Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      1

      Surviving Solitude

      The Travails of Ivy Desegregators

      At but not of Harvard.

      —W.E.B. Du Bois

      Very few black students enrolled in Ivy institutions before World War II. They took up the burden of racially desegregating America’s most elite white organizations. As members of the desegregation generation, they had to perform under the intense white gaze of Ivy League students and officials. The new students did so with the hopes of the black masses. There was a small black population in higher education in general, but the number of black learners in the Ancient Eight in the early part of the century was miniscule. To protect themselves, they banded together to create bonds. When life for them on campus turned cold, they sometimes found warm welcomes in the homes of black people in neighboring communities. Many black students in the Ivy League before World War II enrolled in the elite graduate and professional schools, but there were those few who enrolled as undergraduates.

      Life СКАЧАТЬ