Blackjack at Cornell

...Possibly in face of this pressure, the university acceded to the demands...

...In its place, a substitute motion was made, stating "sympathy" for the blacks but refusing to grant the demands...

...The following day, a protest rally was held in the Arts Quad, the crowd consisting mainly of fraternity men who consider Ackerman a friend and a good drinking buddy...

...There were cheers, and about 2,000 prepared to spend the night...

...it was a student power seizure...

...Subject to faculty approval, this would drop the reprimands and grant amnesty...

...The university could no ED WHITFIELD longer proceed with its plans to evict the militants from the building by the recently popularized means of a court injunction...

...As the morning wore on and it started to rain, the initial revolutionary fervor with which sds greeted the occupation gave way on the part of many to a perverse dejection...

...Thus, on Saturday afternoon sds leader Dave Burak proposed the takeover of Day in support of the black demands...

...As with the state of emergency declaration, instead of restoring faith in the sanctity of intellectual discourse the speech merely hardened the attitudes of those in the university community who believed President Perkins' handling of affairs during the weekend had been less than salutary...

...There is something dead and decaying in Day Hall and its reek has sickened us all...

...Realizing that Perkins was not about to suspend several thousand students en masse, a sizable portion of the group accepted the invitation...

...Saturday...

...About 7,000 showed up, a figure representing almost half of the student population...

...From the ifc meeting, he rushed up the hill to reassure more liberal types that he was indeed on their side...

...Les Hutchinson, a black disc jockey on wvbr...

...True, some faculty members are resigning because they feel academic freedom has been infringed upon by coercive students—but then, important faculty seem always to be leaving Cornell...

...A meeting was called for Tuesday night in Bailey Hall, and a march was planned from there to take over Day Hall in protest against the failure to grant the black demands...

...He invited all who supported the black demands but were unwilling to occupy a building to remain in Barton Hall until the faculty reconsidered its decision at a meeting scheduled for Wednesday...

...The night before guns had been brought into the building...

...The ad hoc "Committee for the Silent Center" placed announcements on wvbr at five-minute intervals saying "Jim Perkins must go...

...the rules were for the most part made up as the game progressed...

...Meanwhile, the sds contingent that had gone to Bailey Hall debated bitterly for an hour about immediate militant action, resigned itself to Burak's decision and reluctantly returned...

...Yet President Perkins took no action against the assembly —he simply ignored it until the faculty reversed its earlier decision and withdrew the reprimands on Wednesday...

...Visibly distressed, Dean Miller used what power he had left: He tendered his resignation...

...More important, aas bargaining power increased tenfold...

...The faculty, for example, proved less susceptible to manipulation than the President had apparently hoped...

...His motion failed, but the feeling remained that sds ached for some larger piece of the action...

...The players, in order of their appearance, were the Afro-American Society (aas)—recently renamed the Black Liberation Front—the local branch of Students for a Democratic Society (sds), various members of the administration, the faculty, and assorted students...

...The gathering was no longer an sds occupation...

...As in blackjack, the percentage is with the house...

...P. Hits the Fan" this way: "There is a stench on this campus...

...An agreement, therefore, was made Sunday afternoon between Whitfield and Muller...

...the object was to capture—or retain—in the course of a week or so as much of the power in the university as one could...

...The Nobel Peace Prize may not have been up for grabs, but it is not unlikely that in the opinion of one man tenure may have been...

...The faculty had asserted its power by nullifying the administration's nullification of the reprimands...

...Well," said a speaker from the podium, "I guess this is a seizure...

...The faculty had already made its little Putsch for control...

...Faced with this contradiction, groups as disparate as sds and the conservative History Department united in struggle against the man they called Diamond Jim...

...Art Shapiro, conservative mainstay of the Cornell Daily Sun's editorial board, opened a column entitled "J...

...Dave Burak held a quick caucus with fellow radicals on the podium and, following a moving speech by aas' Tom Jones, called for "loyal sds people" to leave for Bailey Hall to plan further action...

...The more revolutionary sds members were eager for some sort of militant action, and having the wind taken from their sails by aas was in a strange way disappointing to some of them...

...Cornell radicals were at least failing to keep up with the rest...

...Saturday morning Ackerman, in the role of conciliator, rushed down to Noyes Center, where a meeting of the Inter-Fraternity Council (ifc) was taking place...

...The aas achieved its demands, but black students continue to live in a university community in which crosses recently have been burned, sds has carefully shed the followers it attracted during the crisis and, down to its old fighting size, is currently making two more demands that Cornell seems unlikely to meet: an end to rotc and open enrollment of black and white working-class youths...

...It should also be noted that his courses are widely known as "guts...

...Sds wielded tremendous power in Barton, since its leaders held the chair...

...the Willard Straight Hall-based campus radio station, handed over the micHoward A. Rodman, a sophomore majoring in English on the editorial board of the Cornell Daily Sun...

...At one point, finding the handwriting illegible, he handed the resolution to its author for clarification...

...President Perkins, as unpopular as ever, appears firmly ensconced for the moment thanks to support from the trustees, who have come up with a fairly vacuous 10-point declaration of principle and procedure...

...He told the angry jock-types assembled there that he was with them, but that they should refrain from violence against the blacks in Straight...

...On Monday morning, undoubtedly responding to pressure from a-lumni and trustees upset about Cornell's "capitulation," President Perkins declared a state of emergency and threatened the suspension of any student seen carrying a gun or occupying a university building...

...The author was none other than Jim Perkins...

...The playing area was the campus...

...at any rate, sds was left holding the bag...

...As soon as the blacks vacated the building, he made every effort to insure that the rules by which the game was to continue would again be weighted in his favor...

...On Sunday the administration came into the picture...

...rophone to aas chairman Ed Whitfield for what was termed "a message of political relevance...

...In the persons of Stephen Muller and Robert Miller, the administration had agreed to the aas demands...

...But the medium of firearms was the message that the aas blacks were simply not going to back down, at any rate, not without great cost to the university...

...In comparison, an sds gathering in noncrisis times generally draws a maximum of about 250...

...in the person of James Perkins, it had rejected those same demands and imposed what had come to be considered a state of martial law...

...The President obviously felt that by raising the issues to a higher plane, he would lower the level of tension and thereby help restore normal university procedure...

...Looking at the situation now, the overall impression one has is that very little was changed by the tense week, despite the always bitter and often brutal dispute...

...The blacks insisted these were intended solely as defensive weapons, that they were frightened by a report that several carloads of armed fraternity men were on their way...

...But it was the time for ignoring such things: Everyone had pulled all the cards that could safely be pulled without almost surely going over the brink...

...The university-aas agreement, proposed at the Monday afternoon meeting by Dean of Faculty Robert Miller, who had promised the blacks he would urge its adoption, was rejected by about 700-200...

...Before a crowd of 10, 000, he read a speech that sounded much like the one he had been scheduled to give at Saturday morning's canceled parents' convocation, entitled "The Prospects for Stability...

...It was a critical moment, and Burak made a split-second decision...

...In a crisis context such as this, power is limited almost solely by one's chutzpah...

...If not rebels without a cause...

...sds leaders, upset, requested and were granted an audience...

...That the future of an Ivy League school, and perhaps the lives of several people as well, hung in the balance does not alter the essential nature of the proceedings...

...Whatever the case, the situation was qualitatively changed: What had been just another university building seizure was transformed overnight into important national news—enabling the blacks, among other things, to subsequently sell pictures of the occupation to Life for what was termed "a pretty penny...

...It was offered by a professor who read from a sheet of paper...

...The faculty meeting's outcome left many deeply disturbed...

...He declared that they were demanding, first, a nullification of the reprimands imposed on three black students involved in December demonstrations supporting a black studies program, and second, amnesty for those participating in the seizure...

...The first group to react was sds, whose leaders had met with aas representatives the preceding week when the action was planned...

...If indeed there was the stench of rotting carrion in the administration building, the vultures were quick to move in...

...Although the student movement that grew out of Barton Hall is busy planning for the restructuring of the university, all such plans must be approved directly by the faculty and tacitly by (he administration...

...As a result, serious negotiations and even major concessions became imperative...

...the others felt angry and betrayed...

...GAMBLING FOR POWER Blackjack at Cornell By Howard A. Rodman Ithaca The happenings last month at Cornell University pointed up the similarities between student confrontations and blackjack, although the stakes in the card game are not as high...

...The President assured sds his "hard line" was taken only in hopes of persuading faculty members that it was not necessary for them to take a tough line themselves by rejecting the Whitfield-Muller agreement at their meeting that afternoon...

...It had been a full year since the Columbia uprising, and television reports of university confrontations had become as common as reports of airplane hijackings...

...And Professor Ackerman remains un-tenured...

...In a related effort to assert his power and to reaffirm the legitimacy of his office, Perkins called a univer-sitywide convocation in Barton Hall, the school's gymnasium and rotc headquarters...

...Stephen Muller, vice president for public affairs, and Keith Kennedy, vice provost, entered Straight to negotiate with aas...

...Rope and chains had been bought, along with several loaves of bread, jars of peanut butter and a supply of birth control pills: The plan had been to seize Day Hall, the administration building...

...more, certain departments traditionally critical of Perkins on general principles now saw the crisis as an opportunity to give him the ax...

...now it was sds's turn...

...Armed with this foresight, sds had scheduled a meeting for 6 a.m...

...But Cornell's President James Perkins is no man's fool...

...Everyone can smell it...

...Then he went to Barton Hall and called the assembly "the most constructive gathering in Cornell's history," ignoring the fact that it had convened in direct contravention to his state of emergency...

...The assembly was nevertheless unruly and difficult to manage because of its sheer size...

...Support for aas was quickly voted, and the gathering moved to Straight to demonstrate outside and provide a "defense perimeter" to protect the blacks from any attack...

...About 100 left...

...Perhaps because the early morning timing seemed to imply special importance, the meeting was well attended...

...It was lofty in tone ("We must firmly grasp the tiller of the future lest we be left behind on the sands of the beach of the past . . .)", and failed to mention even in passing the blacks, their demands, the occupation, or for that matter any other issue on the minds of most of the assembled...

...The occupation of Straight by a 100-odd blacks had immediate repercussions...

...The next move was by Professor Charles Ackerman, not because the situation directly affected him but rather because he is not a man to miss an opportunity...

...Now it is always difficult for a university administration to take harsh measures against a group of blacks, for they hold a valuable trump card: the sentiment and support gained by the cry of "white racist...

...Whitfield then signed off...

...Those in the "silent center," as well as those who were admittedly Right wing, flocked to the meeting in hopes of dissuading sds from militant action...

...Play commenced early on April 19, a cold Saturday morning that was scheduled to be the first day of Parents' Weekend...

...The meeting was then moved to Barton Hall, the scene of President Perkins' earlier convocation...

...He further announced that "any organization that prompts any such move for coercive purposes will be liable to have their group disbanded...

...The week before the takeover, he had been denied tenure by the Sociology Department on the grounds that he had not devoted enough of his time to scholarly research...

...Whitfield announced that Straight, Cornell's Student Union building and, not incidentally, headquarters for Parents' Weekend events, had been occupied by members of aas...

...In the face of the guns, there was little else the administration could do...

...A week earlier, a 10-man sds tactics committee had met to devise a response to an expected administration rejection of the group's proposals for university funding of Ithaca housing...