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Higher Education History Episodes

Sept. 23, 2024

Segregation Scholarships

Between 1921 and 1948, every Southern and border state, except Delaware, set up scholarship programs to send Black students out of state for graduate study rather than admit them to historically white public colleges or buil…
July 8, 2024

Dr. Claudia Hampton & the History of Affirmative Action in California

In 1974, Republican governor Ronald Reagan appointed educator Dr. Claudia Hampton, a Democrat active in her local NAACP, as the first Black woman trustee to the board of California State University. For the next twenty years…
Jan. 1, 2024

The History of College Radio

Almost as soon as there were radio stations, there were college radio stations. In 1948, to popularize FM radio, the FCC introduced class D non commercial education licenses for low-watt college radio stations. By 1967, 326 …
Dec. 4, 2023

Merze Tate

Scholar Merze Tate, born in Michigan in 1905, overcame the odds in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world,” to earn graduate degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University on her way to becoming the firs…
Oct. 9, 2023

The Student Right in the late 1960s

In the late 1960s, as college campuses became hotbeds of liberal protest, conservative college groups, like the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), and College Republicans,…
Jan. 16, 2023

The 1968 Student Uprising at Tuskegee Institute

Days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and after months of increasing tension on campus, the students at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama occupied a building on campus where the Trustees were meeting, demandin…
Guest: Brian Jones
June 14, 2021

The Jackson State Shootings in May 1970

Just after midnight on May 15, 1970, officers opened fire on a group of unarmed students milling in front of a dorm on the campus of Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi, killing two and wounding twelve. Although th…