Public higher education is an essential component of a robust democratic society. Even as it is severely underfinanced and faces political attacks that would thwart the training of a critically engaged citizenry, students and faculty, together with community allies, are organizing to protect the public good function of higher education. Danica Savonick’s very timely publication of Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College offers crucial examples of the publicly engaged scholarship, pedagogy, and activism of these famous scholars and illustrates the effectiveness and transformative power of an approach to higher education that is both student- and community-focused. Using pedagogical evidence from archives, writings, and personal correspondence, Savonick details how the titular scholar-authors made material difference in their students’ lives and communities. This examination of Bambara’s, Jordan’s, Lorde’s, and Rich’s teaching experiences offers a valuable contribution to our scholarly conversations on pedagogy, higher education, and feminist studies.
Savonick centers this study on what she describes as the era of open admissions (1965-1976) at City College, City University of New York (CUNY). Under the newly established Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) program, City College recruited local working-class Black and Brown students in an effort to expand access to higher education. Structural racism within the public school system left these students underprepared for college and many were placed in remedial courses. Bambara, Lorde, Jordan, and Rich all taught in this program, helped form a creative community, and empowered and supported students’ efforts to transform public education. Open Admissions reveals the ways these scholars’ responses to student demands for greater access to higher education through open admissions, democratized classrooms, and practical solutions to community issues met students where they were and generated material solutions.
While these scholar-teachers were all able to do this to various degrees, one of the most compelling revelations of Open Admissions is the intentional way they built community between and among each other, shared pedagogical resources, coauthored and edited joint scholarly writings, and nurtured interpersonal relationships. In recent decades, with the changes in higher education management and funding, teaching loads and class sizes have increased while salaries are no longer comparable to those in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Teaching faculty especially must deal with the added stress of contracts based on student evaluations and fear of political consequences of pedagogical decisions. However, faculty can benefit from the example set by these scholar-teacher-activists and the ways they supported each other through shared resources, class observations, and collaborative experimentation. For example, reading about Bambara walking Jordan to her first teaching assignment and offering Jordan reassurance and the advice to “give students whatever she could,” because they would appreciate it (p. 64), offers a model for the support full-time tenured faculty can responsibly provide to adjunct faculty, as well as being a touching anecdote.
This supportive collaboration led to intellectual and pedagogical transformations both within the classroom and in scholarly and literary production. In response to student engagement and together with student activists, we see how Bambara, Jordan, Lorde, and Rich worked to democratize their classrooms and empowered students to be active learners and political agents of change. While many Black and Brown students found that other classes exemplified their experiences in an institution designed to exclude them, in their SEEK English classes they found faculty eager to have them actively participate in course content and syllabus design, and they found space to use their lived experience to help critique and analyze new material. Rich’s scaffolding of the “write a story” assignment is one such example. This assignment for students to craft short stories was divided into five steps over the course of multiple weeks, allowing students to use class time to discuss progress and difficulties they encountered as well as get feedback from her and other students. Rich benefited from the work Bambara, Jordan, and other SEEK faculty did in the years before her arrival to involve students in decision-making within the course. Bambara really set the stage in giving students agency to adapt the classroom to their needs while expanding student expectations from those experiences. As Savonick details, not only did these scholar-teachers reimagine their classrooms and assignments, they also wrote college essays that helped transform higher education by offering blueprints for making it a more inclusive institution.
The chapter on Audre Lorde’s experiences teaching at CUNY colleges stands as a powerful testament to the ways teaching shaped her poetry and essays. Her classroom experiences also helped hone her skills in teaching a diverse student body about race, class, gender, and sexuality. We also learn about how, like Bambara, she took her classes directly to the community and gave so many people access to the power and beauty of poetry. Lorde’s commitment to teaching, not just as a form of salary, was evident in the time, energy, and resources she devoted to creating space for students to learn and grow. This chapter also highlights the camaraderie, friendships, and collaborations that grew during the open admissions period among these scholars.
As Savonick argues, examining the pedagogical archives reveals the ways these professors facilitated students’ knowledge production, bringing in “ideas and perspectives missing from mainstream media, journalism, and curricula … insurgent knowledge” (p. 12, emphasis in original). Two course assignments stand out in Open Admissions and really highlight how these scholar-teachers helped inspire students to be active, engaged citizens and transform lives and communities: the problem paper and curated anthologies. Jordan’s problem paper assignment was an adaptation of an earlier version. Students learned to formulate questions, research and evaluate possible solutions, and write reports. They also learned to value their own existing knowledges and examine social problems from structural perspectives, along with developing tools to write persuasive policy papers. More famous are the edited anthologies that included student writings, which are set within the context of the open admissions era and provide even more evidence of the rich intellectual pursuits of these scholars. Today’s teaching environments really limit faculty’s ability to devote time and resources to these types of assignment, especially in public institutions of higher education. Yet the value of these assignments is clear in Open Admissions. These and others described in the book are the types of exceptional experiential and student-centered offerings often touted in academic programs, yet the resources and institutional support for them are lacking.
Overall, Open Admissions offers a showcase of the intellectual work, pedagogical advancements, and creative teaching of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. It also highlights the ways neoliberal university policy has limited faculty ability to prioritize teaching, eroded faculty compensation, and narrowed access to higher education in the last fifty years. Teaching in higher education has increasingly become a racialized and gendered tiered system that exploits the most vulnerable workers among faculty. Undergraduate teaching is undervalued and marked by shockingly low pay and a dependence on contract labor, which limits opportunities to inspire an engaged citizenry empowered to expand practical democracy. At the same time, faculty across ranks are organizing and supporting the continued relevance of higher education as a public good. Open Admissions is a valuable contribution to literature on pedagogy and a timely celebration of the power of Black feminist scholarship, pedagogy, and literature to transform higher education for the benefit of all.
