Читать книгу Upending the Ivory Tower - Stefan M. Bradley - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIntroduction
With its wealth, power and prestige, the University has the capability to correct the injustices under which Black people have suffered over the centuries.
—Association of Black Faculty Members, Fellows, and Administrators, 1969
To many, Ivy League institutions, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight, represent the best and highest ideals of American education.1 They have provided and continue to provide the nation’s and world’s leaders. In 2008 and 2012, the United States celebrated the election and reelection of its first black president, Barack Hussein Obama. It was not surprising that he had graduated from both Columbia University and Harvard University; nor was it shocking that he had married Michelle Robinson who (along with her brother) graduated from Princeton University; she is also an alumna of Harvard Law. The Obamas’ eldest daughter, Malia, joined the Harvard class of 2021. Of President Obama’s cabinet in the first and second term, more than 50 percent had received degrees from Ivy institutions. Of the cabinet members of color, more than 50 percent received an Ivy education, and of the black members, more than 70 percent held degrees from the Ancient Eight. The percentage of Ivy degree holders on the U.S. Supreme Court is not much different. All but one attended an Ivy institution.2 In total, fifteen U.S. presidents have attained degrees from Ivy schools. Of the presidents to hold office since 1944, nine have received a degree from or presided over an Ivy League school. Undoubtedly, America and the world places value on Ivy League education. In terms of achieving the highest levels of access regarding American decision making, policy, and industry, an Ivy League education has proven to be invaluable.
During President Obama’s elections in 2008 and 2012, two controversies arose surrounding the experience of the black students attending Ivy League universities. The first concerned the thesis that then Michelle Robinson wrote at Princeton in 1985; the other involved President Obama hugging and praising the so-called radical Derrick Bell. In 1985, Michelle Robinson’s thesis “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” attempted to study attitudes of black alumni in their interaction with black and white people after graduating. Additionally, the sociology major investigated whether the alumni wanted to “benefit the Black community in comparison to other entities” and if they had feelings of “obligation” to improve the lives of the “Black poor.”3
The future attorney and first lady’s study shed light on several important themes regarding the black experience with the Ivy League. Her choice of topics displayed an affinity that so many black students had with topics that related to black life. She showed a clear awareness of the fact that black students who attended and graduated from Princeton were unique and that they would be interacting with white people of similar educational pedigree. Also, Robinson and her topic illustrated a deep concern with the formula of the Ivy alumni that maintained their black identity while continuing to help the community even as they entered the professional world. For black alumni of the Ivy League there was the additional burden of race representation as they sought success in their educations and careers. In the run-up to the 2008 election, critics of candidate Obama claimed that Michelle Obama was a militant racist.4
The second incident that drew controversy in the 2012 election involved a video clip of President Obama and Derrick Bell, the “father” of Critical Race Theory, which argues that racism has been integral to the fabric of American institutions and society in general. Alongside Critical Race Theory, Bell advanced his interest-convergence theory, which cogently contended that white gatekeeper institutions offer concessions in the way of black freedom and access when those concessions benefit white institutions. Bell’s appointment at Harvard was a result of student protest that demanded black professors in the law school. Upon agreeing to join the faculty, Bell stipulated that he would only stay if the law school committed to hiring more professors of color. By 1991, Bell, dissatisfied and disillusioned with the law school’s effort, walked away from his tenured position, vowing not to return until the law school kept its promise to diversify the faculty. In 1991, Barack Obama, then a student of Bell’s at Harvard Law and editor of the law review, complimented his mentor at a rally for Bell’s personal stands against racial discrimination and for his penetrating scholarship. Once the video surfaced in 2012, the conservative right media exploded with charges that Obama was a radical who had been trained by reverse racists.5
In the cases of President and First Lady Obama, the access of black people to the Ivy League and the ability of black Ivy Leaguers to positively affect life chances in their communities on and off campus were central. The Obamas benefited from the resilience and activist work of earlier generations of black students who grappled with the challenges of race and rigor while searching for their rightful place in a nation that supposedly valued education, intelligence, and conviction. The black students who preceded the Obamas had to prove that they were worthy of access to the real and implied benefits of the Ivy League while also not abandoning their blackness as students and alumni. Many of those students, like the white graduates of Ivy institutions, navigated their way into the leadership class of America.
In terms of American nationalism, these institutions were in the vanguard. They upheld high academic standards, attracted the most talented faculty members, and sought to mold the noble character of the students. The Ivy League also projected neglect and outright discrimination regarding black people. The white students who graduated from those schools propagated the views of their alma maters when they took leadership of the country. As seven of the eight Ivy schools in this country existed before the founding fathers drafted the U.S. Constitution, these schools may be more American than the nation itself with respect to culture and history. Ivy alumni and officials helped draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. In the twentieth century, they advanced American ideals in the world. A good example is Woodrow Wilson. Before orchestrating the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson was in the “nation’s service and in the service of all nations” at Princeton first as a student, then as a faculty member, and then as president of the institution. As was the case with the ideal of democracy that he and others propagated in the United States and abroad, the fairness and democracy that he espoused as Princeton’s president extended to white people only. The white leaders of Ivy institutions later won American wars and helped to create the United Nations Charter, all while racism raged in the United States and at their alma maters.
Like the nation in the twentieth century, these elite colleges and universities boasted an egalitarian spirit in their missions but struggled with the manifestation of the freedom to which both the nation and the schools aspired. Indeed, the Ivy League reflected the conflicted relationship of traditionally white America with black progress.6 They attempted to instill a sense of integrity in students while excluding some students entirely and admitting others only by way of quotas. The Ivy students, administrators, and alumni could, with no sense of irony, work to bring freedom and democracy to some while shutting out others. For them, America typically referred to white people, and it was with that in mind they proceeded to direct the institutions and the nation.
Institutions do not exist in vacuums; instead, they operate in a historical context. The Ivy League, in the decades after World War II, confronted the Cold War, Vietnam War protests, the Civil Right Movement and Black Power Movement, the women’s movement, student demands for power, and poverty’s encroachment. Before World War II, Ivy officials made it clear that they believed their institutions could and should shut out troubles and undesirables with the Ivy-covered walls. As one Princeton alumnus from the class of 1920 remembered of his time at the university, “While at Princeton one is somewhat insulated from outside irrelevant forces.”7 For the alumnus, some of those outside forces included the push for racial equality and access to education.
After World War II, these institutions’ officials, in observing the impediments to freedom that black people navigated, realized that they could not close the iron gates to the desires of young people to change their educational experiences and spaces.8 Along with the legislative and judicial gains that black people made in interstate travel, housing, and education, the postwar years helped some white people to more clearly see the value of black citizens. James A. Perkins, the president of Cornell, suggested that the Ivy League was moving slowly with regard to racial progress. He noted that during much of the postwar era “universities like the Ivy League and like Cornell really lived in a world that did not see the inevitable implication of this basic drift towards concerns for the equality of opportunity.”9 The Ivy League was living in a “dream world,” he said. Black students, faculty, and administrators unquestionably awakened the ancient American institutions.
By first arriving at these schools; demanding higher numbers of black students and faculty; pushing for the enrichment of their traditional college curricula with the study of black people; and finally, creating a welcoming environment for black people on and off campus, these students became activists for the black freedom movement. Their efforts to advance the cause of black liberation forever changed those leading American institutions. The cases of these elite colleges have added to what scholar Ibram Rogers (now Ibram Kendi) referred to as the black campus movement and the racial reconstitution of higher education. The accounts of the campus campaigns at the elite schools explain how students blackened the Ivy League with respect to admissions, curriculum, and culture.
In the 1960s and 1970s, there were significant student protests and demonstrations that occurred at public universities. The 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the 1968 push for Ethnic and Black Studies departments at San Francisco State University were both monumental in their brashness and influential on the Ivy League in their methodologies.10 Equally significant were lesser known protests that took place in the late 1960s at institutions like City University of New York, Rutgers University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Until recently, the traditional history of the student movement has done little to include campaigns at historically black colleges and universities such as publicly funded South Carolina State College, Southern University, and Howard University. Scholars such as Kendi, Joy Ann Williamson, Jelani Favors, Martha Biondi, Jeffrey Turner, and Robert Cohen have worked to fill that particular historical gap.
Unlike public higher education institutions, the members of the Ivy League were private, elite, and unabashedly exclusive. Scholars of Ivy institutions such as Marcia Synnott, Jerome Karable, Wayne Glasker, Donald Downs, James Axtell, and most recently Craig Wilder, have shown that these colleges and universities did not have to answer directly to state legislatures and executives who controlled much of the funding for public institutions. Instead, Ivy institutions had to report to large donor alumni, whose contributions often determined the fate of their alma maters. Further, the board of trustees at Ivy institutions had considerable influence on the overall operation of the schools and society. The board members’ status and affinity for the cultures and traditions of their beloved institutions often put them in direct opposition to the proponents of the bourgeoning Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement.11 Where some scholars have focused mostly on black presence and admissions in the Ivy League, Upending the Ivory Tower delves into the activities and activism of black students.
Civil rights and Black Power activity did not just exist in the streets and within the headquarters of traditional organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Congress of Racial Equality, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Revolutionary Action Movement. Scholars like Peniel Joseph, Rhonda Williams, Hasan Jeffries, and Jeffrey Ogbar in their respective works have shown that the conceptions of space—in terms of regions, landscapes, and infrastructure—that scholars typically have for these movements must expand. Upending the Ivory Tower takes a similar tack by showing how the black freedom movement invaded the racially and economically exclusive Ivy League. It follows the path created by scholars like Komozi Woodard, Jeanne Theoharis, Matthew Delmont, and Matthew Countryman, who argue that the narrative of the black freedom movement must include northern struggles. Although these Ivy institutions were squarely in the North, the isolation, embarrassment, mistreatment, benign neglect, and outright segregation that black students experienced at some of these schools was as bad as that experienced in many southern institutions.12
Institutional white racism lived within the policies and cultures of those elite institutions. It propagated and accommodated segregation in housing and social activities and in some cases even admission. Harvard, historically known as one of the most liberal of the Ivies in terms of admissions, struggled to resolve issues of housing for black students when it became a requirement in the early twentieth century that all freshmen stay on campus. That meant that black students would ostensibly have to stay in the dormitories with white students. That was not practicable for Harvard’s leadership, which asked black students to lodge elsewhere so as not to cause problems for, what university president Abbott Lawrence Lowell described as, the other “99½% of the students.”13 That was the practice at Harvard as well as several other Ivies. In The Half-Opened Door, scholar Marcia Synnott highlighted the offenses that the fledgling members of the black bourgeoisie had to endure. Even the most exceptional black students coming from the most esteemed families could not live among their peers because of the belief that black people would innately invite problems for white students and officials. In spite of the fact that his grandfather became the first black person to serve a full term as a U.S. senator and that his father was an alumnus of Harvard himself, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, Jr. was denied housing at Harvard in 1922.14
Iterations of the Bruce scenario unfurled at each of the Ivies throughout the twentieth century, as it did not matter how high one was able to go outside the ivy walls and gates of the universities; while inside, one’s race still mattered. Carl A. Fields, the first black administrator at Princeton, best summed up the coping mechanisms of black students at Ivy institutions before the mid-1960s. The first was to “forget that he was a Negro”; the second was to “be quietly but militantly Negro”; and, the third was to keep to himself [or herself].”15 Although there were minor adjustments made to admissions policies, not much changed for black people until the mid-1960s. By 1963, according to Synnott, “the new elite was still overwhelmingly white (about 98 percent).”16 Elite universities did much to open themselves to diverse white ethnicities and religions, but still lagged in terms of the admission of black students.
In the late 1960s, after cities burned and the streets filled with distraught citizens fighting oppression, white administrators finally believed it was important to fully integrate black students with respect to admissions, housing, and other aspects of college life. Having witnessed the deaths of citizens fighting for civil and human rights as well as the local and national reactions to the urban rebellions that occurred in the nation’s northern and western cities, a contingent of black students turned the tables on white administrators by demanding black curricula, residences, and spaces on campus. After generations of dejection, some members of the Black Power generation decided to extend the coping mechanisms that Fields had described earlier. They raised the levels of their voices and militancy and some even decided that it was better to live among black people so that they could live without the stress of constantly educating their white peers and “masters” of the residence houses. Those pushing for separation were not always in the majority of black students, but their campaign was a direct response to the ills of institutional racism and a departure from the methods of earlier generations of black students.
Just as the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement did not manifest themselves the same way in the different regions of the United States, the black student movement took on varied shapes on different campuses. The students at San Francisco State College, Merritt College, or Howard University did not have the immediate need to protest for a higher number of black students in the same way that Princeton and Brown black students did. Although all institutions of higher education stake claim to the advancement of knowledge, part of the identity of Ivy League schools is the awareness that in addition to the advancement of knowledge, they produce the world’s leadership class. Upending the Ivory Tower covers what happened when black people joined that class in larger numbers. In response to the arrival and agitation of young black learners, Ivy institutions worked to respond to their separate emergent needs but also, in ways, banded together to envision outcomes that could satisfy protesting students and the institutions’ desires to remain elite.17 As they competed for black students and professionals, the officials at Ivy schools maintained communication to ensure the league maintained some cohesiveness.
By analyzing civil rights and Black Power in the Ivy League, Upending the Ivory Tower attempts to add nuance to the movements. Scholars have for years painted Black Power as part of the “bad 1960s,” where violence and destruction reigned, whereas the “good 1960s” featured integrationist leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Whitney Young, Jr. Using this model, those who challenged the white power structure outside of the bounds of traditional marches and boycotts—leaders like Huey Newton and H. Rap Brown—were demonized as narcissistic militants. That rendering is, of course, skewed and simple. With that in mind, it is easy for some to see the Black Panthers, who had a chapter in New Haven, Connecticut, as representatives of Black Power. It is more difficult, however, for some to view the erudite black college students on Yale’s campus in New Haven as Black Power agents.
Upending the Ivory Tower argues that what the students did on campus in the name of black freedom was just as significant as what advocates for black liberation did off campus. The struggle for black people existed wherever they found themselves—even in historic, castlelike buildings. Indeed, Black Power, as with all other social movements, had varying elements and people that attempted to attain liberation by employing different tactics. By considering the diversity within the Black Power Movement, which included campus movements, Upending the Ivory Tower will help to complicate (and complete) the narrative. While some black students at schools like Cornell, Columbia, Penn, Yale, and Princeton took over campus buildings and even flirted with violence to achieve their goals, students at schools like Dartmouth and Brown were much less dramatic in their demonstrations but equally successful at winning their demands on behalf of black people. Depending on their schools’ responses to their demands, black students at each of the eight Ivies employed various aspects of the language, rhetoric, and tactics of the movement.
The question is why. Why would these mostly undergraduate black students and professionals risk their own chances at individual freedom? Some of the students came from the black elite, while the majority in the 1960s came from the urban black working class, and fewer from lower economic circumstances. The mix of working class and middle- to upper-middle-class black people created interesting interactions, but a student’s class background was not always easy to determine by the student’s actions. As one multigenerational college graduate of Harvard recalled: “Some of the people who were Black Power to the max had parents who were physicians.”18 Regardless of the higher socioeconomic statuses of some students, if they were black they were likely not that far removed from the lower class in terms of familial, friendship, and social ties. The militancy of the moment crossed class dimensions, which for black people were often fluid. Subsequently, young people, regardless of their backgrounds, worked together to change their institutions to better accommodate their blackness. In spite of all else, they shared their race and what came along with it.
One answer as to why they would risk their opportunities involved the call to collective action that so many young people made during the period. Members of the generation, even today, reflect on the times that “we” stopped the war or when “we” faced down the Ku Klux Klan or when “we” brought Black Studies onto campus. Individual progress was important, but at a time when their entire racial group faced threats, acting in coalition with other black people was both logical and practical. Thomas W. Jones, of Cornell’s class of 1970, explained that “it was in a spirit of self-sacrifice that we were determined to fight for beliefs and principles greater than ourselves.”19 If necessary, he said, they were ready “to meet our destiny in a struggle that was much bigger than any one of us, and even bigger than all of us,” said Jones.
Another reason was the pressure they felt from others. Students described feeling guilty, in some ways, for being at the prestigious institutions knowing that so many black people faced oppression. As more students came from areas and cities where the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement had taken hold, they felt almost beholden to their blackness. This was a point of contention among students, who may have sympathized with the postwar black freedom movement but who did not want to actually demonstrate and protest. Those students felt pressure from some of the urban black working and lower-income students who came during the late 1960s, who believed more militant action was necessary. Moderation and liberalism became targets in much the same way as conservatism and bigotry. That led some black students to relent to what today is called “peer pressure” in the struggle. To compensate for the self-imposed pressure they felt for “making it” to the Ivy League and from the more militant factions on campuses, some black students became activists. These conflicts of ideologies manifested in terms of gender convention, class identities, neighborhood backgrounds, and political agendas.
The few black students who made it to the Ivy League were in a precarious position because of privilege. Ernest Wilson III, Harvard class of 1970, was able to articulate the awkwardness of his situation: “I was born at the top of the bottom and on the inside of the outside of society.”20 His depiction of his life circumstances shed light on the experiences of other black students similarly situated. Ivy Leaguer Eric Holder of Columbia University’s class of 1973 bolstered Wilson’s point about the educational experiences of black students who attended elite institutions: “I had this dual existence.”21 Although he was in a mostly white environment at school, Holder felt the need to prove he “was still one of those guys” from the neighborhood. He attempted to convince his peers from his Queens neighborhood that he “was still cool.” At Columbia that meant he had to stay engaged with the black community through his activism and through service in his black fraternity. As the 1960s ended, larger numbers of black undergraduate students enrolled in Ivy League schools from working class and lower socioeconomic backgrounds. In spite of their paucity of resources, they, too, were part of their communities’ and the nation’s elite once they arrived on campus.
The members of that minority of black people in colleges confronted double marginalization. They were different than the masses—black or otherwise—because of their opportunities to attend college and especially Ivy schools. Concurrently, they were manifestly distinct from the mostly white, well-to-do students at the top universities and colleges. According to Henry Rosovsky, a white economic historian who headed the committee to design Harvard’s Afro-American Studies program, the students, “more or less consciously,” felt “something of a dislocation from the black community” while on campus.22 He argued that they needed to “legitimize, inwardly as well as publicly, their presence at Harvard [or other Ivies] while other blacks remain in the ghetto.” The battleground for this war within themselves, then, became the pristine campuses.
In the eyes of the students, little in the Ivy League indicated that black people had been there before or had done anything that mattered to the world. Had they not struggled for Afro-American Studies and to increase black admissions and to create welcoming spaces, they would have been vulnerable to the criticisms of those from the black underclass who labeled the students as materialistic agents of the bourgeoisie who sought no advancement but their own. The students also felt a need to prove to other black students that they were committed to the cause. Ivy students were aware that their peers at state colleges and universities saw them as the most privileged. If activists at South Carolina State College were dying and agitators at San Francisco State College and Howard University were demonstrating on behalf of Black Power, then there was pressure for students in the Ancient Eight to do so as well. The intention of Black Power was to empower black people even if that meant using the wealth and tools of white institutions to do so. The Ivy activists believed they were obligated to create access to their schools and more beneficial structures for those who followed. That is why they activated.
It is reasonable to expect that Black Power would take hold in black neighborhoods and in predominantly black spaces, but Upending the Ivory Tower shows how young black people became a conduit of Black Power in white spaces. Along those lines, it attempts to point out that the Black Power Movement, which was born out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of the black masses, also took root in the hallowed halls of America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education—spaces that few people in the world could hope to occupy. Writing during the moment that black learners were activating en masse on white campuses, founding director of Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center James Turner said: “Black students have begun to take a leading role in challenging and changing the status of higher education.”23 By penetrating what was traditionally the “exclusive domain of White America,” he wrote, they joined the movement for black liberation. Black students “feel a keen sense of themselves as an extension of the Black community,” Turner observed of the period. They were “going through a period unlike any their parents experienced—it is a renaissance and rebirth” of black resistance and rebellion.24 In this way, members of the black community’s intelligentsia took up the trope of Black Power to bring the interests of the black powerless onto campus. In the past two decades the literature surrounding black student protest has bourgeoned as scholars have recognized that the story of student agents of change is worth telling.25 Upending the Ivory Tower is the examination of those few students, professors, staff, and administrators who pushed for change at the peril of losing what privilege they had.
Change was not reserved solely for the elite institutions. The students underwent transformations themselves during their scholastic journey. The moment and the movements that black learners observed in their time spent in the boldly white environment of the Ivy League made an impression on them. Discussing and participating in protest actions and negotiations with officials helped to develop the students’ black identities. Some students, particularly those who came in the early 1960s and graduated in 1967 and 1968, witnessed within themselves the rise of black consciousness. Scholar William Cross referred to the phenomenon as Nigrescence, which is the process of actualizing blackness that occurs within Americans of African descent. For many students, that included self-identifying as black and not Negro, changing their style of dress and hair to reflect the Afrocentric trends, and choosing to associate with mostly black people whenever possible. If some students questioned their blackness before arriving, they established a racial identity that linked them to what historian Vincent Harding referred to as the river of black liberation and created an ancestral bind between black people who rebelled against slavery and those who fought to advance opportunities at the collegiate level in the postwar era.26 That process informed the remainder of their experiences in the Ivy League and also in life.
In wrestling with their own black development, they looked to the now sacred but then recently released Black Power texts. In addition to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), they read the searing criticisms of institutional racism and economic deprivation in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967), Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Where Do We Go from Here? (1967). By January 1968, Nathan Wright, Jr.’s Black Power and Urban Unrest was available and socially conscious and intellectually curious students read books like The Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays, edited by Floyd Barbour. In an attempt to extend their international political understanding, some students were reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) and Mao Tse-tung’s Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (Little Red Book, 1964), a favorite of the Black Panthers. Through their reading, students attempted to grasp the meaning of revolution and sought to apply revolutionary principles to their own struggles.27 In viewing themselves as victims of colonialism, some black students even identified themselves as part of the third world.
In considering the sometimes traumatic experiences the students endured, a logical question is why would they stay? Why would they not leave and attend historically black colleges or universities if education was the sole goal? A few students, like Alford Dempsey (who would have been in Columbia’s class of 1969), decided to transfer to historically black colleges and universities.28 The majority of black students, however, agreed that they had the right to be black and human in any space in the nation and they advanced that concept through their demonstrations. The social movements of the time helped them to see what was possible and they applied the rhetoric and methods used in human rights struggles on campus.
It is clear that the black students who attended Ivy League universities between the close of World War II and 1975 greatly influenced black America and the nation in general. The list of black figures who graduated during the period is impressive by any measure. They became high level politicians, captains of industries, health care officials, and thought leaders. A representative example of those black leaders and figures who took degrees from Ivy institutions was the Haverford Group, which met in the late 1960s and early 1970s to advocate racial integration in a moment when young people of the race proposed Black Nationalism and racial separation. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, William Hastie, John Hope Franklin, J. Saunders Redding, M. Carl Holman, Anne Cooke Reid, Phyllis Wallace, and Robert Weaver, who represented nine of fourteen group members, all attended Ivy universities or colleges before the World War II era. They represented a segment of the civil rights generation and the older guard of the movement that contrasted with the newer guard, which cried Black Power and campaigned for Black Studies.29 Black Ivy alumni’s advocacy in the nonprofit sector (including education) is equally as notable as that in the academy, industry, and politics. In addition to achieving in their careers and in society, black graduates continued to push their alma maters to create access for black students who followed them by joining alumni associations.
It bears noting that there has always been within the ranks of Ivy-educated black people a great diversity regarding values, political allegiances, and beliefs about the best course of action for the larger community. For instance, conservative politician and political commentator Alan Keyes opposed the efforts of black student activists at Cornell in 1969 when he was an undergraduate.30 He left Cornell for Harvard, where he continued his opposition to the antiwar and black campus movements. Coming from a military household, he supported the conflict in Vietnam. Thomas Sowell attended Harvard for his undergraduate degree, Columbia University for graduate school, and was a professor at Cornell. Like Keyes, he opposed the actions of black demonstrators at Cornell and resigned his post to leave in personal protest.31 Keyes and Sowell represented the conservative contingent of black students in the postwar era, but there were large numbers of students who were more liberal and an even smaller contingent who were militant enough to demonstrate. They all experienced their time at Ivy League institutions differently. For the most part, Upending the Ivory Tower follows the actions of those willing to join in collective agitation on particular issues affecting black people.
Although the black students who attended Ivy institutions, particularly before the late 1960s, mostly came from middle-income communities, by and large they could not fathom the lives that some of their economically advantaged white peers lived. One black student insightfully noted: “You have to have an awareness of how big the world is in order to really take advantage” of an Ivy education.32 Many of the black students who arrived on the campuses of the Ancient Eight had the opportunity to see intimately how the “haves” lived. Even though most of the black students did not represent the “have-nots” per se, economically they were different than the nation’s most wealthy white children.
By the 1960s, there was a new brand of student attending the elite schools. Scholar Marcia Synnott revealed that “before World War II, children of middle-and upper-class families, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant, had found it relatively easy, if they possessed minimum academic qualifications, to be admitted to the elite colleges.”33 That did not necessarily change in the period after the war, but there was a notable shift in admissions, with fewer of the traditional prep school students attending. Black students were just a part of the shift. In general, more students from public high schools and fewer from private and boarding schools attended Ivy universities and colleges. There were more working-class students taking advantage of the G.I. Bill benefits. Then, according to Synnott, when considering the “Big Three” (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) before the 1960s, nearly all-white secondary schools and preparatory academies like Groton, St. Paul’s School, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Phillips Academy Andover sent 50 to 70 percent of students in their graduating classes to those universities.34
Private boarding and day school graduates made up the grand majority of the student body at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and so the Ivy universities focused their attention on recruiting at those few preparatory schools where all but the slightest percentage of pupils were white Anglo-Saxon protestants. There were exceptions, of course, but the student bodies at the preparatory schools mirrored those at the Big Three. That is why the push for and arrival of black students jarred the sensibilities of alumni who clung to notions of tradition, culture, and “standards.” Such reasoning during an earlier period gave way to official and unofficial quotas regarding religion and race. Alumni of these elite institutions created and judged the standards that young applicants needed to meet with college board examinations and personal interviews. Often, potential interviewees got to that point in the application process by way of referral from an alumnus. The alumni of each of the Ancient Eight in the postwar period were also nearly all white. With the shift, the elite institutions still cornered the market on the highest achieving students, as they were ranked among the top 5 to 10 percent of U.S. college students in terms of intellectual abilities.35 Perhaps as much as academic achievement, one’s family name, socioeconomic status, pedigree, and race were all extremely important in terms of Ivy admissions before the 1960s.
When university students pushed Ivy admissions offices to recruit black students later in the 1960s, administrators at elite preparatory academies, ironically, suggested that the universities were discriminating against them. In consequence, the move to recruit more racially diverse students at the university/college level indirectly influenced elite secondary academies to review their admissions practices. Still, the Ivies, in spite of some alterations, were exclusive. As one Ivy admissions official indicated in a 1968 report, the son (seven of the Ancient Eight were still male-only then) of an alumnus stood between a 40 and 50 percent chance of admissions; whereas all other applying students had less than a 20 percent chance of admission.36 That meant that for centuries, the culture of these institutions maintained itself by way of strict homogeneity. Black students, staff, and faculty disrupted that culture.
Some observers recognized that the changes in demographics and culture on college campuses were long in coming. A New York Times editorial suggested that the institutions themselves were, in part, to blame for the uprisings on campuses that occurred in the 1960s. The unwillingness to accommodate the more progressive social climate off campus and to lessen the hold on power that administrations maintained on campus left some students little choice but to press their issues. The editorial opined: “Too many university administrators have waited until students—some genuinely idealistic … press their demands.” The “lack of initiative of school officials” led to “unsatisfactory ‘settlements’ under pressure,” stated the editorial.37
The black freedom movement and activism of black youth had immense effects on the Ancient Eight. The stakes, with respect to their traditional existence, were high. Agents of change off campus and from within were able to pop the bubble of whiteness, security, and exclusivity that the Ivy institutions had created. No matter the school’s geographical setting, history, or leadership, the social movements of the postwar era dictated that change was coming. In lashing out at the war, young people pushed ROTC programs and defense recruiters off campus. In the same way, by 1975, each of the Ivies had revised its admissions policies to better accommodate black candidates. All but one of the eight Ivies had Black Studies programs, departments, or centers by then as well.
By the end of the period that Upending the Ivory Tower covers (1975), women enrolled in and graduated from some of the Ivies for the first time in their histories; black women were among those pioneers. Because most of the eight Ivies did not admit a substantial number of women until the 1970s, the bulk of this narrative will focus on male students, staff, and administrators, while engaging in some discussion of how gender affected the approaches taken to campus life and decision making. Historians Stephanie Evans and Linda Perkins have done fascinating work on black women in higher education institutions. Both covered female collegians before Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Perkins focused specifically on those who attended what are called the Seven Sister colleges (Barnard, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Radcliffe). Upending the Ivory Tower, therefore, explores in a somewhat limited way the participation of black students from Barnard (then associated with Columbia), Radcliffe (then associated with Harvard), and Pembroke College (formerly Women’s College of Brown University) in the 1960s.
Given the historical context of the institutions themselves, particularly their exclusively male student bodies and staffs, the discussion of black presence in the Ivy League is necessarily male-centric. Recent scholarship has effectively demonstrated that there was no area of social advancement with regard to black life that black women did not influence during the period, and that was true of life in elite colleges.38 The scholarship regarding the presence and activism of black women at the Seven Sisters during the postwar era and at the eight Ivies in the subsequent period will be useful in filling the scholastic gaps.
The arrival of women was a change for the Ivy League, and so too was the challenge to leaders. By 1975, six of the eight Ivy presidents who served in the 1960s had resigned. The presidents of Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, and Penn all stepped down during the period of protest. The nation’s most exclusive educational centers could not escape change. From the most conservative to the most liberal, the presidents could not satisfy protesting students. The unity that characterized the nation during World War II had unraveled to the point of disjunction.
The presidents of the elite universities were aware of the moment as they struggled to keep their institutions together. In 1969, at a conference hosted by Cornell University, three Ivy presidents discussed the implications of uprisings on their campuses. They spoke of the “crisis” that was occurring. The president of Harvard, Nathan M. Pusey, suggested that the sentiment of the nation was turning against universities because of the student “militants.”39 Cities and state officials were attempting to take legislative action against campus demonstrators if university administrators could not control the problem. Cornell’s leader, James A. Perkins, asserted that if the nonmilitants (whom he claimed formed the majority on campus) maintained their “deafening silence,” the university faced grave danger. Only if students operated within the “bounds of checks and balances” could the university function effectively.40 The Cornell president did concede, however, that the educations that the students were receiving needed to be “relevant” to life after school. That was the language that militants inserted into the lexicon of the period. Harvard’s leader warned against altering the well-established curricula and policies of the staid universities because young adults were not wholly satisfied. No need to sacrifice all that “precious and good” for the minority of dissidents, said the head of the nation’s oldest university; doing so might threaten academic freedom and lead top scholars to search for work elsewhere. Perhaps, as scholar Ula Taylor indicated in an article about a black Ivy League student-activist, the presidents “longed for the good old days of political conservatism and elitist privilege.”41
When asked how to keep the militants away from the cherished institutions, Brown University’s president remarked that it would require rejecting the most academically talented and reflective students. Scholars Milton Mankoff and Richard Flacks, in their study on the social base of the American student movement, found the Brown leader to be correct.42 Many of the white campus radicals did well academically, usually majoring in the liberal arts or social sciences. They typically came from politically liberal homes and were financially comfortable. Black students in the late 1960s largely came from working-class homes and public schools and performed well academically. At Ivy institutions, however, there was a sizeable minority of black students who were the second or third in their families to attend a university, but many by the late 1960s and early 1970s were first generation students. The methods of change depended somewhat on each president’s style of leadership. Some were more liberal and outgoing, such as Perkins and Yale’s Kingman Brewster; while others were more reserved and conservative like Pusey and Columbia’s Grayson Kirk.43 Students and community activists used whatever tactics best suited their situations to achieve their goals.
Upending the Ivory Tower is organized along four major themes, although every effort was made to maintain chronological context. The first is the admission of black students and the various steps the Ivies took to circumvent traditional methods of relying upon prep schools and alumni in an effort attract and keep matriculants from different backgrounds. A second theme concerns students who arrived during the mid-1960s and sought not to assimilate. As urban uprisings stunned white America, black students took inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement and applied the rhetoric and methods of outside activism on campus. Seeking to avoid the destruction they observed off campus, administrators of Ivy schools relented to changes. The power to control space and place is the basis of the third theme. The Ivies were at the forefront of the corporatization of the “university” after World War II, and their stance on progress stirred great controversy among black residents and student activists. The final theme delves into the birth of Black Studies in the Ivy League. The struggle for the curricular inclusion of people from African descent was remarkably tense, but Black Studies is one of the most enduring legacies of not just campus activism but the black freedom movement in general. These four themes help provide context for the wave of black youth activism that has arisen since the 2013 death of Trayvon Martin.
Chapter 1 explores the lives of black desegregators in the Ivy League from the early twentieth century through WWII. Rather than analyze the number of black students present in the Ivy League, which other works have capably done, the chapter attempts to reveal the lived experiences of the students as outliers. Although they could matriculate at some Ivy schools, they faced what could only be described as Jim Crow and innovated ways to survive their sometimes-hostile environments. Next, chapter 2 examines the postwar era racial evolution of what some have called the northernmost of the southern universities, Princeton University. Princeton openly Jim Crowed black students before World War II. Even though some scholarship has focused on the growth of Princeton in the postwar era, none focuses specifically on what black students did to evolve the institution toward freedom. That freedom included a push to advance the black struggle internationally in an early anti-apartheid campaign. Brown University’s complex relationship to black freedom and education is the topic of chapter 3. Without great fanfare, students pressured the university to allocate substantial resources to achieve racial parity with the population of black people in the United States. This chapter also breaks new ground as there has been little written on the Brown campaigns. Although Dartmouth College’s president, John Sloan Dickey, helped to construct a nationally recognized civil rights document, chapter 4 illustrates the conflict between simply accepting black students and creating a welcoming and inclusive environment. The chapter discusses some of the more extreme recruiting efforts that Ivy institutions made to attract black students. There is no scholarship at present covering the influence of civil rights and Black Power at Dartmouth.
The final chapters of the book continue to focus on the role of students, faculty, and administrators as agents of change in the way of admission policies and curriculum offerings, but they also incorporate the role of outside residents and intellectuals who played a part in shaping the Ivy League during the period. Urban Ivy institutions occupy space in contested terrains. The push and pull between schools like Columbia University in New York City and the University of Pennsylvania and the surrounding neighborhoods in Philadelphia is the subject of chapters 5 and 6, which seek to expand the scholarly conversation about the obligations and motivations of white institutions in black and brown poor spaces. They attempt to understand the meaning of the “greater good” as these extremely well-endowed universities attempted to create future leaders among those who had the least. Chapter 7 explores the role that black students and faculty members at Yale played in shaping the field of Black Studies and how black militants off campus influenced university developments. It features in-depth discussions and debates of the early proponents and opponents of Black Studies. The final two chapters delve into the more militant struggles for Black Studies that took place at Harvard and Cornell. The campus battles resulted in the premier programs and centers that exist today. It highlights just how far students were willing to go in the Ivy League to change the culture to accommodate black life.
From their communities and the struggles that arose within them, black students who attended Ivy League institutions in the postwar era carried a history of resistance to racism and a spirit of advancement regarding education that sustained them. Not all of the students sought to fight for the “cause” and still others just wanted to pass their classes. Many black learners, however, became agents of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. They employed their Black Student Power by using their privileged status as students and alumni, as well as their race, to win victories for the larger black freedom movement. Because they did, the Ivy League remained in the vanguard of higher education. Those black Ivy students, by way of their will, endurance, and ability to see beyond themselves further opened institutional white America to justice and racial progress.
