Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ than a reference to an improvement in “lifestyle” that teachers observed in program participants, there was no explanation of what exactly the memo’s author meant by a “productive citizen.” The sentiment and language of the document, however, smacks of the Horatio Alger narrative, protestant work ethic, and Christian missionary zeal rolled into one. The programs were, indeed, missionary in nature, as representatives of predominantly white institutions of higher education went into the foreign lands of the ghetto to seek converts to the college way of life.

      The officials, students, and administrators who applied for and funded the programs viewed the potential young participants as those who might not otherwise become productive citizens without their assistance. That is not to discredit the important work and efforts that the programs coordinated, but it does illustrate the way that even when couched within good intentions, public and private policies “othered” black and brown children from low-income households. By bringing them into the environment in which the nation’s wealthiest and whitest children dwelled, perhaps the children from the ghetto could eventually hope to be respectable, read the tone of the document.

      Woodard, after completing the program at Princeton, eventually graduated from Dickinson College and earned a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in history. Reflecting on his experience with the Princeton Cooperative Schools Program a half century later, he said: “It was a life changing experience for me because I thought I was an all-American boy, and that everyone in America lived like I did in the ghetto of Newark.” When he went to Princeton, however, he discovered he was wrong, and that “inequality was real.” Reading Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962) while in the program bolstered his conclusion about the unevenness of life for him as a young black person from Newark and the majority of the white students who attended the Ivy League school in New Jersey. Woodard, who concluded he was not typical, was wrong to an extent. He was, in fact, an all-American boy, just not in the way the print and electronic media depicted Americans. Millions of citizens faced slum circumstances and toiled in the working class to make a living; he and his family were certainly not alone. Class differences—more than race—impressed him initially, Woodard recalled.57

      As part of the Princeton program, Woodard also found out that some of the instructors were researching and tracking the participants. He remembered leaving campus without permission on a mission to meet girls with the other participants in the all-male program. When he returned, a white counselor exclaimed: “you ruined the experiment!” Woodard was confused by the statement. Upon investigation, Woodard believed he learned that both Princeton University and Dartmouth College were trying to use the summer program to test the assimilation model that had been used on Native Americans centuries before on black youth. Dartmouth, according to its charter, started as an institution whose mission it was to educate and assimilate Native peoples. Woodard sensed that the idea behind the “experiment” was to get black children away from what the designers of the program would have considered “pathological black culture” and bring them to the more reasonable and liberating campus of Princeton. Back then, Woodard admitted decades later, he felt like a guinea pig in the War on Poverty. Acting on his feelings, he and several other students rebelled with their behavior. The prospect of being experimented on caused him to question the purpose of education. In spite of his feelings then and decades later, the program, working in combination with his abilities, helped to advance his life chances.

      One of Woodard’s inspirations in the PCSP was senior Robert “Bob” Engs, one of the two black student-counselors attending Princeton for the PCSP in the early 1960s. Engs’s upbringing was atypical, in that he grew up in Germany as part of a military family. He graduated from Princeton in 1965 and earned a PhD in history from Yale in 1972. He, like so many other black alumni of the Ivy League, went on to mentor younger generations of black scholars, who paid the favor forward to the generations of black learners that followed.58 Engs began doing so in the Princeton summer program, where he taught Woodard. It helped to have someone with whom Woodard and other black participants would relate racially.

      With the Princeton administration continuing its desegregation effort at the high school level, university students dealt with the implications of the movement. Although a higher number of black students than ever before were attending Princeton, they did not always feel welcome. Harvard Bell, who was a sophomore in 1968, remembered Princeton as a “lonely” place, and he recalled feeling at times “unwelcome” and “under attack.”59 As it was, the arrival of black students set into motion a cultural experiment on Princeton’s campus that was ultimately positive but at times troublesome.

      Princeton, said 1969 graduate Nathaniel Mackey, had a “southern gentleman” stereotype. By that, he meant southern white gentleman.60 Mackey claimed that many people associated with the university accepted the stereotype. The negative behavior that black students withstood included antagonistic attitudes and gestures toward the prospect of racial integration. Segregation and racism were widespread throughout the nation. The southern culture that celebrated slavery and the Confederacy was, however, particularly prevalent at Princeton as a member of the Ivy League, according to black alumni and white officials. One black alumnus remembered that when he arrived in 1965, Princeton boasted that “half of its [Princeton’s] students who died during the Civil War fought on behalf of the South.”61 In spite of the fact that officials walked the same paths and took in the same views as the black students, the flag of the nation that attacked the United States flew proudly in the Princeton sky. Black students saw that as an “affront” to their personhood.

      It was not just the Confederate flag but the open hostility that black students faced from white students and professors that damaged their impression of Princeton. John Caldwell, class of 1968, remembered urine and garbage being thrown on black students walking beneath Rock Suite dormitory.62 In response, black students approached the white residents in the dormitory ready for a physical confrontation if necessary. Perhaps the white students who participated in the reprehensible acts were merely inebriated, or maybe they understood that it would be difficult for black students to compete scholastically if they had to concern themselves with getting to the classrooms without being dumped upon. In any event, it was left to the black students to “get over” the incident.

      Then, there was still the issue of eating clubs. The ABPA survey indicated that 83 percent of the graduates refused to join an eating club at all. With the eating clubs as a very narrow option, socializing became difficult for black students. “There was essentially no social life,” remembered Shearwood McClellan who graduated in 1969, “you [black Princetonians] were really on your own.”63 Although most of the clubs, according to the survey were “cliquish,” McClellan’s classmate Brent Henry recalled that some “were more tolerant than others on issues of race and politics.” Henry said that he and his peers occasionally attended events at the Dial Lodge and the Campus Club on Prospect Avenue. In terms of the suffering that black people without an education experienced outside of Princeton, not being able to join or feel welcome at exclusionary eating clubs was seemingly insignificant, but having the liberty to be human everywhere black people existed was still important.64

      By most accounts, 1968 was a year that stood out as both eventful and traumatic for the nation and the world. Popular leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, while students and other activists railed against the escalated war effort in Vietnam and for youth empowerment. Some Ivy League university campuses, like Columbia University, shut down because students rebelled against the university’s ties to the Vietnam War as well as what the students viewed as racist policies concerning Columbia’s expansion. At Cornell, black students took over offices to protest for Black Studies. Princeton students opposed similar ties to the university’s relationship with the Department of Defense. Indeed, Ivy League universities were not immune to the social unrest and uprisings that affected the rest of the nation. The Black Power Movement had reached college campuses along with a more militant cadre of black students.

      In 1968, Princeton University offered courses that focused on black history and culture. That year, Henry Drewry, a black educator, became the director of the university’s СКАЧАТЬ