Academic advising and the lessons of the civil rights and social justice campus movements

Abstract

ABSTRACT The changing campus demographics following World War II and the U.S. Black Student Movement of the 1960s unified and influenced the values of academic advising and student support services. This article argues that this context of U.S. college civil rights protest resulted in the call for more inclusive student support services that combined social work, counselling, social justice, and academic knowledge. Academic histories like Martha Biondi’s comprehensive Black Revolution on Campus and Ibram Rogers’s The Black Campus Movement document well the call for Black counsellors, trained social workers, and academic coaches at campuses on the east and west coasts during the Era of Protest. This study adds to these representations by looking at this history through the lens of a midwestern U.S. flagship, urban campus. Academic and student affairs administrators are taking note of the new generation of undergraduate students and their penchant for protest, especially regarding the Black Lives Matter movement spurred by the tragic deaths of college-aged and college-bound young Black men like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown that has strengthened during the pandemic after the murder of George Floyd. .