Divestment, Dissent, and Discipline: A Workshop

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About

This digital workshop plan provides primary source materials from the Barnard Archives & Special Collections and discussion questions to guide workshops or classes interested in utilizing archival materials to research histories of divestment campaigns, student dissent, and student discipline at Barnard College. This plan may also be used as a roadmap for individual researchers seeking archival materials related to student activism and protest on campus.

This resource was created by Katelyn Landry, a Barnard Archives Graduate Fellow during the 2024-25 academic year. It was created within the context of intense political and social turmoil in the U.S, especially in higher education institutions. Recent events have fueled increased requests from researchers for materials related to histories of campus protest and activism. In response to that demand, this guide is intended to aid researchers in identifying relevant materials for their inquiries.

This resource also serves as an affirmation of the right to protest and freedom of expression on college campuses. By looking to the archive for evidence of past organizing, activism, and negotiations, the archive may serve as a tool for fortifying solidarity, understanding, and accountability on campuses today and in the future.

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How to Use this Resource

This workshop plan is divided into four sections. The first section, “Intro,” provides definitions of institutional and administrative records, which are the primary types of materials presented throughout the lesson plan. This section explains why these types of records are preserved and why they are valuable resources for researching college administrators’ perspectives and reactions to divestment campaigns, campus dissent, and student discipline.

The second and third sections, “Divestment” and “Dissent and Discipline” respectively, provide digitized materials from institutional record collections at the Barnard Archives related to those topics. The materials are organized roughly chronologically into sections based on major issues that gave rise to divestment campaigns and/or protest on Barnard’s campus, such as South African apartheid. Because this resource intends to serve as a lesson plan rather than a digital exhibit, the historical context provided for each material is minimal in the hope that workshop participants will pursue their own close analysis. The materials presented here are by no means the only materials in the Barnard Archives that are relevant to these subjects. Rather, they are a sample of particularly compelling materials that came to the Graduate Archives Fellows’ attention while they processed institutional records collections during the 2024-25 academic year. They have been digitized for this resource to improve their accessibility. Additionally, each material includes a citation that links to the material’s record in its collection finding aid, which will hopefully aid researchers in navigating the Barnard Archives’ finding aids to discover and request additional materials of interest.

The “Divestment” and “Dissent and Discipline” sections are each concluded with questions designed to be posed to a workshop or class for discussion. They include basic document analysis questions designed to encourage the researcher to think critically about the material’s creation, its creators’ intentions, its perception by outside actors, and its preservation within the archive. They also include content-specific questions intended to facilitate discussion about how archival materials reveal, obscure, or otherwise impact our understandings of past divestment campaigns, student protests and organizing, and student discipline policies and practices. Finally, there is a suggested group exercise for encouraging further comparative analysis between the materials as well as with contemporary documents.

The fourth and final section, “Resources,” offers suggestions and links to additional research support within Barnard and Columbia libraries and archives, as well as other topically related digital resources for continuing research into divestment, dissent, and discipline.

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Publication Rights

Barnard College retains copyright of materials created as part of its business operations. To request permission to reproduce these types of materials, please contact us at archives@barnard.edu.

This collection may also contain materials created by others, for which copyright is not held by the College. In order to reproduce these materials, permission from the Archives is not required, but it is researchers’ responsibility to determine and obtain any necessary permissions related to copyright, privacy, publicity, or other rights.

No permission is required for reproductions of materials in the public domain or uses that fall within fair use exemptions to copyright as defined under U.S. Copyright Law.

Please see our Reproductions, Copyright, and Citing Archives page for more information and contact us at archives@barnard.edu with any questions.

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Content: CC BY-SA Katelyn Landry, 2024-25 Barnard Archives Graduate Fellow 2025 (get source code).

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