Alumni still divided over the events of April 1969
I found the March/April 2009 issue to be outstanding. As for the cover story, "Getting It Straight" by Beth Saulnier—really well written. It was so good, it made me angry all over again.
Arthur Berger '52
Kew Gardens, New York
Your article about the takeover of Willard Straight Hall by African American students is a shocking example of irresponsible journalism. It romanticizes what was not a genuine civil rights protest but a publicity stunt by immature students. Cornell lost a great president, Jim Perkins; several faculty members resigned in disgust; many alumni were afraid to send their children to Cornell; and, most tragically, a distinguished professor, Clinton Rossiter '39, ended his life in 1970 after being ridiculed by his colleagues and students for reversing his position on clemency for the students who took over the Straight.
Far from "getting it straight," your revisionist history glorifies a violent takeover that was contrary to every teaching of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It does a serious disservice to the many people who fought and died for racial justice in America, including our fellow Cornellian Mickey Schwerner '61, who was killed in the 1964 civil rights murders in Mississippi. Shame on you!
Roger Stetter '68
New Orleans, Louisiana
As an adjunct professor in art history, I had agreed to be on campus, available to parents, over that April 1969 weekend. About 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, I telephoned the Straight to confirm the hour of that day's luncheon and was utterly surprised to hear someone say calmly, "There will be no Parents Weekend events here today; the Afro-American students are occupying the building." Recognizing the seriousness of this news, I asked about the reason for the takeover. My recollection of the reply is that the black students didn't feel welcome at the Straight, and, furthermore, they felt threatened by fraternities that kept conspicuous gun cases handy at their front doors. All of this was said in reasoned tones, and I could do no more than sympathize with their concerns and urge calm.
Monday morning classes proceeded as usual, though all were aware that there had been a real "happening" on Saturday, even though no one knew quite what it meant. Word of mouth let it be known that guns had been around, but no physical injury had resulted. President Perkins was quietly in charge; he and his staff would deal with the potentially explosive situation. From the sidelines, I could only applaud James Perkins—there were no wounded or dead bodies to memorialize, and I was sorry he felt obliged to resign as president. Further, I applauded the aggrieved and impassioned youth who had listened to reason and reined in their turn toward violence. Honor at Cornell had been upheld, and as a Cornellian I felt deeply grateful to the known and unknown persons who had made that possible.
Ernestine King, MA '68
Topsham, Maine
It defies all logic or reason as to why the alumni magazine keeps re-visiting the single most shameful episode in Cornell's history. The participants in the takeover were all guilty of at least one criminal act. Cornell's response, if one can call it that, was marked by the cowardly and spineless non-leadership of President Perkins, who took entirely too long to resign. That Tom Jones '69, MPR '72 went on to become the head of TIAA/CREF does not negate the fact that in the spring of 1969 he was nothing more than an armed thug. That he can seriously state that Barack Obama would not be president today without what happened at Cornell in 1969 is so far beyond self-aggrandizement and hubris as to be in the realm of science fiction.
Lon Benamy '65
Brooklyn, New York
I was a freshman during the takeover, and the episode has haunted me all these decades. I came to Cornell from a conservative white ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn, and I have joked that, naive in the ways of the Ivy League, I took the whole thing to be what happened in such schools in the spring. But of course the events were immensely upsetting—it felt something like the Cuban Missile Crisis on campus during the tensest days—and I have come, over the years, to view the episode as a totally unnecessary disaster, both for the University and for the progressive left.
I knew several of the black students who took over the Straight reasonably well from basketball games on the U-Halls court. They were from the city, as I was, and if I felt more than a little out of place on an upstate campus, it was easy to imagine their more profound alienation. I believe that their isolation from any larger black community pushed these students into extremely confrontational modes of behavior, as a way of proving to themselves that they could keep pace with the harder-edged forms of protest being practiced by black radicals in the urban areas. But was that level of confrontation at an extremely liberal and accommodationist university necessary to achieve their goals? From this distance, the risk that those students submitted themselves and many others to by smuggling guns into the Straight, and then marching out with those firearms held high, seems insane. The AAS had been purchasing rifles throughout the semester? Why, for God's sake? And can we spare a thought for those poor parents hustled out of the building in the middle of the night?
Tom Jones's statement that "I do not think Barack Obama would be president today without what we did in Willard Straight Hall in 1969" is one of the most blinkered and stunningly self-serving claims I have ever encountered. In point of fact, the dangerous posturing and idiocies of the student left gave the right all the ammunition it needed to roll back the liberal political agenda. One of the signature political books of our era was Allan Bloom's surprise 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, which stands to the culture wars as Pearl Harbor stands to World War II. The left was caught with its ideological defenses down, and we would do well to contemplate that the burr under Professor Bloom's saddle was the Straight takeover and all that led up to it. A tenured professor at Cornell, he resigned in 1970 in disgust and made erudite and reactionary hay from those events. Rather than take credit for a signal triumph of progressive politics, Tom Jones might consider apologizing for making it that much harder to achieve with his ill-advised actions as a young firebrand.
Gerald Howard '72
Tuxedo Park, New York
I was overwhelmed to read the article on the Straight takeover. As the wife of Jack Musick, Cornell's head football coach at the time, I found myself in the thick of that event. I believe we had three African American players in the building and four outside. Rumors were thick, and the young men were greatly disturbed by the idea that white "vigilantes" might be coming after them. Jack and I went to the black players' apartment and sat up all night playing Monopoly with them. We were all very jittery. We also were busy the next day trying to inform the parents of all of the players about events in as accurate a way as we could. We hoped to mitigate what we perceived as some of the media inaccuracies. That was a critical time, as was the first practice when all players, black and white, were once again working together as the Cornell football team.
I was a forty-two-year-old Cornell student taking a course in painting from Alan D'Arcangelo, who encouraged me to "go bigger than life." My first large-scale painting was a portrait of Jack (which now hangs in Schoellkopf Hall). My second effort was a series I painted reflecting on the Straight takeover and the political events of the late Sixties. I painted police brutality, assassination, burning and looting, and the Vietnam War. I gave one piece to the new Africana Center that was subsequently burned to the ground by an act of arson. It was reported to me that the canister of fuel was placed directly below my painting and ignited.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to reflect on those tumultuous times. I come down on the side of Cornellians that feel those events were an opportunity for redress of some serious wrongs done to a significant part of our population, and a chance for Cornell to grow and contribute to the benefit of our society.
Pat Musick Carr, MA '73, PhD '74
Manchester Center, Vermont
What I never have understood is why these people were not arrested and prosecuted for assault and reckless endangerment—at the very least expelled from the University forever! Instead, we lost a very good man, Steve Muller, PhD '58 [vice president for public affairs], who went on to become president of Johns Hopkins. How come Steve Muller and Jim Perkins had to leave and not those thugs?
Tom Nisbet '60
Alexandria, Virginia
The takeover of Willard Straight Hall in April 1969 was shameful and knocked Cornell down from the pedestal on which it rested, in my opinion, as a leading university. I was shocked in 1969 and again in 2009.
Art Behrer '48
New Bern, North Carolina
Naming Opportunity?
After reading the article about Goldwin Smith ("Goldwin Smith: Anti-Semite?" Currents, March/April 2009), I found it hard to respond—yet I felt a need to respond. The sad thing is that I thought it was necessary to disclose my religion and ethnicity, just to make sure that my opinions were not misinterpreted. I am Episcopalian and part Irish, English, and German. Having given my ethnic background, I want to say that I have a serious problem with keeping Smith's name on a building knowing that he was an acknowledged anti-Semite. He may have been a key instructor during the founding of the University. Even so, can't we just quietly do some renovations that require a new naming opportunity that would change the building's name? I had classes in the building and spent numerous hours drinking coffee there, but I don't feel one bit of nostalgia that requires that we continue to keep the building with the same name if, in fact, it honors a known anti-Semite. That is not what our university is about. We should not honor this man just because he happened to be at Cornell at its moment of inception.
William Miller '73
Fairfield, New Jersey
Glenn Altschuler, PhD '76, and Isaac Kramnick wrote informatively of Goldwin Smith's anti-Semitism. As an undergraduate, I learned about another of Smith's biases. In the fall of my sophomore year, I took an American history course taught by Professor Curtis Nettles. When we returned for the spring term and went to our lecture room in Goldwin Smith Hall, signs on the door directed us to report to Boardman Hall (where Olin Library now stands) for the first lecture. Professor Nettles, whose primary interest was the Revolutionary War period, lectured quite vociferously on Goldwin Smith having Tory sympathies and regretting that Britain had lost the war. He concluded by saying he would never again lecture in Goldwin Smith Hall.
Lonnie Hanauer '56, MD '60
West Orange, New Jersey
Free Ride
I was intrigued by the article about the prospect for pod car service in Ithaca ("Catching a Lift," Currents, March/April 2009). In 1967, when I was working for Stanford Research Institute, we had a large contract with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to formulate and evaluate advanced concepts for urban transportation. One of my chores was to investigate the potential for networks of small automated cars. A number of proposals had been made, but none of these had been carried beyond the image of a small car traveling down an exclusive guideway. No one had yet seen fit to deal with the full random variability of urban travel. We addressed the problems of merging and separating streams of cars traveling between diverse origins and destinations; analytical applications for a small city (Palo Alto, California) and a large city (Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota) were postulated and used to develop quantitative system performance requirements and to estimate costs. Unfortunately, in 1967 the computer hardware and software were not up to the task, but we boldly predicted that its day would come. What better place for an introductory U.S. trial than Ithaca?
Paul Jones, BME '51
Atherton, California
Protecting Public Education
I want to thank President Skorton for expressing his support for public higher education in New York State (From David Skorton, March/April 2009). After graduating from Cornell, I came to SUNY Stony Brook as a PhD student in Latin American history. I am honored to be part of the incredible public mission of the State University of New York and the service it provides to thousands of undergraduates, graduates, continuing education students, and everyday citizens.
President Skorton is correct in stating that SUNY provides an invaluable service to the state. Unfortunately, he is also correct in his description of the large funding cuts and their potentially devastating results. New York has raised SUNY tuition only to divert a majority of these funds to fill budgetary needs in non-educational spending. These actions result in an unfair and indirect tax on SUNY students while they suffer from debilitating cuts in classes, scholarships, and important capital and maintenance needs. All Cornell alumni who are New York residents should urge their state representatives and Governor Paterson to reconsider these drastic cuts to public education in this state.
Mark Rice '07
Stony Brook, New York
Correction—March/April 2009
"Hot Topic," page 58: The article states that Cornell generated 319,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2009. The amount is correct, but the year should be 2008.