Student Life at Regional Colleges and Universities in the Mid-20th Century

• In Event: New Perspectives on the History of Being a College Student

Abstract

This paper explores campus life at state colleges and regional universities in California, or those campuses that often originated as normal schools and transitioned into comprehensive colleges throughout the mid-twentieth century. In California, these campuses became part of the California State University System. Studies of these institutions—most notably, E. Alden Dunham’s Colleges of the Forgotten Americans (1969)—argued that students at these institutions were apathetic and not engaged in campus life, and Horowitz’s Campus Life (1987) largely ignored these colleges. Based on original, archival research, this paper challenges this view to show that students built active, engaged student cultures on these campuses. In detailing this student engagement, the paper relies on official and unofficial university records, such as presidents’ papers; student organization records; alumni documents; student and community newspapers; and first-hand accounts and biographies. Far from being uninterested in campus life, students at state colleges and regional universities throughout the 1950s and 1960s shaped their campuses in dramatic ways through their activities and through the campus cultures they developed. Their overriding focus was on building real colleges and expanding access to a real college to greater numbers of students.

In the 1950s, for example, students pushed for and demanded intercollegiate football teams. They circulated petitions and voted to increase their fees in an effort to get presidents and faculty to agree. They did so, not because they were interested in playing football but because they perceived that athletic teams were an important part of college life among the more established Ivy League and state flagship universities. As was the case with the normal schools, many students attending these state colleges came from the lower ends of the socio-economic ladder. Often first-generation college students whose parents worked in trades, these students valued a college education for the degree and credential they could earn. As such, the reputation of their institution mattered, and athletics helped build a college’s reputation and prove to the public—and potential employers—that their college was a real college and that their credential was a legitimate one.

This focus on athletics and active involvement continued among students into the 1960s, as student life and activity coalesced around civil rights. Since these colleges initially expanded to meet greater demand for a college education, student activists—including African American and Latino activists—in the 1960s pushed these campuses to live up to this history by expanding access to poor students, African American students, and Latino students. In doing so, they used the tool that earlier students had used—football and athletics. Threatening to shut down games or to boycott games unless these campuses abolished segregation among fraternities and football teams, for example, and built Black Studies and Latino Studies programs, these students challenged the centrality of athletics, drew attention to their cause, and often succeeded in moving these campuses toward greater access and toward a more welcoming attitude. In the process, they furthered the active campus life that marked these campuses in the postwar years.

Author

• Marc A. Van Overbeke, University of Illinois at Chicago