History Rhythms & Higher Education with Dr. Kevin Kruse

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Lessons learned from history rhythms and the role of higher education.

In this episode, I interview Dr. Kevin Kruse, Professor of History at Princeton University. He specializes in the political, social, and urban/suburban history of twentieth-century America, with a particular interest in conflicts over race, rights and religion and the making of modern conservatism.

(Scroll down to access the transcript.)

We discuss the following topics:

6:46:19: Why the ugly parts of American history are essential for students to learn.
Resource mentioned:
Critical consciousness development

MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail

George Wallace 

Dan Carter, Politics of Rage

16:35:01: Historical lessons in messaging during manufactured culture wars.

23:49:15: Reasons for the recurring backlash against higher education.

30:23:10: Positive changes at elitist institutions.

36:04:00: Optimism for higher education professionals.

Select Dr. Kruse quotes:

"If you want a history that is purely celebratory--it just tells you the great things the country has done and that tells you the country has done no wrong--that's not history. That's propaganda."

"If students see a connection in the past, see a utility in that if it speaks to them, it's not some distant foreign world, but it's got some connection and some resonants in their lives--that's fantastic! That's what we should be doing. The goal here is if we're trying to make this relevant and meaningful to our students, we just have to point them to the right parts of it because the past speaks to us today."

"Institutions of higher learning were effectively bastions of white supremacy and not just in the South. When I lecture on affirmative action, I ask my students in what year did Princeton University first implement preferences by race and gender? And the answer is 1746. Because for the first two centuries of our existence, you had to be a white guy to come here. So these institutions, public and private, north and south, east and west were largely held off and reserved for white people." 

On one reason for the recurring backlash against higher education:
"Higher education challenges not only people's assumptions about themselves, but the assumptions and limitations placed on them." 

"Post-emancipation, the thing that scared southern whites the most were the new levels of education and literacy they saw in free Blacks. A professor from Ole Miss put it best when he said that the reason why you're scared about this is that educated people make their own paths. They find their own places, and they didn't want freed Blacks to do that. They didn't want them to have that mobility, that leg up to have that, not only that vision of where they wanted to take their lives, but the ability to do so. And that's what education is. Education opens doors."

"I'm on the graduate admissions committee of my university this year, and every year we find somebody whose path started at a community college and they're going to come on and earn a Ph.D. at Princeton. And to us, that's a more impressive journey than some legacy kid who got into Harvard and had life handed to them." 

"When things look dark, I think the biggest lesson of history is that they don't stay dark. We have fumbled our way to the light." 

"I think the most depressing way to teach history would be that everything used to be perfect. And now, God, it's all screwed up! We don't know why? That's awful. Instead, show people how we muddle through the dark times of the path."

About Dr. Kevin Kruse
Professor Kruse studies the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America. Focused on conflicts over race, rights, and religion, he has particular interests in segregation and the civil rights movement, the rise of religious nationalism and the making of modern conservatism.

His first book, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), won prizes including the 2007 Francis B. Simkins Award from the Southern Historical Association (for the best first book in Southern history, 2005-2006) and the 2007 Best Book Award in Urban Politics from the American Political Science Association. His second book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015), examined the rise of American religious nationalism in the mid-twentieth century and its legacies in American political and religious life. 

Professor Kruse has just published Fault Lines: A History of America Since 1974, a trade/textbook with co-author Julian Zelizer. A sweeping history of the past four decades of American history, the book chronicles the origins of the divided states of America, a nation increasingly riven by stark political partisanship and deep social divisions along lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. Co-written with Julian Zelizer, the book tracks not only the course of our current state of political polarization, but also the ways in which an increasingly fractured media landscape worked to aggravate divisions in American politics and society as well.

Professor Kruse is currently conducting research for his new book, The Division: John Doar, the Justice Department, and the Civil Rights Movement (contracted to Basic Books). The point man for civil rights for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Doar was a vital actor in countless crisis moments in the civil rights movement — pioneering voting rights lawsuits, personally confronting segregationists at Ole Miss and the University of Alabama, putting Klansmen on trial for the murders of civil rights workers (including the famous “Mississippi Burning” murders), helping craft and implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, literally leading the way in the Selma-to-Montgomery March, etc. Through the previously untapped papers of Doar, he hopes to provide new insights into these civil rights milestones as well as a new understanding of the ways in which the federal government worked (and didn’t work) during the racial revolution unfolding across the South.

Professor Kruse was honored as one of America's top young "Innovators in the Arts and Sciences" by the Smithsonian Magazine and selected as one of the top young historians in the country by the History News Network. He has recently been named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.

About Dr. Al Solano
Al is Founder & Coach at the Continuous Learning Institute. A big believer in kindness, he helps institutions of higher education to plan and implement homegrown practices that get results for students by coaching them through a process based on what he calls the "Three Cs": Clarity, Coherence, Consensus. In addition, his bite-sized, practitioner-based articles on student success strategies, institutional planning & implementation, and educational leadership are implemented at institutions across the country. He has worked directly with over 50 colleges and universities and has trained well over 5,000 educators. He has coached colleges for over a decade, worked at two community colleges, and began his education career in K12. He earned a doctorate in education from UCLA, and is a proud community college student who transferred to Cornell University.

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