Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ