Knowledge of, by, and for the People

For nearly 40 years, UCSB students have struggled to make this campus’ curriculum and institutions relevant to the most fundamental issues facing their lives. UCSB’s Black Studies, Chicano Studies, and Environmental Studies departments; the Resource Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity; and the Ethnic Studies Requirement were all products of student activism, most of them created only in spite of inevitably reluctant upper-administrators.

The following information was compiled through conversations with faculty, staff, and students, as well as from a variety of department Web sites. These stories represent one of the central but little-recognized themes of UCSB’s history: students organizing to claim their educations as their own, rather than passively accepting the education that is handed to

Black Studies Department

Black students at UCSB joined with the national civil rights movement in 1968 to end racial segregation on campus and to remove institutional racism from the university curriculum. They wanted something other than a mere supplement to the academy’s course offerings: they wanted to move real knowledge of real people back into spaces of institutional power. Over 4,000 students had signed a petition demanding more racial and cultural diversity, but university administration ignored them. A core group of activists persisted, and put their bodies on the line by occupying North Hall. “It was like going into South Africa,” one commented, “People looked at us like we were lost.”

The students presented the university administration with a set of demands that changed this campus forever: the creation of a Black Studies department and a Center for Black Studies to monitor, coordinate, support, and encourage research in the community.

Recently ranked ninth in the nation, today’s department of Black Studies includes nine ladder rank faculty and four lecturers coming from an array of disciplines concerned with the Black Diaspora (the United States and Caribbean), as well as Africa. Scholarship within the department creates new knowledge on topics of religion and sexuality, media studies, music and black popular culture, critical and feminist theories, traditions of black radicalism in and outside the U.S., global political economy, multicultural education, and Francophone African and Caribbean literatures. And just as the notions introduced by Copernicus shifted perspectives from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe, Professor Cedric Robinson reminded the audience at the department’s 30th anniversary celebration, “Black Studies knowledge yields consequences....When you introduce Black Studies, the field of History is transformed, Economics is revolutionized, and Political Science is disturbed. It doesn’t stop there, it moves on.”

More than 4,000 students take Black Studies courses each year, and the department offers an undergraduate honors program option that provides year long engagement with original research. In testimony to the outstanding quality of its students and to the excellence of its faculty, the department has produced three valedictorians and a number of other prestigious recipients of academic awards. Particularly popular undergrad, lower-division courses include Intro to African-American Studies, Intro to African Studies, Blacks & Western Civilization, and History of Jazz.

A doctoral program is envisioned to advance the department’s reputation for excellence and broaden the fields of knowledge. But according to Professor Gerard Pigeon, who chaired Black Studies for over 15 years, institutional resistance to retaining visiting faculty and scholars must first be overcome to guarantee a solid base of support for incoming graduate students. Perhaps just as student demand and initiative founded the department, student demand and of the department’s graduate program options. For more information, see:
http://www.blackstudies.ucsb.edu/initiative will determine the future

Ethnic Studies G.E. Requirement

In April 1988, students commemorated MLK’s assassination in protest to the lack of progress made in increasing the numbers of minority faculty and minority students on campus. They presented then-Chancellor Uehling with a 5-part plan to combat racism and followed up for nearly a year before pulling out all stops. Seeing insufficient progress by February 1989, the students pledged to hunger strike until their demands were met.

Nine students denied food for 15 days while 30 others abstained for 3 days. They set up camp with more than 10 tents and held ground across the entire lawn of Cheadle’s entrance for 15 days in rain and 40-degree weather. A few faculty and university staff showed their solidarity by fasting and visiting the encampment. Black Studies Professors

Girard Pigeon, who fasted with students for 4 days, and Cedric Robinson set up a “Faculty Club” at the site. Six days later, students at all UC campuses unified to end institutional racism and lack of student participation in university governance.

The struggle lasted for several months, with students renaming several university buildings, staging rallies and threatening to resume the hunger strike. The Academic Senate finally agreed to a vote on the resolutions.
UCSB’s MultiCultural Center, the Asian American Studies department, the Native American Studies program, divestment of university holdings from companies with ties to South Africa and the undergraduate Ethnic Studies GE requirements are a few of the fruits born from that struggle.

Chican@ Studies Department

In Spring 1969, a group of Chicano activists and intellectuals met at UCSB and prepared the foundational document El Plan de Santa Bárbara:

“Chicanismo draws its faith and strength from two main sources: from the just struggle of our people and from an objective analysis of our community’s strategic needs. We recognize that without a strategic use of education, an education that places value on what we value, we will not realize our destiny. Chicanos recognize the central importance of institutions of higher learning to modern progress, in this case, to the development of our community. But we go further: we believe that higher education must contribute to the information of a complete person who truly values life and freedom.” [http://www.panam.edu/orgs/MEChA/st_barbara.html]

Inspired by their communities, these men and women generated an educational program to represent the histories, knowledges and experiences of Chicanos and provide a bridge for a new generation of Chicanos into higher education. Highlighting the central role of knowledge in power structures and in producing real social change, the Plan was the intellectual model for the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCSB and continues to exert a profound influence on the teaching and activities here.

UCSB is the only UC campus with a Chicana and Chicano Studies department, a Chicano Studies research center, and a library collection devoted to the field. Over the past three decades, the department has developed an interdisciplinary curriculum that focuses on gender, culture, and institutions. Courses probe the roots of a cultural tradition beginning with the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico and extending into the many areas of contemporary American society, including politics, education, literature, the arts, and religion. At the present time, the department has more majors and double majors than ever before and is expanding its course offerings.

Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCSB is organized around various support units: the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, the Center for Chicano Studies, the Colección Tloque Nahuaque Unit and the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (both in the Davidson Library), the Luis Leal Endowed Chair, the Educational Opportunity Program, El Congreso, Chicanos for Higher Education, and various student groups.

Environmental Studies Department

It was over 35 years ago when Santa Barbara experienced the worst oil spill in U.S. history up to that time. The University of California, Santa Barbara was within sight and smell of the littered channel and its beaches.
In the wake of this unfathomable disaster, in February 1969, a group of twenty-one faculty -- calling themselves The Friends of the Human Habitat -- met to discuss the possibility of promoting some form of environmental education at UCSB. The members of the ad-hoc committee were geologists, geographers, engineers, biologists, an economist, and a historian. By the fall of 1970 the Environmental Studies Program at UCSB was established: one of the first of a new breed of educational programs in the country. It was set up as a multidisciplinary program drawing on the strengths of many fields and providing a generalist approach to complex environmental issues.
Adapted from www.es.ucsb.edu

Queer Resource Center
compiled by De Acker (acker-d@sa.ucsb.edu)

The establishment of UCSB’s Resource Center for Sexual & Gender Diversity can be credited to the efforts of many different people and organizations throughout the years. These efforts included students, staff and faculty whose presence, requests, demands and activism led to the creation of the Center in 1999.

The student organization, the “Gay People’s Union” was created at UCSB in 1977. A faculty, staff and student LGB awareness group was formed in 1989 and one of their first goals was the creation of a LGB Center at UCSB. This group led to the first UC system-wide LGBT conference that was held at UCSB. A formal bid for a Center was made in 1994 by a number of LGB groups including the student LGBA, GLB Graduate Student Network, LGB Faculty Group, LGB Staff Association, University Committee on LGBT Concerns, and the rap groups and LGBs of Color. In 1997 the Women’s Center developed a Queer Peer Intern ship and Sergio Morales served as the campus’ first peer. Another formal proposal was made to the Chancellor in 1998 by the Queer Student Union.

In October 1998, the day after the vigil for Matthew Sheppard, the Queer Peer Intern (Janet Mallen) spoke to the Chancellor about the lack of support for LGBT students at UCSB and the need for allies. Soon after the Chancellor and Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs pledged funds for a LGBT Coordinator and small operating budget. In Winter, 1999, a large group of students protested for the protection and growth of Ethnic and Queer studies on campus. Out of this protest came a commitment from the Chancellor and Vice Chancellor to find a space for a LGBT Center on campus.

The first LGBT Coordinator, Debbie Bazarsky, was hired in June, 1999 and the Center was officially opened in Fall, 1999. The Center was called the Queer Resource Center until the name was changed to the Resource Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Spring, 2001. Maurice Hudson and Stacey Shears served as subsequent directors. CC Sapp, and Rebecca Chapman served as the first office managers and Erin Pullin and Stephanie Lee as Assistant Directors. Kyle Richards is the current Director of the Center.

think any of these histories are incomplete? feel free to email us at sbdisorientation@riseup.net