The way Angela Davis is now featured on curricula has an almost subdued radical quality. Not in the margins, not as an additional footnote to something more “canonical,” but right in the middle—listed next to Foucault, ahead of Ta-Nehisi Coates, and sometimes even before the first week of classes. According to a psychobiography that was published in the European Journal of Psychology, she has spent more than seven decades navigating issues of race, class, gender, and American social policy as a writer, academic, and political activist. It feels significant to be both an activist and an academic at the same time. It’s precisely this combination that makes her so hard to ignore and, it seems, so crucial to assign.
According to a recent study of American university curricula, Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? Alongside Coates’ Between the World and Me and Michel Foucault’s writings, it is one of the three most frequently co-assigned texts in the nation. That cluster is impressive. It implies something about how the modern academy places its intellectual weight—in structural critique, in writing that challenges students to consider the framework of the world they already inhabit, rather than in policy briefs or economic models. Depending on who you ask, that may or may not be comforting.
For many years, Davis has argued that education should not only impart knowledge but also develop critical thinkers. Speaking to students at Northeastern University in February 2021, she stated that the main goal of education is to teach us how to approach not only texts but also our surroundings. It’s the kind of statement that, until you think about it for a while, seems almost obvious. The first section still serves as the foundation for the majority of curricula. Throughout her career, Davis has maintained that the real work starts in the second section.
It took her some time to transition into required reading. She was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up navigating the day-to-day mathematics of segregation, including the discarded textbooks, the first names white board officials used to refer to Black teachers, and the little games she and her neighbors played as kids that, looking back, she realized were daily resistances. By the late 1960s, she was on the FBI’s most-wanted list, had joined the Communist Party, and had been cleared of charges that had garnered international attention. She was writing her autobiography from a prison cell by the 1970s. She was teaching feminist theory at UCLA by the 1990s. Her life condenses a great deal of American history into a single, cohesive arc, which is why psychobiographers are drawn to her as a subject.
The intriguing thing about the current situation is that Davis theorist, not just Davis the figure, is being featured on curricula. Published in 2003, Are Prisons Obsolete? is a slim book that is truly teachable because it reads more like a long argument than an academic text. A first-year student can hold it in their hands without feeling crushed. However, the concepts presented within—that prisons have evolved into a common solution to social issues that were never primarily criminal in nature—are difficult to accept. The world as it operates and the world as it might otherwise be organized must be held in tension simultaneously by the student. That’s the exact intellectual muscle that universities are meant to be building, Davis told a Northeastern audience.
Observing all of this gives the impression that Davis stands for something that American higher education has been hesitant to fully accept: that the most persistent criticisms of the nation’s institutions did not originate from within those institutions. They originated from those who were watched, fired, imprisoned, and monitored. Their work is now being assigned by the university, albeit somewhat belatedly. That could be considered progress. It’s also possible that the academy is figuring out how to process criticism without actually responding to it.
Are Prisons Obsolete seminars are still being attended by students? They have a real book tucked under their arms. The more difficult question, which Davis herself would likely be the first to ask, is whether those books have any impact outside of the classroom.
