May 3 Faculty Forum panelists, from left, President Hunter Rawlings, alumnus Donald Downs, author of Cornell '69, listen to comments by Robert Harris, assistant professor of Africana studies, on Downs' book. Robert Barker/University Photography
An audience of about 250 people attended "Cornell 1969: Key Issues Then and Now," a University Faculty Forum held May 3 in Kennedy Hall's David L. Call Alumni Auditorium.
Cornell President Hunter Rawlings and Dean of the Faculty J. Robert Cooke co-sponsored the event, originally scheduled for March 17, as part of ongoing efforts to stimulate campuswide dialogue on critical issues, including diversity.
Monday's panel discussion was intended as a point of departure on the book by Donald A. Downs, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University, published recently by Cornell University Press. The publication coincided with the 30th anniversary of the Willard Straight Hall takeover. (See story about the book.)
In his book Downs addresses what he states was the failure of the 1969 Cornell administration to uphold its commitment to academic freedom under threat of violence from an aggressive, politicized student body.
Downs '71 was a Cornell undergraduate in 1969 and is now a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin.
Forum panelists included: Rawlings; Cooke; Downs; Dale Corson, Cornell president emeritus; Kenneth McClane, the W.E.B. Dubois Professor of Literature; Walter LaFeber, the M.U. Noll Professor of American History; and Robert Harris Jr., associate professor of Africana studies.
"We're here this afternoon to devote ourselves to do what universities should devote themselves to," said Rawlings after reciting the definition of academic freedom as stated in the Campus Code of Conduct. "We're not here to offer judgments 30 years after the fact on individual behavior, or blame. The issues we address are complex, vexing and sensitive to individuals and groups and that, therefore, require the most careful and honest consideration."
Downs was given 15 minutes to reiterate and sum up his views as expressed in Cornell '69; Corson, Harris, McClane and LaFeber were granted six minutes each to posit their views. A brief discussion among panelists was then capped by statements from audience members.
Downs said his book is a combination of narrative and advocacy, where he argues in favor of academic freedom, above and beyond politics.
Cornell crossed the line, Downs said, in allowing politics, social justice issues and, above all, the threat of physical violence to subvert the university's mission of unfettered academic freedom.
"This crossing was a harbinger of the politicization of the universities of the 1990s," Downs said. "The Cornell crisis was largely a crisis of liberalism, a crisis, I dare say, is still with us."
Corson spoke on behalf of then-president James Perkins, who, he said, "was treated badly then and is treated unfairly in Downs' book." Corson, who replaced Perkins after he resigned in the summer of 1969, reminded the audience that Perkins arrived at Cornell in 1963, when there were just eight black undergraduate students. In large part through Perkins' efforts, that number had risen to 250 by 1969. Corson added that the unprecedented and dangerous events of April 1969 at Cornell ended without fatalities; and then he recited the grim statistics at other volatile university campuses during that period: deaths at Spartanburg, UCLA, Stanford, Kansas, Wisconsin and, later, at Kent State.
Corson closed by asking: "What if we had had the National Guard at Cornell? What policy should we recommend to our successors?"
Harris was sharply critical of Downs' book.
"Professor Downs does not give us much of the context in which black students confronted a privileged environment that gave those within it a sense of entitlement, and when he does, he usually gets it wrong," Harris said, pointing out an error in Downs' reportage on James Meredith and the rise of the black power movement. "[Downs] does not tell how the student movement of the 1960s and early 1970s expanded opportunity and opened doors for the previously disenfranchised, how it dismantled entitlement and privilege and how it has made this a more democratic society, which I fervently hope is one of the purposes of higher education."
McClane praised Downs' journalistic efforts but also said the book "is unnecessarily harsh on the Cornell administration of that period." McClane called the administration's actions in 1969 "valiant attempts at preserving human life, and that to me is the most sacred responsibility of any governing entity. No one at Cornell died, and that is no small accomplishment."
LaFeber said, "The real tragedy at Cornell was that the administration and the faculty and the students allowed the situation to get to the point where, indeed, academic freedom and social justice became antithetical to one another until, finally, guns were introduced on the campus at Cornell."
Downs was flexible in the face of his critics and conceded errors and a lack of knowledge about events that followed in the 1970s.
Speaking from the audience, Professor Emeritus Robert Miller, dean of the faculty at the time of the takeover, took Downs to task on several key points related in the book regarding Miller's involvement in the events of the time.
Richard Baer, a professor of natural resources, used the book as a point of departure, saying, "In terms of ideas, Cornell is less diverse than it was 25 years ago when I came," arguing it is now unbalanced in favor of the political left. "It's my experience at Cornell," he said, "that conservative secular ideas and normative religious ideas are simply censored out of the university. We don't invite those people; we don't seek those people [who express conservative viewpoints]."
History department chair Mary Beth Norton noted that Downs' book and the forum itself lacked a woman's perspective. As for diversity, she said Cornell's history department is certainly different than it was 30 years ago.
"There were no women in 1969; now the history department is one-third female, with a woman chair," Norton said, adding that the administrative infrastructure created by the events of 1969 helped to peacefully defuse a later takeover of Carpenter Hall by potentially violent anti-Vietnam War protesters.
Freshman Michael Brown, from the College of Human Ecology, said the forum enhanced his personal sense of sitting on the razor's edge between "social commitment and intellectual responsibility" and how, at times, that can be a "very uncomfortable place. But I feel we are better off because of that discomfort."
In addition to this week's forum, the Campus Climate Committee scheduled pilot discussions across campus as the initial phase of the "Dialogue on Difference." The committee has conducted two discussions this semester, and more are planned for next fall.
Read quotes from an April 20 commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Straight takeover.
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