Campus color line College President s and the struggle for black freedom. Its out on september 29. If you havent yet preordered a copy of the book please consider grabbing one from book depot, we ship nationally, internationally, we have Curbside Pickup and we are actually open at a limited capacity. Just a heads up, weekends are busy so your best luck is swinging by monday or tuesday. Will share some guidelines in our chats and share some links to the book so you have easy access to purchases. Remember that your purchase goes to our supporting arts bookstore and staff. With that i would like to give a walkthrough of our platform and event after the introduction our guests for the night will be joining us up on the screen. We will be taking questions from the audience, please submit your questions in the q a photo below. If you are looking at the art below to the right you will see two bubbles that say q a thats where you should put them i would avoid the chat so we can keep track of all the questions and get to them. If you are watching via our Facebook Live stream make sure to submit questions in the comments field and we will be sure to grab it from there. I would like to give a warm welcome to our guests for the night. Eddie cole, phd associate professor of Higher Education and organizational change at ucla. And the author of aba campus scholar line. Published by Princeton University press. You can find him on twitter at eddie r. Cole. abshe is the author of remaking black power how black women transformed an era published by usc press and you can find her twitter at doctor actually farmer. With that, please help me welcome from home eddie r. Cole and actually farmer, thank you both for being here tonight. Hello, hello, can you hear me . Yes. All right pin. Welcome everyone, we are excited to have everybody here. Im going to go ahead and get right into our conversation because this is a wonderful but meaty book and there is so much to discuss. I want to make sure we get a chance to hit on all the wonderful dynamics that doctor cole has for us in this book. I like to ask people when they first start, how did you get into writing this book one with the idea come to you wasnt something that was marinating . Was it an aha moment moment you set up in the middle of the night and if you could tell us maybe one challenge and one tree to of writing it. Dr. Cole first off, everyone tuning in, thank you for joining me and im happy to be in this conversation with doctor farmer. Great question and thats the answer i continue to grapple with because an idea for a book comes from you from so many Different Directions so on a macro level i like to say that the idea actually started in my hometown ology alabama, smalltown west alabama greene county, total population of less than 400. This is where i grew up. It is something i notice in my home county growing up in a rural black south we had one Public High School in our entire county so its in the next town over and i remember this every day going to school we turned left on what hill avenue and my high school public, allblack to the right but if you made a left it was a private smaller majority white academy. At always been interested in how even in my own experience in my lifetime schools stood had the remnants of affiliation in the black Freedom Movement every day i was going to this routine, it wasnt bothering me, we werent having protests, nobody cared, frankly, it was just the norm if you will. It always stuck out in my mind, we would be in practice outside, we would hear one school over there, they could hear us, it was one of those things that always been thinking about educational leaders and the decisions they made in the past and how that shaped our present. That was sort of the in the back of my head even as a teenager but, trust me, as a teenager i wasnt thinking that deeply about it. Eventually writing a book on academic leaders. Over time continue to study more and more about my own experience, the black School Experience, i came to realize that more and more these educational leaders were just at the mercy of the state exclusively. They were actually actively involved in shaping the School Experience to racial policy practices, Community Organizing and so forth. Over time thats kind of where the idea started marinating and my attention turned completely to College Credits and i would say about a decade ago the occupy wall street movement. When we got to that point and saw College Campuses and looking how College Prisons were responding to that sort of activism, occupy wall street and then moving into 2015 with activism, black student activism at the university of missouri and really the rest of the nation you can go down the list. At that point i really started thinking seriously about how do College President s respond to these sort of events. I wanted to know how did it work historically. Knowing that this current moment at that time 2015 didnt come out of nowhere. Its one of those things where the idea just came at me from Different Directions watching things unfold in my own life as well as professional. Its one thing to have an idea and another thing to actually do it. I would say one unexpected challenge in studying College President s, particularly when you talk about the 1950s and 1960s its really restrictions in the archives. Its almost as if 50 to 60 years ago those College President s knew some of the decisions they were making would not be seen in favorable light. Having multidecade restrictions on some things, most often the longest being 50 years is one of those books i would say if i wanted to write it 10 years ago i wouldnt have been able to a lot of records were just being released in 2010, 1960 or even getting into 2015, 65, when it comes to College President s and chancellors. That was the challenge just trying to get my timing right and going back to some archives like, i will be back in a couple years. In some instances. That was an unexpected challenge when studying these College President s but a unique treat, just to wrap up and address the full question. A unique treat in writing this book was really thinking about the vulnerability seeing the human aspect of who some of these College President s were. One example is dan coyle the special assistant to the president Preston Robert geoghegan in the 60s. Just after the on the anniversary this week, just after the Baptist Church bombing in birmingham alabama where four black girls are killed as well as two additional children killed later that day. Just a violent horrific moment within American History and to see one of those senior administrators at princeton writing a letter to another one late at night, the details in the letters like i just cant sleep tonight knowing that what has happened nationally and then a week later ralph barnett, the segregation white supremacist governor of mississippi is coming to princeton to give a speech. You see this personal versus professional conflict happening and really get a chance to look at these College President s and see how human they are and how these decisions were quite complicated, that remains a treat. Writing this book i try to also do the human aspect justice to it. I like that you say that because one of the things that you end with is the conclusion that maybe we should be seeing College President s as elected officials in a way. That economy you are talking about needing to influence policy, needed to be the face of something but also somebody in private conflict and beliefs, thats a constant tug of war our elected officials also have to deal with. I thought was a little bit provocative. We live in a world we think of the university for better or worse the life of the mind but your book is telling us about the case. Why do you think that looking at College President s or speaking of them as elected officials is a useful frame for us. As people and them as the decisions they make. Its quite useful and reveals a couple things. It returns abreminds us of the the way it is for me at ucla compared to ut austin two different worlds. Ucla in los angeles not the state capital but austin this relationship with the legislature is just completely different. One thing it reveals the importance of stakeholders on some campuses right now we look every day in the news we say, whos really pushing this decision around major sports, Major College football, in a pandemic. That is very telling when you think of a College President as an elected official sort of navigating their position as a public figure, if you will. The other aspect you just mentioned and the question all the issues we are dealing with right now stem back to policy and social practice. Talking about campus relationships with Police Departments own Police Departments as well as city police. Student debt and the Racial Disparities without. Racist incidents on campus and we can go down the list of all these issues but when we think about those issues off the College Campus we look at where elected officials who take about the same issues on a College Campus we look toward the College President and chancellor ultimately we are looking toward people but we dont think about them in the same way as being able to shape and mold policy. I think thats incredibly important for us to remember because a university they are not just reactive to the social issues, they are actively involved in shaping a number of the issues, ultimately a lot of those decisions come across their desk. I love that because as i was reading the book i was thinking to myself as someone who works in the university i see the president as a subtotal of power. Having worked at public and private universities i certainly see that in the public context but im not sure ive always thought about it i thought that was a really provocative way of thinking about how power works and helping us map how power works on a physical terrain of a campus but also a city ecosystem. One of the things really great about the book is addictive spans of next. For those of you havent read it yet and you get to learn about president s of historically black colleges and universities, hbcu, you learn about predominantly white colleges like princeton, we learn about public universities, private universities, etc. I wondered if there were things that you found that it united these folks who acted like president s or things that he found that now i think of them as like a secret society or club where theyre all eating out together and planning things after reading the book in a way that i didnt think of before. Where did they find Common Ground or where they perhaps fight figuratively or literally . Something that united all these president s, regardless of the institution side, regardless of their region was i found that it takes a certain type of person to ascend to that level of academic leadership. Its one thing to say you want to be department share, its another to say all of these individuals i discuss in the book were very much committed to leaving their legacy, their leadership imprint on moving the University Forward and also addressing bigger societal issues as well. The thing that united them was the common challenge. The book covers roughly from the 1940s into the 1960s and when you look over that middle decades of the century they are all faced with the challenge of race question. Its hard to argue something that isnt as pressing or as complicated as that, regardless of the institution type. It becomes so fascinating that they have this shared issue but then the big differences becomes how do they address it or whats the importance of it. Thats where you see knockdown drag out fights, some compelling interactions throughout the book one example i give you is in the state of maryland in maryland being upper south, midatlantic, and has this multi regional identity happening. Its segregated but doesnt have a history of seceding from a union like some other southern states. Its got this uniqueness and one real fight that happens between curly byrd who is the president of the university of maryland and mark jenkins who is the president of Morgan State College in baltimore. This fight between the two really over segregation and who gets what funding and what goes where and should the university of maryland admit black students . If they do should academic support go toward the historical black college, you get the real difference is that when it comes down to it, we all agree that our shared challenge is racism, ultimately in society but we dont agree on what to do with it. That becomes one of the unique things that you look across the region state to state even when you look at the relationship between a luba foster the president of Tuskegee Institute in alabama, being an conversation with harlan hatch of the president of the university of michigan. You just dont think about tuskegee and michigan in partnership and communication with each other. It is one of the more fascinating things when you do a book like this as National Scope and you see correspondence on one end and you dont know how the conversation came out then you go to another institution edits the internal conversation with each other. Heres the back and forth. And the multiple conversations and how people say one thing. The people running these institutions are just as conflicted as the rest of us in society. Just out of curiosity, do you think today the College President still finds race and racism to be the defining thing they have to deal with that is uniting them across the world . Does that really changed or im just thinking like i can imagine some of these conversations about desegregating the university of mississippi i understand we are not desegregating the same way but the racist incidents and stuff helping is quite similar and princeton is in the news. I would say yes, privately. I would say among themselves in conversation, i would love to hear i would be fascinated to hear what conversations they have but i would say privately there is a shared concern to racial applications of a number of decisions that are happening right now. I think about the annual surveys of College President s where they have a chance to respond to race or racism a prominent issue on your campus and theres always some ridiculously high number, like 80 to 85 percent that say no. But if you were to ask students across the nation the same thing, maybe 80 to 85 percent would say yes. So how are these two groups president s and students seeing things differently . I would venture a historical record of what the archives of study across the nation tell us is that any indication that behind closed doors these president s are very concerned about race particularly as we go into this heightened racial moment in the selection this fall. Dr. Farmer its interesting to see them. Along those lines, one of the things that struck me about the book is that because if you view College President s at the center, and see them as these elected officials of politicians that means you have to make deals and perhaps build coalitions of people that are somewhat unlikely. There are moments that i was like, wow, that i didnt see that College President being on board with this group, making a deal with this particular segment of the university or the surrounding area. And wondering if you might be able to tell us an example of how College President s have had to make bedfellows in order to get deals done or move initiatives forward. So many examples in the book but two in particular stand out to me, the university of california system even if you are not familiar at all but just know that as a really Large University with multiple campuses. That makes the system. We talk about thousands of students, theres a president head of the system and each campus has a chancellor. That alone sounds complicated. Imagine how complicated it was when they were building the system out and the 50s into the 1960s. One particular relationship that i did not see unfolding or attention if you will that university of california has the center rejects but california is so large, i read about this in the book. It has its own some regional loyalties within the state. If you are in Northern California in the bay area Southern California. As ucla did Franklin Murphy important figure and ucla he actually had some hesitance in taking the chancellor job at ucla because for the first time he will be reporting to a system president instead of the director to a board of trustees. Hes kind of hesitant about taking the position but what you see is murphy at ucla performs these very unique relationships a number of very powerful Southern California influencers. People who run, the l. A. Times, talking about lockheed and coming out of postworld war ii. He makes a unique aball of a su