In The Ocean in the School Rick Bonus tells the stories of Pacific Islander students as they and their allies struggled to transform a university they believed did not value their presence. Drawing on dozens of interviews with students he taught, advised, and mentored between 2004 and 2018 at the University of Washington, Bonus outlines how, despite the university's promotion of diversity and student success programs, these students often did not find their education to be meaningful, leading some to leave the university. As these students note, they weren't failing school; the school was failing them. Bonus shows how students employed the ocean as a metaphor as a way to foster community and to transform the university into a space that valued meaningfulness, respect, and critical thinking. In sharing these students' insights and experiences, Bonus opens up questions about measuring student success, the centrality of antiracism and social justice to structurally reshaping universities, and the purpose of higher education.

Rick Bonus is Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, coeditor of The “Other” Students: Filipino Americans, Education, and Power, and author of Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space.

Preface and Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. What Does It Mean to Transform Schooling?  1
1. The Students, The School, The Ocean: Tracking Students' Lives on Campus  23
2. Pipe: Collective Mentorship as a Politics of Partnership  65
3. Those Who Left  107
4. Schooling Outside and Inside  149
Conclusion. Transformative Schooling Against Boundaries  191
Notes  203
Bibliography  277
Index  245