Yulissa Chavez and Madison Mathews were born long after the Vietnam War.
But that time has come alive for them thanks to a research assignment in their HESA 500: Foundations of Higher Education course that sent them digging through the Founders Memorial Library archives.
How did NIU students feel about the situation – and how did they respond? How were those perspectives or actions influenced by the arrival of combat veterans ready to start or resume their education? What view did DeKalb County residents take of the temperature on campus?
The first-year Higher Education and Student Affairs graduate students now understand how the conflict that ripped apart college campuses and their communities decades ago continues to influence the current social landscape.
“I kept an open mind,” says Chavez, who is from Aurora, Colo. “In some of the documentaries I watched, they really tried to show the justification for going to war – and they had no idea it was going to have this big of an impact. It was just about stopping communism. It was like this specific thing and trying to justify it.”
Conversely, she adds, “I came to see what students here at NIU were thinking – and they saw it differently. They were able to talk to soldiers who actually went to the Vietnam war and came back, who saw that it was having more harm than good.”
And the local population?
“It’s not surprising to know that there was a little bit of tension,” she says, “between anyone affiliated with the university and folks who lived in DeKalb at the time who were maybe opposed to this growing demographic of students and their maybe more-open-minded ideas.”
Chavez and Mathews were among the 36 M.S.Ed. in Higher Education and Student Affairs students, including some enrolled in HESA 509: Campus Environments and Student Subcultures, who presented their projects Dec. 8 during the “Contemporary and Historic Social Movements at NIU” exhibit and reception held in the library.
Other projects examined topics such as Black Lives Matter, the women’s rights movement of the 1980s, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, GLBT rights, undocumented student rights and trans* student rights.
Significant support came from Founders Memorial Library staff Bradley Wiles, associate professor and head of Special Collections and Archives Department, and Alissa Droog, assistant professor and Education and Social Sciences librarian.
Wiles and Droog helped conceptualize the assignment and then assisted students in using the archives and finding sources for literature reviews of the larger historical context.
SUCH LARGER SOCIAL movements shape the values, beliefs, traditions and ways of operating for institutions of higher education, Associate Professor Carrie Kortegast told her students in assigning them to research those historical struggles at NIU and to determine the results.
Kortegast, who joined the Department of Counseling and Higher Education faculty in 2014, completed something similar during her master’s program at the University of Massachusetts.
“From my own experience, I know that there is something kind of cool about trying to investigate, and use, primary sources to understand something that happened at an institution,” she says, “and I wanted to provide my students the same opportunity, to explore something that happened at NIU and then be able to connect it to larger concepts and larger social movements that were happening in the U.S.”
Doing so supplies a glimpse into how college campuses and their host communities interact, she says, as well as how that relationship informs change on campus in areas such as student support services, student advocacy and even curriculum.
“It’s important for any higher education professional to understand the historical context of where we are now,” Kortegast says.
“The reason we have places like the Center for Black Studies, the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, the Latino Resource Center – both academic and student support services in these identity-based places – is because of larger social movements,” she says. “The reason we have more parity around women in sport is because of larger social movements and Title IX.”
Learning “how these social contexts influence current practice is important,” she adds, “but so is how larger social movements can provide, and push for, more equity.”
“If we think about more recent movements, particularly around undocumented students and the good work that NIU has done in supporting undocumented students, we see that that has been supported by student activism,” Kortegast says. “Another example is the continued work and the needed work regarding supporting trans students on campus.”
Meanwhile, the task of conducting local research via university archives reveals the fact that most records stored in such places come from administrative sources and not students.
“One of the things that struck me about that is that these are individuals who are going to be working with student organizations,” she says, “so how do we encourage students organizations to think about, and document, their own experiences through these groups? That’s part of what we can do as advisors – to start encouraging student groups to share their content with the university archives so they can be the documenters and preservers of their own histories and good works on campus.”
DAKOTA WILLIAMS WORKED with Kianna Graves, Natalia Silva-Ramirez, Trevon Smith and Monica Tomarchio on “Holding Queer Space Then and Still Doing So: The Evolution of How Space Has Been Used as an Activist Tool.”
“I felt like I didn’t have enough knowledge about LGBTQ+ spaces and history, so I definitely wanted to dive into that, and I also wanted to better understand a university that I didn’t have much knowledge on or relationship with,” says Williams, who is from Aurora, Colo.
Williams and his classmates discovered that much of what they unearthed in the archives made little or no reference to national contexts, including the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.
Students did find connections to the federal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policies of the 1990s by way of an on-campus “Do Ask, Do Tell” campaign urging the community to talk openly about sexuality.
“I was really able to see that there was a lot of bargaining that had to be done through student and administrative efforts,” Williams says. “It’s not just students. It’s not just faculty or staff who are pushing for things. It’s a combined effort, and students have to be heard. Student perspectives have to be taken into account in order to actually get work done.”
Freda Kpodo joined Alea Akers, Marissa Licea and Austin Robinson in looking at how NIU students participated in Black Lives Matter.
“Being an international student and being a Black woman, I wanted to understand social movements on campus, and one of the areas that I really connected with was Black Lives Matter,” says Kpodo, who is from Ghana. “I just wanted to understand what the movement was about and what led to its creation. There is a whole history of how it got to the point for Black people to come with the movement.”
Kpodo and her teammates discovered how NIU students in 1968 presented then-president Rhoten Smith with a list of seven grievances, which echoed the national push for Black Studies programs and resulted in the current Center for Black Studies.
They also learned about the NIU Black Student Union’s #ProjectOutline campaign in 2016 that aimed to raise awareness of Black people killed by police.
“I gained so much knowledge about the type of students we have on campus and how much they are willing to do,” Kpodo says.
“There have been a lot of protests. There have been a lot of students speaking out on what they need and how we can help them to work for their own benefits and to advocate for themselves,” she adds. “It teaches me advocacy and that it’s important to be patient and to actually listen and be there to support them.”
Alejandra Guzman, Neyda Diaz, Katherine Hutto and Omar Ramirez researched the history of undocumented students and their human rights.
“It was really cool to dive deeper into learning about DREAM Action NIU,” Guzman says. “I’ve always heard things about this student organization on campus, but just seeing what a pivotal role they played in allies across the NIU community and in this movement was incredible, particularly the ‘Coming Out of the Shadows’ movement and how that resulted in student demands and demanding an institutional response.”
She also grasped the purpose of Kortegast’s assignment.
“It’s incredibly important in entering the field as full-time professionals – very soon for our cohort – to think about the ways that we are continuing to empower students to advocate for themselves and others, and to do that well,” Guzman says. “Being a part of that is a joy that I look forward to in the coming year.”
LEARNING AND MASTERING the process proved worthwhile.
“I really liked how all the pieces came together to just develop the story that was happening here at NIU,” says Mathews, who is from Yuma, Ariz. “These problems don’t go away. They are very cyclical, and they disguise themselves as new issues, but they have always been pervasive. Being able to look at our history allow us to, hopefully, be able not to repeat the harm we’ve inflicted in the past.”
Her research partner also came away feeling positive.
“I was really inspired by the way that faculty, specifically in the History Department, showed up for the students and fought for them to have a variety of perspectives on the Vietnam War – and not to take just one document as truth but to understand the power of storytelling and the power of understanding the implications that those with power have over others,” Chavez says.
“As I think about the work that I want to do, and always thinking back to the position I hold, it’s about how I can really think through bringing students a variety of resources so that they know that there’s not just one pathway or one truth for them,” she adds. “There are many things that they can seek out there.”
That resonates with Wiles, who spoke during the Dec. 8 event about what he observed about Kortegast’s students.
“Students got to search disparate pockets of things to piece this stuff together,” Wiles says, “and I was very impressed by their tenacity. It’s not always an easy process.”
Making it harder – and, at the same time, more valuable – were the unanswered questions.
“Even thought you’re sort of overwhelmed by the bulk, there is a word called ‘lacunae.’ It’s what’s missing. It’s the gaps. It’s the things that are absent,” Wiles told the attendees, “and that absence speaks volumes about where an institution is at over time. The idea is to fill that lacuna in a way that is equitable, that is inclusive and that really speaks to the representation and the stories that people have on campus.”
He also was grateful for the opportunity to assist in the projects.
“We want to work with students, with organization and with different academic departments and people across the university to try to help tell the stories,” he says. “This was a great step in that direction.”
Founders Memorial Library now will store the posters permanently in the archives.