of schooling might promote or contradict the goals of particular groups who seek to benefit from public education, and ways in which education does not promote democratic ideals.* Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Society & Social Sciences

This course introduces students to the central themes, issues, & controversies in American education. What is the purpose of “school”? How did schools begin, in the United States, & how have they evolved across time? How do children learn? How are they different from each other, & why & when should that matter? How should we teach them? & how should we structure schools & classrooms to promote learning? Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Society & Social Sciences

Explores why the 1960s witnessed the greatest upsurge of student activism in American history. Assesses student movements’ impact on race and gender relations, US foreign policy, free speech, and the university. The backlash against Left student activism from anti-radical politicians, the FBI, and CIA will be probed, as will the rise of conservative student activism. Examines debates over the meaning and legacies of this turbulent era’s youth revolt. Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent- satisfies the requirement for Societies and Social Sciences.

This course will examine the origins, development, and meanings of so-called cultural conflict in the United States. Topics will include abortion, gay rights, bilingualism, and the teaching of evolution in public schools. Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Cultures & Contexts

In the last years of World War II, Albert Camus wrote his novel, The Plague, as a way to illuminate the deep personal and societal ills around him. The book has again become popular as people struggle to understand the ramifications of the COVID-19 plague. Students and faculty use Camus’s work to explore what humans are experiencing and how they are reacting to this 21st century plague and its impact on frontline workers, marginalized communities, elections, and universities. Students write an extended review of The Plague to add their reflections to the conversation.

Reflecting the United States' birth as a slaveholding republic, many higher education institutions in pre-Civil War America promoted white supremacy ideologically and were subsidized economically by profits made via racial slavery. Students explore the role of US colleges and universities in institutionalizing racism, from this era of slavery though the heyday of Jim Crow racial segregation in the 20th century, and probe resistance to this regime among abolitionists, African American educators, Reflecting the United States' birth as a slaveholding republic, many higher education institutions in pre-Civil War America promoted white supremacy ideologically and were subsidized economically by profits made via racial slavery. Students explore the role of US colleges and universities in institutionalizing racism, from this era of slavery though the heyday of Jim Crow racial segregation in the 20th century, and probe resistance to this regime among abolitionists, African American educators, Reflecting the United States' birth as a slaveholding republic, many higher education institutions in pre-Civil War America promoted white supremacy ideologically and were subsidized economically by profits made via racial slavery. Students explore the role of US colleges and universities in institutionalizing racism, from this era of slavery though the heyday of Jim Crow racial segregation in the 20th century, and probe resistance to this regime among abolitionists, African American educators, integrationist lawyers, social scientists and civil rights organizations, as well as recent attempts by universities to confront their racist roots.

This course explores the civil rights movement roots of Berkeley’s historic student revolt, the reasons for the Free Speech Movement’s success in attracting student support and changing campus policy, its impact on the history of free speech, and on the rise of both the New Left and the Reaganite Right. This course ends with reflections on the state of free speech on campus in our own century when that freedom is often slighted, dismissed or weaponized by student groups on the left and right and the corporate groups that subsidize them, leaving us with the question of whether the Free Speech Movement is still relevant to the campus scene today.

This course explores why student protest has surged repeatedly on 21st century campuses and how American universities became lightning rods for criticism from both the Left and the Right. Topics include student movements against racial and gender discrimination, nativism student debt, exploitation of labor, the concentration of wealth, Euro-centric curriculum, and the rise graduate student labor unionization. Student struggles over academic freedom, corporatization, and academia’s globalization, the commercialization of intercollegiate athletics, academic boycotts, divestment, and campus governance will also be assessed. These campus conflicts will be set into historical perspective, probing their roots in earlier struggles over the nature, mission, uses, and failures of the 21st century university, illuminating the changes, continuities, progress, and setbacks in American higher education and its student movements. Right wing student activists and their off campus allies will also be studied, as will the fate of free speech on campus in the politically polarized world of 21st Century America.

This course explores the nature & function of higher learning beginning with the Greeks & the ancient academy through the medieval rise of the universities & the expansion of the corporate culture of higher education. Students will be exposed to a vast array of classical works from the fields of philosophy, sociology, economics & the humanities. Student will apply the works of such thinkers as Plato, Kant, Veblen as well as others to ask critical questions about what has shaped their contemporary college experience. Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Texts & Ideas