This article interrogates the political contexts leading up to the University of Arizona’s designation as a land grant and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). As a white settler teacher, I reflect on how researching this history helped me confront how increasing access to the university was met by exclusionary gatekeeping mechanisms that function more generally in higher education. While historicizing this tension between access and exclusion at the University of Arizona, I recognized how racist and classist gatekeeping mechanisms emerged in the nineteenth century in ways that are continually recycled in the composition classroom. This case study provides an example of the sort of local historical research that encourages educators to unearth the colonial and racist infrastructure of FYW born from nineteenth-century educational policies and engage with the collective responses of BIPOC student activists from the civil rights movement. In this way, composition instructors can interrogate their universities’ institutional history to reimagine the role they might play in creating a more socially and linguistically just future.
Charles McMartin (Mon,) studied this question.