Before we expound on our brief “farewell” essay, we wish to extend our deepest gratitude to those colleagues who contributed as authors, reviewers, associate editors, and editorial board members in sustaining the high quality of scholarship in the history of education. You have been indispensable in this process. I hope you realize the extent to which your role as reviewers serves as a means of mentoring, in contributing to the development of a community of scholars through your topical expertise. The majority of authors, junior and senior faculty alike, shared how appreciative they were of the thoughtful and lengthy feedback offered by the reviewers. They did not view the critiques in a punitive way but rather as a place for creating dialogue. This spirit of collegiality is what also helps our field to thrive.

In 1969, the discipline of Ethnic Studies emerged and was implemented at a handful of colleges throughout the country, most notably at San Francisco State College where the first School of Ethnic Studies was established that year. The idea of devoting space within traditional educational institutions to the study of a particular race or ethnicity has existed since at least the 1920s when Carter G. Woodson proposed Negro History Week and encouraged the study of African American history. While Black Studies is thus the oldest of such fields within American education history, its establishment within higher education is tied to the establishment of the larger discipline of Ethnic Studies. Ethnic Studies encompasses the critical study of racial and ethnic histories and cultures and it incorporates a wide variety of methodologies. The course of the discipline throughout the past forty years has resulted in a variety of approaches to this study, thus generalizing about the field as it exists today is complicated. One thing that may be said about Ethnic Studies in its current iteration, however, is that it bears little resemblance to the proposals that ushered it into existence.

In June 1948, Wisconsin Superior Court Judge Roy H. Proctor sentenced four University of Wisconsin students to one year probation for “participating in abnormal sexual activities.” The four students were among a group of twelve men on and off campus who had been arrested by city and university police. Their sentence was mild, given that the judge could have put them in prison for up to five years. Judge Proctor warned them that if there was a second offense, they should not expect leniency. “Each and all of you should feel deeply ashamed,” Proctor told them; “your conduct has caused an indelible mark to be placed against you. Certainly you will have to watch your step in the future, not only to avoid becoming second offenders, but to allay all suspicions of your becoming involved again.” Indeed, when one of the young men tried to move on with his life, university administrators made sure that the “indelible mark” followed him.

Samuel M. Cart, superintendent of the recently opened federal boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sat down at his desk in September 1891 to write the commissioner of Indian affairs regarding his recent recruiting tour through the pueblos under his jurisdiction. The recruiting trip was in preparation for the first full school year of Santa Fe Indian School's (SFIS's) existence. Though Cart had only recently arrived, his would-be pupils belonged to communities who had lived in the region for over millennia. The Pueblos among whom Cart had just traveled had established successful agricultural committees in the arid region and developed complex social and cultural means to order and influence the world that Cart's countryman now called the American Southwest. And for generations, they had educated their children in order that their communities would survive. Now Cart, and men and women like him, had traveled to the Southwest to convince the Pueblos (and other Native American groups) that their way of life was inferior, their social–cultural complex was immoral, and their methods for educating their children were insufficient.