Editor's note: The following is a response to the Chronicle's coverage of the May 3 University Faculty Forum "Cornell 1969: Key Issues Then and Now," which took as its point of departure the book Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University by Donald A. Downs.
I wrote a letter complaining that the Chronicle's report (May 6) of the faculty forum on Cornell '69 was radically lopsided in favor of positive thinking about the Perkins administration and negative thinking about Professor Downs' book. No one could tell from the story that some arguments made from the floor differed with that evaluation. I am grateful to the editor of the Chronicle for giving me the opportunity, in the interest of balance, to respond to the book.
I never knew Downs when he was a student here, but he has traced my role accurately and comprehendingly as a spokesman for the Committee of 41, who introduced the motion in the faculty meeting that rejected the administration's deal with the armed students. Defenders of President Perkins have minimized the issue of academic freedom, but they have usually been teachers in scientific disciplines unaffected by the issues raised by SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and the Black Liberation Front. A conservative teacher of American constitutional history like Walter Berns, for example, could have good reason to think, in the light of Perkins' stunning silence about the violation of his own freedom when he was seized by his coat collar at a rostrum, that his administration might not protect Berns' academic freedom. Downs notes that Perkins had written in the Ithaca Journal as an advocate of student power, seeing academic freedom as a barrier to it, rather like the privileges of feudal barons.
In the conservative '50s at Yale University, I had given a lecture critical of the New Conservatives, and a student had complained to my department chairman, who called me into his office for being accused of "intellectual arrogance." It was even clearer in the radical '60s, that student groups, such as SDS and the Black Liberation Front, could play the same heresy-hunting role on campus that congressmen and corporate trustees had traditionally played.
Downs understands the role at Cornell of a liberal paternalism, absorbed with guilty self-doubt about racism, that failed to take seriously enough (as the protesters did) the conflict between black nationalism and traditional liberal values. Lip service was often paid to those values but not in practice with respect to hard cases of deep disagreement, which test one's commitments to principle.
"Political correctness" on campuses aims to snuff out heresies. As an example of a local heresy in the '60s and '70s, I cite the ideas of Ralph Ellison, the greatest novelist of black American life, whose work I taught, and who was never invited to speak at Cornell. He was a critic of black nationalism and black separatism because he believed that American and black culture are inseparably entangled with each other. The director of the Africana Studies Center, James Turner, has recently argued that the social sciences had a "deficit-centered" perspective on American blacks, one which the black studies program was needed to correct. But, ironically, Ellison is an especially incisive and eloquent critic of the negative perspective.
Cornell '69 is not without flaws. It needs to be comparative, judging Cornell in the light of what happened at Columbia, Harvard and especially Chicago, where legal injunction wisely gave black protesters six days to think about obeying it before they decided to leave the building. Nor does the book pay sufficient attention to the repressive foreign and domestic American national policies that recklessly fostered bitter polarization.
I also disagree with the book's idealizing of "putting one's body on the line." It claims that the demagogic Tom Jones articulated "the stakes for everyone" in seeing that "everything amounted to a showdown over who had the most courage in the face of danger." So Downs commends Professor Donald Kagan for being "comfortable with the prospect of physical violence that lay, at least psychologically, at the heart of the showdown at Cornell." In fact, the grim situation was defined by the presence of angry armed students and angry armed sheriff deputies: the possibility of violence was historical, not psychological. I knew as an infantry soldier in the Battle of the Bulge what it means to risk one's life in a cause. Nevertheless, the great English liberal philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, has called the ethic of risking one's life a form of "moral tyranny." Better to have the ethic of keeping one's head while everyone else is losing theirs.
Berlin's point seems especially apt for the delirium that gripped Cornell in '69. It was a near-anarchical moment, and Downs for the most part sees it clearly as an agonizing mixture of tragedy and farce. In less parochial quarters I think his book will be done better justice.
Cushing Strout is the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters Emeritus at Cornell.
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