Exploring Political Participation in University Yearbooks

College yearbooks have a special place in my heart. I met my wife at the writers' training for the University of Oklahoma yearbook, and it was my first paid job after receiving my green card. Yearbooks are beautiful archives of how students witnessed their university during that year. Captured in these books are historic examples of political participation, including protests, boycotts, strikes, art, clubs, and other experiences that reflect the myriad of concerns and approaches to politics from young people.

In a published article for the Journal of Political Science Education, I wrote about how we can use yearbooks in the classroom as an effective tool for accomplishing three main objectives:

1. Learning about young people’s participation,

2. Gaining a better understanding of a student’s own university, and

3. Gaining experience analyzing archival and qualitative data.
   

Examining yearbooks offers a hands-on learning opportunity for students to work with archival data. For this lesson, I took my students to Georgetown’s Special Collections, working with one of the librarians—a valuable resource for students. For this paper, I developed an initial database of 246 American universities that have a digital archive of yearbooks. In the figure below, I plot the distribution of archived yearbook coverage from my database. The earliest book I found was from 1852 at the University of Pennsylvania, but by the early 1900s, many schools were publishing yearbooks that are now digitally archived. The steep decline in yearbooks raises interesting questions about how the current cohort will be remembered.

College yearbooks are a highly visual medium, providing powerful images that are easy to explore. Throughout the books are both large and small examples of political participation. Young people are often criticized for their low voting rates, but this emphasis ignores other areas of participation where young people are highly active. We defined participation broadly and encouraged students to consider fashion, hairstyles, music, and other cultural elements they found in the yearbooks. I provided several yearbooks from the 1965-1975 period, and students observed increasing political activism throughout these years. In the slideshow below, I’ve included examples of the types of participation students may observe in these books.

Using yearbooks allows students to observe participation occurring in sites they are familiar with. Students can identify continuities and changes on their campus and better relate to the students who shared similar spaces and experiences. However, not everyone will find themselves represented in the yearbooks, and students should also interrogate what is missing from these records. For many decades, universities were predominantly white and male. During the lesson, my students frequently commented that the most significant change they observed was the increasing diversity of the current student body. This activity provides an opportunity for students to reflect on their own university experience and how it connects to those who came before them.

Finally, this lesson offers hands-on experience in analyzing archival resources using methods common to political scientists and historians. Youth participation is often measured with quantitative data. However, qualitative evidence like yearbooks can paint a richer picture of how young people engage in politics. Archival research is a vital method in political science, and the trip we took to the library for this lesson helped expose my students to this approach while preparing them for more advanced research projects.

College campuses remain important sites of political participation. Students can learn a great deal about their own experiences by stepping back and exploring how previous generations of students approached their own political demands. Some elements look the same, while others have changed dramatically. This lesson encourages students to think critically about their own political power and what it means to be a student at their institution.