Great Summer Reads: Open Admissions

The pace of academic life has picked up significantly in recent years. According to a 2024 survey conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education , faculty across America have been experiencing increased workloads, higher levels of stress, and declining levels of job satisfaction since the COVID-19 pandemic. Our current poli-crisis consists of multiple intersecting crises: large-scale disinvestment in higher education; the growing corporatization of academia, with its attendant income disparities and widespread precarity; pervasive threats to academic freedom; and, most recently, the unchecked incursion of generative AI into student learning.

In this difficult moment, a remarkable book, Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College (2024), offers an alternative vision of the modern university as a space of creative synergy and social transformation. The volume focuses on the pedagogical work of four celebrated American writers who taught in the tuition-free SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) program at CUNY (City University of New York) in the late 1960s and early 70s. Author Danika Savonick gives readers a rare glimpse of her writer-educators' pedagogical artifacts (course outlines, assignments, reflection prompts, notes, journal entries, anthologies of student work, etc.) and uses this archive to demonstrate continuity between their academic teaching, their published work, and their civil rights activism.  

The lesson here is that our lives as teachers need not happen in isolation from our lives as researchers and citizens. In Open Admissions , the academic classroom and the world outside the classroom permeate one another; students learn from their teachers while teachers learn from their students in a reciprocal process of intellectual and creative exploration that values not only scholarly knowledge but also lived experience. In addition to this central lesson, Savonick’s book offers a number of insights into the practice of teaching that feel particularly resonant in our current moment:

• Teaching is hard work: even visionary teachers struggle with engaging students in meaningful learning beyond the transactional logic of academic institutions.
• One of the greatest challenges in teaching is getting students to connect what they are learning in our classes to their own lives—and to their own power to make change. Savonick shows Bambara, Jordan, Lorde and Rich patiently cultivating an "activist consciousness: an awareness of their [students’] ability to address injustice" in their students through the thoughtful design of course assignments, through their own community engagement, and through active participation in student-led social action.
• Unconventional assignments like reflective journaling can inspire what Savonick calls “a kind of radical openness toward the materials—a willingness to be changed by what they were learning”. These types of assignments challenge students “to try and unlearn established attitudes and see things differently than they did just six hours earlier" with the goal of producing more thoughtful, engaged, and empowered learners.
• Teaching is inevitably unpredictable: “teachers are not fully in charge of what, or how much, a student learns, just as an author never has the final word about how their poem will be interpreted.” Savonick quotes Audre Lorde’s powerful description of the learning process as “something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. And then, just possibly, hopefully it goes home or on.” In this sense, teaching is a future-facing endeavor, premised on the hope (but not certainty) that what we teach will eventually click for our students: if not now then some days or months or years later.  "And in that unknowability of the future,” Savonick concludes, “lay the possibility of something different, perhaps even a more livable world than the present."

The many innovative pedagogical experiments featured in Open Admissions—student-led courses, collaborative public projects, student-faculty publications—remind us that academic teaching can be an integral part of our intellectual and creative lives, and that we need to continue advocating for institutional structures that protect and support these transformative synergies.