In recent months the media have closely followed the issues of student housing at Berkeley, highlighting the tensions that frequently arise between university campuses and those living around them. Here, PUP Speaks speaker Eddie R. Cole explores the racialized history of campus expansion and community conflict, and the role that university leadership has played—for better and worse—in the battle for racial equity on campus.
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Eddie R. Cole is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Organizational Change at UCLA. His research focuses on college presidents’ historic role in shaping racial policies and practices both inside and outside of the educational sphere. His book The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom was described by New York Times–bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi as “a stunning and ambitious origins story… embedded with breath-taking narratives recovered from meticulous research.†In 2023 he was named a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow for 2023-24 and spent the year researching his forthcoming book, Black Ideas, a history of American higher education as told through the Black intellectuals who shaped it.