Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University » (New Edition)

In April 1969, one of America's premier universities was celebrating parents' weekend - and the student union was an armed camp, occupied by over eighty defiant members of the campus's Afro-American Society. Marching out Sunday night, the protesters brandished rifles, their maxim: "If we die, you are going to die." Cornell '69 is an electrifying account of that weekend which probes the origins of the drama and describes how it was played out not only at Cornell but on campuses across the nation during the heyday of American liberalism. The weekend's traumatic turn of events is shown by Downs to be a harbinger of the debates raging today over the meaning of the university in American society. He explores the fundamental questions it posed, questions Americans on and off campus are still struggling to answer: What is the relationship between racial justice and intellectual freedom? What are the limits in teaching identity politics? And what is the proper meaning of the university in a democratic polity?

Library Journal

The scenes recalled here of armed black students leaving a Cornell University building in 1969 speak loudly of the rule of law, radicalism, racism, power politics, intellectual honesty, and the relations between academia and society. For Downs (political science, Univ. of Wisconsin), the author of several books, including Nazis in Skokie (LJ 3/1/85), the context for the Cornell uprising was shaped by the history of liberalism in 20th-century American higher education as well as campus events and university policies. A Cornell undergraduate that infamous spring, Downs narrates the issues argued by the Afro-American Society, other student organizations, and factions among administrators and faculty. He clearly details the complex, rapidly unfolding events, which embodied contested notions of progressive education, academic freedom, racial justice, and identity politics and which made the Cornell uprising more significant than most American student revolts of the 1960s. Readable, at times fast-paced, and based solidly on interviews and primary sources, this is highly recommended for academic libraries.--Charles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State Univ., State College