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This chapter illustrates the diverse social identities that are developed in racial-ethnic, identity-based campus organizations. Students listed race-ethnicity as the focus of their initial attraction to these organizations. However, they came to embed themselves in these organizations because the organizations also developed other aspects of their identities, such as their professional, political, and academic identities. This chapter also highlights students who explicitly sought to embed themselves in organizations and clubs that were not connected with their racial-ethnic identity. In doing so, this chapter takes a critical look at extracurricular activities in relation to experiences of race-ethnicity at college and examines the role they serve in minority students' self-exploration.

This chapter focuses on the students' lifestyle. The discussion covers a wide range of BHU students, from high to low caste backgrounds, and even those with Parsee, Christian, Sikh, and Muslim backgrounds. It takes notes of their everyday activities, practice of religious rituals, dining arrangements, and extracurricular activities. It then addresses some issues, such as those related to differences of caste, religion, and political persuasion. The first part of the chapter describes the BHU as a residential university (the first in India) and the various residences available on campus. It observes that nationalism became the university's defining feature. The final part of the chapter discusses the fundamental changes made to nationalist activism on campus and Malaviya's outlook towards the nature of student activism.

This chapter describes a school in Delight which was founded in 1903. To the community of Delight, the rural school is a space where people gather. It acts as an animated and dynamic area. School-related extracurricular activities bring people to the school, as parents, relatives, and friends gather to support their children in school plays and festivals. For such a small town, there is quite a lively atmosphere seen at the school. Without the school, the community would lose its recreational and communal center.

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the first children’s museum in the country, aimed its offerings at middle-class children who they saw as independent strivers. In discussing the types of science education available at their museum, the educators who ran the Brooklyn Children’s Museum showed how science education for boys in the early twentieth century was pitched at a higher level than the equivalent offerings for girls.

Chapter 2 explores the experiences of students who positioned themselves as caregivers within their extracurricular groups, a role reserved primarily for women. Silver argues that the college environment offers an intricate landscape of need. Given the plentiful supply of students requiring support, those who were willing to provide care were valued by their peers. Feeling valued in this way amplified some caregivers’ sense of belonging. But caring for peers also carried significant costs. Nurturing other students was an arduous and time-intensive task, and women who positioned themselves as caregivers could be called on at virtually any time for support. For some students, this detracted from their own well-being, academic engagement, and self-actualization. This chapter engages with theories of “doing gender” and care work to consider how gendered self-presentation and meanings about femininity and care shape social life for college women.

Chapter 3 explores the social performances of students who were endowed with authority in extracurricular settings. This authority took one of two forms: the authority to lead or the authority to speak. Some students took on identities as managers, giving direction and taking charge. They shaped the day-to-day activities of their peers and were regarded as valuable for the direction they provided. Others positioned themselves as educators, emphasizing their authority to speak and convey knowledge. The attentiveness of peers solidified their place as central members of social groups. Silver argues that raced and gendered associations limited access to these styles of self-presentation to White men, and the attention these men received endowed them with a durable sense of belonging. They were the beneficiaries of cultural assumptions and stereotypes that shape the meanings attached to leadership and intellect. This chapter argues that the existence of these roles and their exclusivity to White male students derive from broad social inequalities that imbue Whiteness and masculinity with authority that has historically been denied to women and racial/ethnic minorities. These patterns are situated in histories of racist and sexist exclusion within higher education.

Chapter 6 shows that in the rarer instances where change in students’ self-presentation occurred, it happened in patterned ways. These patterns were propelled by twin social forces that Silver dubs centrifugal pressure and centripetal elevation. Female and racial/ethnic minority students who tried to craft identities as managers or educators were blocked from doing so through the application of centrifugal pressure. Pushed toward the margins of group life, they frequently became entertainers or associates. On the other hand, White male students who initially occupied less central places in groups benefited from centripetal elevation, whereby the deference and encouragement of peers drew them into central roles with greater authority. These forces further stratified student experiences and emotions in social groups. After exploring the intricacies of these phenomena, Silver discusses their broader impact on inequality in college extracurricular outlets. While more than 75% of White men came to occupy social roles—versions of the cookie-cutter self—that offered greater opportunity to feel valued or appreciated, less than 50% of women and very few racial/ethnic minority men did. The chapter concludes by discussing how these findings exist in tension with prevalent understandings of higher education as a place for growth and development.

Finally, chapter 7 brings together the insights of the preceding chapters to reflect on the implications of this work. Here Silver situates his findings in an ongoing conversation about the nature of higher education as a site for the contestation or reproduction of social inequality. Understanding student interactions within social groups provides insight into how inequality gets generated, even after challenges related to access have been overcome. Drawing from the experiences of a few exceptional students—those who resisted the pull of the cookie-cutter self and refused to comply with centrifugal pressure—this chapter explores potential avenues for reform. These exceptional students defied pressure for conformity and found tools for engaging across dimensions of difference in productive ways. While they represent a small fraction of the participants in this study, their experiences suggest possibilities for combating inequality in higher education. Only by adopting a new approach to the college social scene can post-secondary institutions hope to address the inequalities that flourish on their campuses. Just as others have called for greater intentionality in promoting learning in the classroom, Silver makes a case for intentionality in the extracurricular realm.

This chapter explores the world of proms, cheerleading, band, pep rallies, homecoming court, and student government, where the racial politics of the day had a direct impact on the lives of students. It analyzes how the micropolitics embedded in extracurricular activities both helped and impeded the loftier goal of reducing prejudice through social integration. For years, segregationists had warned about the dire consequences of “race mixing.” Indeed, the Citizens' Council built its campaign to preserve segregated public schools around predictions that integration of schools would bring about interracial friendships, dating, and marriage, thus the end of “racial integrity” and the dominance of the white race. Therefore, as schools began to desegregate in the late 1960s, at the forefront of everyone's minds was the issue of social integration among black and white students.

This concluding chapter summarizes the lessons learned from studying the stories of school desegregation in Mississippi. In organizing the book with separate chapters on black parents, superintendents, principals, and teachers, this study hoped to capture the nuances of how school desegregation was accomplished, fought for, resisted, and doomed in differing ways in different parts of the state. The inclusion of the role of sports, band, the prom, cheerleading, and student government during the school desegregation process is a reminder that educational reformers cannot ignore the importance of the informal curriculum, the hidden curriculum, and the extracurricular of schools. Meanwhile, the chapters on protests and private schools illustrate two primary ways in which people responded to this monumental cultural change that threatened the status quo: they resisted in various ways through conventional methods of protest, and they formed a countermovement that sought to retain the tribalism to which they clung and around which their identities were built.

Chapter Four explores the political theory and educational policy literature relevant to civic preparation. It draws on this literature to develop a conceptual framework that emphasizes the need to provide all students with (1) broad-based civic knowledge; (2) cognitive and verbal skills, as well as the critical analytic skills needed for democratic deliberation; (3) school governance experiences, extracurricular activities, and involvement in school-connected community service programs; and (4) basic character values like responsibility and self-discipline, as well as important democratic values like tolerance, equality, the rule of law, and support for the fundamental political institutions of our society. The chapter posits that preparing students for civic participation necessitates embracing our communities’ increasing diversity, and taking aggressive steps to establish equal educational opportunities for students in poverty and students of color.

This chapter examines the ways in which schools and neighborhoods influence civic participation. Schools promote civic participation through the curricula and programs that they provide, such as mandatory service programs, service learning programs, courses in civic education, and extracurricular activities. Research also shows that the climate of schools and classrooms can also have an impact on young people’s civic engagement. Schools that encourage respect among students, allow students to express their views openly and feel safe, and offer a wide range of extracurricular activities will have students that go on to become active citizens adults. Neighborhoods, too, influence civic engagement. Neighborhoods in which individuals know and trust one another and that have many social, recreational, and cultural organizations for both youth and adults produce more civically engaged residents.

This chapter looks at the vibrant economy of language teaching and learning in early modern England. The period witnessed a boom in both autodidacticism and private educational provision. Language teaching was central to a vibrant urban ‘extracurricular economy’. New spaces, schools, and teachers reshaped the educational landscape. Working within an economy of reputation, skill, and prestige, language teachers advertised their services and attracted students through a mixture of their presence in print, networks of contacts, and claims of pedagogical skill and linguistic prestige. In doing so, these teachers—particularly teachers of French—contributed to new ways of thinking about the English language itself. New perspectives on the places, people, and practices of this extracurricular economy ultimately demand that we rethink the concept of an early modern ‘educational revolution’.

Chapter 1 highlights the significance of everyday social practices for white sectional reunion after the Civil War, reassessing the form assumed by reconciliation as it transitioned from an object of political contestation to common sense reality. Specifically, it recovers the campus novel, a popular though largely unstudied genre that, despite its sophomoric content, acquired historical weight by turning the practice of campus affections into a metonym for national belonging tacitly predicated on racial exclusion. Focusing on the ability for merriment to overcome and, above all, trivialize intra-white difference, novels like Hammersmith: His Harvard Days (1879) and For the Blue and Gold (1901) enacted a civic pedagogy, becoming handbooks for a sociality that turned political disagreement into jocular affinity, dispute into banter, and racial exclusion into an implicit element of white fellow feeling.