"Banner inside the Memorial Room (ballroom) of student union building w:Willard Straight Hall at Cornell University" by Alex (eflon) (19 October 2009)
Donald Downs ‘71 is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison who specializes in free speech issues and social history. He is the author of Cornell ‘69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Cornell Univ Press 1999). Recently, he was the principal author of the Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry. Downs is a cofounder of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) and was interviewed by the AFA about his career. AFA asked him, “What did you see at Cornell in the late 1960s that sort of looks like some of the same things that we’re seeing today?”
DD: Boy, how can I package that in a concise kind of way? When people ask me the Cornell question, I open up, you know. I have even thought of doing a second book on it. So, this is revisiting the question 25 years after I did the book, and 50 years after the event. It is really what turned me into being an academic.
The importance of social issues and racial justice issues was coming to a head in the sixties, especially in the later sixties. At the same time, the question of how a university should handle controversial issues and social change arose as a big issue. Cornell became very politicized, and there was pressure to see the issues through only one lens.
The president of Cornell at the time, James Perkins, wrote a book in the mid-60s in which he declared that the purpose of the university was no longer just intellectual, but to foster progressive type change. At the same time, there was a real challenge to the authority of the university, to its disciplinary system and how Cornell would set up an academic study center dealing with race. Student mobilizers wanted an activist type center, the faculty wanted something more academic and open to different perspectives. Students became very militant and took over the student center, Willard Straight Hall to push their position. They brought in 20 rifles and kicked all the parents out for the annual Parents’ Weekend.
Others got involved, and Cornell became an armed camp of sorts. There was a threat by the student movement, which started with the Afro American Society (AAS) and then spread to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other radical groups on campus. A climactic moment was reached after a deal was struck to get the students out of [Willard Straight Hall] and the faculty had to hold a vote to decide whether to give the students amnesty for the takeover of the Straight and for other illegal actions the activists had committed in the lead up to the takeover.
So, the night before the faculty vote, 8,000 students took over Barton Hall, the large armory arena for basketball and major public events. I was there, mainly as an observer trying to figure out what was going on. The “Barton Hall community” was there to pressure the faculty to vote for amnesty. They came very close to taking over another building. Had students done so, behind the scenes the Provost [Dale Corson] had ordered 150 deputy sheriffs that were armed down at the bottom of the hill to come to campus and stop them by whatever means were necessary. That would’ve been mass chaos, because when I interviewed people who were down there for my book, former witnesses said that the deputies were ready to use arms. They were ticked off about what was happening and they were itching for a fight. There was a hostile culture present between the Ithaca Sheriff deputies versus “the brats” of the Ivy League school. At the very last second, a professor talked the mob in Barton Hall out of storming another building by urging, “don’t take over another building until tomorrow if the faculty doesn’t support you.” He said, “A good revolutionary waits for the right moment to act.” His amazingly effective speech convinced the crowd to wait because, believe me, it was on the precipice of acting.
And so, the faculty had to make a vote in the face of a real threat of violence. That posed an enormous academic freedom and free thought kind of dilemma, because the faculty’s decision was not made according to standards of fairness and reason, et cetera. It was made at the point of a gun so to speak. Death threats and urgings to violence swept the campus, and dozens of faculty members known to be unsympathetic to amnesty sought shelter in other homes and in hotels to ensure their safety. The next day, under tremendous pressure, the faculty voted to support the activists’ demands.
Three professors from the Government Department resigned, claiming that this vote was a violation of principles of an institution that’s supposed to decide things by reason, not threats, not violence. Alan Bloom, the famous professor of political theory, Walter Burns, a well-known professor of constitutional law, and Alan Sindler, a noted professor of American government, all resigned on the spot. The climate on campus following the ordeal was such as now that if you spoke out against what happened you would be accused of all sorts of bad things and threatened.
It essentially became an academic freedom question. I watched all that unfold. At that time, I pretty much sided with the activist students. I was 20 years old and going along with it. But in the aftermath of the crisis, I was exposed to the counter arguments as to how this settlement was going to harm the university. Critics of what transpired had the foresight to see that this was the beginning of a different kind of university, a university that was based on pushing for a particular notion of social justice or a particular notion of politics, and that this was the politicization of the university.
The whole event opened my mind to three things: one, the question of the proper mission of the university and its role in society; two, the role of academic freedom in defining that institution; and three, the problem of turning the university into a political party or a political organization. Cornell to me, was really kind of a harbinger or foreshadowing of the future in all this. Seeing all these issues that were so important, how best to resolve them, really set me on a path. And I should stress something else: had it not been for the courageous faculty members who spoke out against what had come down—and there were others besides Bloom, Berns, and Sindler. Historian Walter LaFeber spoke out, as did historian Donald Kagan, who later told me that he wished he hadn’t already resigned to go to Yale because that meant he could formally resign like Bloom, Berns, and Sindler—I would have been exposed to only the activists’ side of the issue. It’s a classic example of the importance of hearing all relevant viewpoints.
RELATED: The Coddling of the Cornellian Mind
I happened to have gone to and taught at schools that had dealt with a lot of campus politics issues over the years. I went to Cornell and then grad school at Berkeley, the home of the free speech movement and ground zero the student radical movement. I taught briefly at Michigan; home of the Port Huron Statement written by the SDS in 1962. So that was the beginning, even before the free speech movement by two years. I’ve been at [Univ. of] Wisconsin for 30 years, which was an epicenter for the anti-war movement and many major issues that came after that, including being a pioneer in the speech code movement that took off nationally in the late 1980s under the aegis of chancellor Donna Shalala. Wisconsin was also a leader in the national drive to institutionalize academic freedom in the early twentieth-century and in resisting McCarthyistic loyalty oaths in the 1950s. And from the late 1980s into the early 2000s, we had more free speech controversies than perhaps any university in the country, according to FIRE’s president, Greg Lukianoff.
So, it’s been part of my career to be involved in wrestling with these things. I’ve written about these aspects of campus politics and participated in them, especially at Madison. These are important social issues, and a university has a particular role in helping us think more creatively and more rationally about how to deal with these problems in a way that’s conducive to intellectual freedom rather than just pushing a cause that disregards the importance of dissent and disagreement. I think that’s sort of how it all kind of fits together for me. And it means that the issue of institutional neutrality is of special significance to me.
