Institutional Changes

The Third World Liberation Front had a profound impact on student, staff, and faculty demographics, locally, at the universities where they organized, and more broadly, across the high education landscape in the U.S. Their efforts profoundly changed how universities approached diversity and inclusion, especially in admissions policies and hiring practices and with the establishment of Ethnic Studies and similar programs across the country.

Local Impact

Locally, TWLF strikers at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley were pivotal in advocating for and increasing the number of students of color in these universities. One of the demands of the TWLF strikers was that all Third World Students who applied to UC Berkeley be admitted. While this demand was not met, TWLF strikers became involved in recruiting more students of color at these institutions undergraduate and graduate programs. 

LaNada War Jack, a participant in the 1969 UC Berkeley TWLF strike, played a crucial role in recruiting more students of color to UC Berkeley. In her book "Native Resistance: An Intergenerational Fight for Survival and Life," she recalled that with the help of her friends and the people they knew in the the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) office, she was able to successfully recruit other Native American students.

At Berkeley Law School (then known as Boalt Hall School of Law), TWLF strikers were approached to help enroll students of color, including Bruce Quan. This led to the increased representation of Chicano students admitted to the law school. The increase was especially important in bolstering support for Centro Legal de La Raza, a recently created legal services clinic by UC Berkeley Chicano students that sought to address issues that pertained to low-income immigrant, Black and Latinx communities.

Broader Impact

The broader impact of TWLF was seen in the creation of Ethnic Studies programs across numerous other universities in the United States, which also began to reconsider their own admissions policies. The success of TWLF in initiating these programs provided a model that demonstrated the value and importance of such curricula, leading to wider recognition of the need for higher education to be more reflective of a diverse society. This in turn helped shift national discussions about race, education, and equality, influencing policies beyond just the campuses where TWLF was active.

Challenges to Demographics

Despite the tremendous efforts of activists and community leaders, the increase of students of color in institutions of higher education has gone down. At the UC level, affirmative action policies have been outlawed since 1996 when California voters decided to do away with the policy. In 2023, a Supreme Court ruling held that race-conscious affirmative action policies violated students’ constitutional rights. With the rollback of these affirmative action programs that sought to increase the enrollment of students of color, the diversity of student demographics has consequently gone down. For more information, please visit our Challenges page.