Countercurricular Rhetorical Education: Reimagining the University from the Inside Out

This essay articulates the theoretical basis for my term “countercurricular,” which denotes college students’use of curricular and extracurricular learning to craft alternative or oppositional views. The countercurricular highlights how student organizers mobilize history to change the present, especially to inscribe into public memory recurring conflicts between students and university administrations. I examine documents related to the Black Student Union at the University of California, Irvine, and discuss teaching this activist history. Through these textual and pedagogical examples, I demonstrate how countercurricular rhetorical education orients our understanding of how students challenge the oppressions upon which the university is built.