Historian Robert Cohen, whose most recent book focuses on integration at the University of Georgia, explains what we stand to lose now that anti-DEI attacks extend to the classroom. In 1961, shortly after the University of Georgia admitted its first two Black students, a math instructor asked a group of white students to write down their feelings about the integration—and the segregationist riots that followed. Decades later, Robert Cohen, a professor of history and social studies at New York University and a senior fellow at the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, became the first historian to analyze those writings in an attempt to better understand the racial ideas of university students in the South at the time.
