Campus protest is under threat. Recently the Trump Administration announced that it is withholding $400 million dollars from Columbia University for the “school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” While not outright blaming student protests, the administration blames Columbia for not controlling the protests.
According to scholars of higher education, campus protest is one of the foundational ways in which students exercise “student voice” whether the protest be self-advocacy for activism on behalf of others (Jerusha Conner, 2023). Protests have changed on college campuses from the 1960s protests over Vietnam to the 2015 protests over Black Lives Matter. This paper will seek to address the proposed topic of “Campus politics, activism, and practices of engaged scholarship.” I argue that schools with religious backgrounds or formerly religious backgrounds have a unique platform to teach their campuses’ history to demonstrate the dynamism of religion and its relationship to campus activism. These platforms offer the opportunity for student to participate in engaged scholarship through archival research that can shape their understanding of student voice and sense of place on campus.
The paper will draw from my experience teaching at Mercer University and utilize Mercer as a case study for considering this pedagogical approach.
The Integrated Studies curriculum at Mercer is an interdisciplinary writing and communication curriculum divided across three courses. In the first course (INT 101) that address the foundations of academic writing, students are to interrogate the relationship between self and other.
I organized one of the four units of this course around the history of Mercer University. Mercer was founded in 1833 as an alleged ‘manual labor’ institution by Georgia Baptists in Penfield, Georgia. Students read documents from both founding and more recent Presidents as well as recent scholarship that challenges hagiographical narratives of Mercers founding. While the school continues to promote its origins as a manual-labor institution, students, many of whom were the children of wealthy Baptists planters, refused to work. The labor of enslaved persons built the institution. Students discuss how religious narratives eclipse the historical realities of enslavement (Douglas Thompson, 2023).
From this understanding of Mercer’s origins, students read curated documents and interviews from four foundational events in the school’s 20th and 21st century history. In 1939, John Birch (namesake of the John Birch Society) along with twelve students organized local pastors to carry out a Heresy Trial on multiple Mercer Faculty deemed to be too liberal. Another section addresses Civil Rights and Integration with documents illustrating the faculty and student activism that led to the admittance of Sam Oni in 1963, a student from Ghana. Documents also include interviews of the first generation of Black students on campus. Another section includes the fight for women’s rights on campus and the rules women faced in the 1950s. A final section includes the history of LGBTQ individuals on Mercer’s campus and role Mercer Triangle Symposium (a pro-LGBTQ student group on campus) played in precipitating a break with the Georgia Baptist Convention.
In each of these four seminal moments in Mercer’s history, documents demonstrate the roles students, faculty, and administrators played in advocating and facilitating change on campus. Additionally, they complicate simplistic understandings of religion, specifically a Baptist flavor of Christianity. These documents and events do not pit religion against nonreligion, nor do they pit one religious tradition against another. Rather they pit Baptists against Baptists. Often times they position a minority group of students whether they be conservative in the case of the Heresy Trials or progressive in the case of Integration, and demonstrate how students can leverage their student voice to affect change.
These curated readings and conversations provide an opportunity for students to participate in engaged scholarship through visits to the University Archives. I scheduled class periods for students to search university documents and campus newspapers to capture a fuller understanding of the history of their institution. Papers for this unit offered students to practice archival research on Mercer as they studied the ways in which students have historically leveraged their voice for change on campus.
While such an assignment does not preclude secular, state universities, religious and formerly religious institutions are uniquely positioned to teach the relationship between religion and campus protest. Many formerly religious institutions are often weary or skittish about discussing their religious history. Rather than avoid such history, I suggest faculty and universities leverage the history and archival material at their disposal to current students about the ways in which students before them have advocated for change either drawing upon religious tradition or pushing against it.
Engaging institutional histories of campus protest and activism not only helps students conceptualize and even practice student voice, but it also cultivates a sense of place. Students regularly were shocked to read about brutal violence committed to a Black community members in the 1960s outside our classroom window.
As new generations of students arrive on campuses each year, it is important to teach students strategies and approaches for exercising student voice. For scholars of religion, many of our campuses are filled with historical examples of students drawing upon and pushing against religious ideas and establishments to advocate for change. For younger generations that far less likely to be religious than previous generations, demonstrating the dynamic ways in which religion operates in the world is more important than ever.
According to scholars of higher education, campus protest is one of the foundational ways in which students exercise “student voice” whether the protest be self-advocacy for activism on behalf of others (Jerusha Conner, 2023). Protests have changed on college campuses from the 1960s protests over Vietnam to the 2015 protests over Black Lives Matter. This paper will seek to address the proposed topic of “Campus politics, activism, and practices of engaged scholarship.” I argue that schools with religious backgrounds or formerly religious backgrounds have a unique platform to teach their campuses’ history to demonstrate the dynamism of religion and its relationship to campus activism. These platforms offer the opportunity for student to participate in engaged scholarship through archival research that can shape their understanding of student voice and sense of place on campus.