Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ