Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ War II Goheen rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army.45 Goheen’s worldview was somewhat more liberal than that of his predecessors. In terms of the university’s relationship to black students, Goheen attempted to change the university’s racially exclusionary image. In a moment of clarity he stated: “For the past decade, we have been terribly concerned with what we could do for students from underdeveloped countries. It took a shock (the civil rights crisis) to make us realize our problems at home.”46 President Goheen authorized a tutorial program for mostly black youth in the nearby city of Trenton, which had a significant black poor and working-class population, as a long-term approach to admitting more black students.47

      The early 1960s saw further tentative admission of black students. One Daily Princetonian article noted that of the 1,202 applicants who were accepted for the 1963–1964 academic year, only ten were black. Although the number of accepted African Americans was small, the article claimed that no black student had been accepted in 1953, 1954, and 1959. The article blamed the unfriendly nature of the town of Princeton and the university itself, as well as the “scarcity of qualified Negroes, which is slowly being corrected.”48 To be sure, the town of Princeton had a history of segregation and discrimination against its black residents. The town’s treatment of African Americans, however, did not mean that the university had to be unwelcoming. Incidentally, the article also noted that of the class entering the 1963–1964 school year, 20 percent were the sons of alumni. The article did not mention the qualifications of the legacy students.

      Years later, the Association of Black Princeton Alumni (ABPA) commissioned a survey of black Princeton alumni that revealed several interesting things about the experiences of students. The number of black students who attended Princeton did not increase significantly until after 1963, so the bulk of the respondents were still relatively young in their careers and not too far removed from life at Princeton. Because black students did not attend any of the Ivies in great numbers until after the mid-1960s, the ABPA survey is somewhat useful in assessing the experience of black students at peer institutions.49

      The survey reported that most (78 percent of the respondents) of the black graduates came to Princeton from the East Coast. After graduating they “principally” lived in the Mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Two-thirds of the respondents disclosed that they came from predominantly black neighborhoods and that their communities could have been characterized as low and middle income. When asked why they chose Princeton University, the answer was predictable. Fifty-seven percent said they were “attracted because of Princeton’s prestige and because of what the university could do for them.” Likely, the grand majority of students—irrespective of race—would have answered similarly. Black students coming from low to middle income neighborhoods and families, however, were well acquainted with what attending an Ivy League school could do to alter their life chances.50

      The opportunity to attend Princeton came with significant emotional and mental costs, according to the survey. More than 90 percent of those surveyed remembered “observing at least a few separate instances of racial discrimination”; 46 percent remembered seeing more than five instances. Unfortunately for the students, it only takes one experience with racial discrimination to induce trauma and set into motion negative reactions. Students considered having to observe Confederate flags flying outside the windows of dormitories and eating clubs on their way to class racial discrimination. One student regretfully recalled having to confront “Southern attitudes” on campus.51 Charlie Shorter, in the class of 1962, called Princeton the “Northernmost of the Southern schools,” referring to its stance toward black people.

      Following the lead of Goheen, who recognized the significance of the Civil Rights Movement, Princeton’s admissions office targeted black applicants. The director of admissions sent letters to 4,000 public and private high schools, notifying the school counselors of Princeton’s “search for Negro applicants.”52 The university also attempted to cultivate potential black students through the Trenton Tutorial Project, which involved university students and faculty members tutoring mostly underprivileged and black students at the nearby high schools. In 1963, over 140 Princeton students assisted the more than 200 Trenton students (a significant number of whom were black) who signed up for the project.

      Although university officials encouraged the effort to racially diversify Princeton’s campus, there were students who still outwardly opposed integration. In March 1964, several university students created an organization called the Princeton Committee for Racial Reconciliation. Apparently, the members of the all-white group believed that the best way for the races to reconcile was to remain segregated. The group’s president, Marshall Smith, claimed the group represented the opinions of a third of the student population (in fact there were only fifteen members of the groups). “We just want to show that in the midst of all this sympathy for the Negro there exists some opposition on campus,” Smith explained, “Segregationists are not going to give up by default.”53 Hoping to contradict the “integrationist propaganda” to which Princeton students had been exposed, Smith’s group pointed to the controversial book by Carleton Putnam, Race and Reason, that attempted to confirm racial stereotypes regarding black people and to make the argument for segregation. The segregationist group claimed that Putnam’s work provided evidence of the ineffectiveness of social integration.

      Taking advantage of the 1965 Higher Education Act, Princeton used a federal grant to reestablish a cooperative program with the nation’s first college established for black students, Lincoln College in Pennsylvania. Like Princeton, Lincoln had early ties to the Presbyterian Church, and Lincoln’s first president supported colonization as did several early Princeton trustees. In 1854, Princeton alumni helped to found the institution to educate black men, and the universities maintained a relationship throughout the years with Princeton men serving on Lincoln’s faculty and the board of trustees. In 1965, the $113,000 Higher Education Act grant allowed for a faculty and student exchange. Lincoln faculty came to Princeton to take graduate courses and teach specialized courses while Princeton graduate students had the opportunity to teach at Lincoln. Moreover, Princeton students and faculty members would have access to Lincoln’s African Studies collection. While select Lincoln faculty members had the chance to take advanced courses from Princeton, a critic of the exchange might have observed that the white Princeton students, acting as instructors, were able to “practice” on black Lincoln students and to exploit Lincoln’s special collections for the advancement of their own research agendas, which would allow the white Ivy League students (who would benefit from Princeton’s reputation) the chance to be in the forefront of a relatively new field of study. Critics may have charged that the exchange was hardly equal. Still, the president of Lincoln explained: “The benefits … to both faculty and students through [the] cooperative relationship between a great university such as Princeton and a small liberal arts college will be of incalculable” value.54

      The Princeton-Lincoln exchange was one way to expose black students to Princeton, but there were others. Another source of exposure to the university was the Princeton Summer Cooperative Program (PSCP), which began in 1963 as an attempt to draw secondary students from the surrounding urban centers to Princeton to bridge the cultural and racial gap that existed. Officials believed that if the mostly black lower-income students spent time on campus they might learn what was necessary to eventually matriculate at Princeton or another higher education institution. In that way, Princeton was attempting to solve the problem of the ghetto by providing young people with potential options for their futures. There were similar programs at Ivy institutions, including Dartmouth’s A Better Chance and Columbia’s Project Double Discovery. The PSCP marked another step toward racial progress for the Ivy institution that had only desegregated less than twenty years earlier.

      Historian Komozi Woodard, who participated in the PCSP at Princeton University in the summer of 1965, believed that it and similar programs were mostly positive, but they had drawbacks. He viewed the summer program at Princeton as an experiment to see if ghetto children could make themselves culturally worthy of elite universities and colleges.55 As a memo from the news office at Columbia explained about its program, “the premise is that a deprived youth with a college education СКАЧАТЬ