When Ivory Towers Were Black
A Story about Race in America's Cities and Universities
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- CHF 12.00
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- CHF 12.00
Description de l’éditeur
This personal history chronicles the triumph and loss of a 1960s initiative to recruit minority students to Columbia University’s School of Architecture.
At the intersection of US educational, architectural, and urban history, When Ivory Towers Were Black tells the story of how an unparalleled cohort of ethnic minority students overcame institutional roadblocks to earn degrees in architecture from Columbia University. Its narrative begins with a protest movement to end Columbia’s authoritarian practices, and ends with an unsettling return to the status quo.
Sharon Egretta Sutton, one of the students in question, follows two university units that led the movement toward emancipatory education: the Division of Planning and the Urban Center. She illustrates both units’ struggle to open the ivory tower to ethnic minority students and to involve those students in improving Harlem’s slum conditions. Along with Sutton’s personal perspective, the story is narrated through the oral histories of twenty-four fellow students who received an Ivy League education only to find the doors closing on their careers due to Nixon-era urban disinvestment policies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Loosely framing this work as a case study on institutional transformation, Sutton, a professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Washington, examines the development and unraveling of an experimental education initiative at Columbia University's School of Architecture that arose out of the school's 1968 student rebellions, aimed at recruiting of minority students and transforming the school's curriculum into "humanistic, justice-oriented" education. Sutton leads the way through the "murky waters of transformation" that occurred between 1968 and 1976, following an "evolutionary arc that begins with an unsettling effort to eliminate the exercise of authoritarian power on campus and in the community, and ends with an equally unsettling return to the status quo." Sutton follows the stories of 24 black and Puerto Rican students, including herself, who attended Columbia during this period. The detailed account of the intra- and interdepartmental quarrels often lapses into tiresome institutional history, and Sutton's excessive use of the second person hinders the immediacy inherent to her personal experiences and the historical events she lived through. The recollections of the alumni that infuse and inform the text, nevertheless, give the book value as an oral history.