AndyGrundberg '69 graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences. During his time at Cornell, he witnessed the Willard Straight Hall takeover and participated in Vietnam War protests…
AndyGrundberg '69 graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences. During his time at Cornell, he witnessed the Willard Straight Hall takeover and participated in Vietnam War protests on campus. He can be reached [email protected]. Dear editors, students, faculty and trustees, I'm writing as a long-ago Cornell student who witnessed and participated in an earlier paroxysm of institutional crisis first hand.
While quite different from what is happening at Cornell today, the events of my undergraduate years and their consequences might hold some lessons for all to consider. My classmates were among those who occupied Willard Straight Hall for two days in 1969, the spring of my senior year, as part of a campaign to create an African-American studies center on campus.
When the students left the building, a photograph of them with rifles, bandoliers and a shotgun made front-page news and made Cornell the center of national attention, none of it good. This happened as other classmates held rallies against the Vietnam War and publicly burned their draft cards. I was part of a group of several hundred students who sat-in and slept-in at Barton Hall in an effort to prevent ROTC drills from taking place.
These were heady times, with an active campus chapter of Students for Democratic Society leading the charge for social justice, but also ones tinged with tragedy. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated a year earlier, in 1968, the same year Richard Nixon won the Presidency. The year before that a fire at a Cayuga Heights residence hall killed eight Ph.D. candidates and my English literature professor, John Finch. Arson was the cause, but no perpetrator was ever identified.
Other suspicious fires followed. Still, we were uncompromising idealists. We were going to end the war, end racism, end the patriarchy. You can judge how well that worked out by looking at 21st century history. We, like many of you, wanted things to change and we blamed the Cornell administration for holding change back. Before the end of the Spring 1969 semester, most classes and final exams were cancelled and my graduation ceremony was a muted event.
This is a source-linked briefing. Read the original report from The Cornell Daily Sun .