Teaching the Truth about America’s Political and Racial History

This session will provide techniques for how to address campus tensions created by the current U.S. presidential election, geopolitical events abroad, and domestic racism. These interconnected tensions affect faculty, students, and staff—collectively and individually—regardless of academic field or discipline. Attendees will receive strategies for how to facilitate difficult dialogue and repair racial harm.

Eddie R. Cole, Ph.D., is Professor of Education and History at UCLA and a 2023-24 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. A historian of higher education, Professor Cole’s research focuses on race and social movements on American college campuses. His research explores power and systems of power; education’s impact on society; and higher education and organizational change. In addition to research support from the Radcliffe Institute, Professor Cole’s has also received fellowships and grants from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (now the Institute for Citizens & Scholars), the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University. His essays and op-eds have appeared in TIME, The Guardian, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Chronicle of Higher Education; and he has served as expert commentator for CNN, BBC World News, MSNBC, and C-Span Book TV. He is author of the award-winning book, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2020), and co-author of With Faith in God and Heart and Mind: A History of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity (University of North Carolina Press, in-press 2024). Professor Cole is currently Associate Dean of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies.

This event is open to the Stanford community.