Victoria Cain. Schools and Screens: A Watchful History Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. 272 pp.

Abstract

riage; we see how Black and White students navigated the sharing (or racial segregation) of dining hall tables; we see how White college presidents hired or, more often, did not hire Black faculty amid conflicting demands from constituents. And throughout, Bell highlights the roles of Black students and alumni as “agents of change” who were the strongest advocates for their own equal treatment (p. 8). Bell’s highly focused narrative does come with some drawbacks. While readers get a good sense of how religious and gender ideology permeated the abolitionist colleges, Bell could have given even more context on race and racism. In the absence of regular references to other nineteenth-century colleges, Bell’s critiques can cause readers to forget just how advanced the abolitionist colleges were in comparison. Bell also gives only limited insight into the sources of the colleges’ reinvigorated bigotry. He points toward the rise of two intellectual movements, liberalism and cultural evolutionism, which recast racial equality as the result of an individual’s own merit or a race’s past effort rather than as an intrinsic, preexisting element of human nature. Other causes, however, may have been equally influential. The egalitarian evangelicalism of the abolitionist colleges’ early years is notably absent from Bell’s later chapters, probably because of the institutions’ realignments with a more hierarchy-minded mainstream Christianity. Theology could inspire equality; it could also reinforce difference. Relatedly, it seems likely that this renewed racism did not have academic origins but rather was born, or else never died, in more humble social spaces such as homes and churches. Intellectualism may have only dressed up old prejudices learned outside the ivory tower, prejudices that no civil war could kill. All the same, Degrees of Equality is an excellent book and would make a good addition to the graduate or undergraduate history classroom. Graduate students can learn much from Bell’s precise recounting of human action and motivation. Undergraduates can learn this as well, but also a more basic and “relevant” lesson: that the priorities of their institutions, and even the banalities of the campus dining hall or dating scene, are not without meaning.