It’s a hot, hazy night at Cornell University. It’s May 1958. An effigy of President Malott is burning in front of Sage Hall. It’s hanging from a thick-branched American-elm tree, and it’s labeled “No Ban” and “This Ain’t Ezra.” There is a mob. A huge mob that eventually breaks up on central campus. Some members go to The Palms to get beer. Others trek a mile to Malott’s house. The marchers are armed. They are angry. They are armed with eggs and rocks. They aim at a single target: the president. Divestment Protest: Student activists in the 1985 divestment protests. Sun File Photo.

The 1958 protests took place during a relatively peaceful time in United States history. The sense of paranoia from the Red Scare and the Cold War were winding down. The economy was emerging from a state of recession. Inklings of the counter culture movement were beginning to emerge, but conservative social values were nationally prevalent. Elvis became the handsome face of a generation. Families lived in the suburbs. Zoot suits and poodle skirts were all the rage.

But on the Cornell campus, the social conformity of the ’50s was not settling with students, who were taking the first steps towards sexual liberation. The University had just outlawed co-ed apartment parties under the reasoning that “apartment entertaining was not in the best interests of an educational environment.” Women had a curfew of 12:30 a.m.

As described in a 1958 Sun editorial, the University subjected “a group standard in conformity with the morals of middle class, small town America” upon its students. So they acted out: they egged Malott’s home. They egged Day Hall. They rallied and protested. They shamelessly fought for their cause.

But such was life in 1958, a time when raw eggs and rocks were radical weapons capable of winning over a university administration. A time of retrospective fantasy where the biggest campus issues were bedtimes and parties. However, it was also a time of historical significance — students embarked on their long train of activism that has continued to this day, and in large part, has defined Cornell. “Cornell’s student activists [of the 1950s] were the forerunners of those who led even more significant movements for civil rights and student freedom in the 1960s,” writes Carl Leubsdorf ’59 in A Century at Cornell.

1958 Student Protests: Curfews and parties were the subject of this 1958 student protest where students struck fear into the heart of the administration by throwing eggs and waving flags. Sun File Photo.

Cornell student activists set off a spark that grew into a raging fire, a fire that both burned down and built up their University. Cornell student activists embody what Prof. William Trochim, policy analysis and management, calls our “historical legacy”: “Any student who doesn’t confront the issues of the time is missing out,” he said. “Activism is a great tradition at Cornell.”

Out in The Open

This month’s black flag demonstration re-awakened Cornell’s tradition of public protest. When the Islamic Alliance for Justice placed 1,300 flags on the Arts Quad — which where then re-arranged into a Star of David, then re-re-arranged into a peace sign — he sprawling lawn was transformed into a forum for polarizing debate. Lined with elegant stone buildings named for notable historical figures that are connected by pristine walkways, the picturesque quadrangle, along with Cornell’s manicured outdoor spaces, has been a hotbed for some of the University’s most defining forces of change.

One Shantytown, Many Arrests

“The divestment movement hit Cornell like an emotional force. It attracted students because the apartheid was evil. There was no defense for it. It was not a complicated issue, in that sense,” said Scott Jaschik ’85, former editor in chief of The Sun.

In the post-sixties era, many college campuses had “quieted” since the days of the SDS and emergence of the New Left movement. But not Cornell, according Prof. Paul Sawyer, English, and Brian Eden of the University Library staff, who co-authored a paper entitled “50 Years of Activism at Cornell.”

“On April 18, 1985, sit-ins in Day Hall began what was to become the largest, most sustained student political movement in the history of Cornell,” they write.

It was the mid-’80s, the Apartheid regime in South Africa was in full force. The U.S. was under the guidance of famously conservative president Ronald Reagan. South Africa, in the midst of national crisis, had declared a state of emergency. Political violence had claimed the lives of 5,000 citizens. The African National Congress sought international assistance. Divestment was declared the most powerful means, but both the American and British governments resisted.

So students, staff and faculty at Cornell took matters into their own hands. What began as a protest turned into one of the most dramatic public demonstrations in Cornell’s history. Hundreds of students and faculty engaged in a campaign for University divestment from South Africa by removing funds from companies doing business with the apartheid regime. The Board of Trustees managed the investment portfolio — Cornell activists pushed for transparency and accountability.

“We recognized that the role of the trustees was to maintain the financial well being of the University,” said Prof. James Turner, chair of the Department of Africana Studies. “We argued that they were shepherds of the University. But their wider responsibility was for the moral and intellectual well being of the University.”

Students and faculty erected a Shantytown between Sage Chapel and Day Hall. They built — and many resided in — shacks made out of thin boards, cardboard, tar paper and plastic. According to Turner, the Shantytown, “dramatized the townships that were common during the Apartheid era. We wanted to evoke sympathy and solidarity with people in South Africa.”

At least five student groups went on hunger strikes, according to Sawyer and Eden. 250 faculty members signed a petition published in The Sun. There was a 323-72 vote at a Faculty Senate meeting in favor of total divestment. But when a fire erupted in the Shantytown, the University closed it down. Students and faculty were arrested as they refused to leave the site after the University officially banned them from rebuilding the shanties after a fire destroyed three of them.

In the end, the trustees did not divest from South Africa. But the public protests had far reaching implications. “At that time at Cornell, race relations were not great,” recounted Jaschik. “It crossed racial lines, it united black and white students for a common cause. It made people feel good, it was a unity movement for students.”

The Art of Protest

In an effort to achieve a Latino Living Center and a Latino Studies program at Cornell, the Latino community of the early 1990s mobilized with a force nearly unparalleled in Cornell activist history.

Their 1993 protest, which led to a takeover of Day Hall, spurred from the defacement of “The Castle Is Burning,” a sculpture famously placed on the Arts Quad as part of the Johnson Museum’s “Revelations/Revelaciones” exhibit celebrating Hispanic Art. Sawyer and Eden describe the sculpture as an “undulating rectangle of ochre walls that stretched out across the Arts Quad.”

The Sun previously reported that Martinez’s inspiration for the sculpture was the social unrest of the 1968 Paris uprisings. It consisted of a series of black walls constructed around walkways on the Quad, the layout of barricades mimicked those used in Paris. They blocked sidewalks across campus, and thus compelled pedestrians to find alternate paths.

According to Sherina Giler ’10, treasurer of La Asociacion Latina, “when walking through the piece, you couldn’t see the person on the other side. It was as if you were in a bubble.” On the fourth night of its display, the sculpture was vandalized when students defaced it by writing, “Fuck you! This sucks asshole!”

“The defacing was a spark to the protest,” Giler said. “We wanted as equal an education as everyone else.”

After protesters barred the entrances to Day Hall and took over the third floor offices for a weekend, the administration and students negotiated and began the planning stages for a Latino Living Center.

“It’s hard to only view the takeover as a sign of success, because we shouldn’t have to protest for things that we should already have,” Eduardo Peñalver ’94 a key protest figure, previously told The Sun. “White students come here, identify with the school and love it. They have an uncomplicated educational experience ... this is what we should have.”

Through the Jail Cell Walls

In April 2004, a group of six students with fake bombs taped to their legs trudged across The Arts quad. They were making their way to a prison cell constructed out of wood and wire, guarded by fatigued officers (professors), filled with suited prisoners, (professors), staged in from of Olin Library. Impersonating terrorists, the students were approached hastily by Cornell’s public safety officers. “It was definitely a dramatic moment,” said Prof. William Trochim, policy analysis and management. “But it fostered communication between two groups about the issues of the time.”

And the issues of the time were huge. The scandals and questions surrounding Guantanamo Bay had yet to be played out in the mainstream media. Cornell professors and students took it upon themselves to begin a dialogue surround an issue that has largely defined the Bush Administration. “The Guantanamo Bay Prison was used as a concrete entry point into a critical examination of the national policies, military strategies, and new legal norms being championed by the U.S. administration as essential to combat those employing terrorist tactics around the world,” write Sawyer and Eden.

As part of a series of events called “Liberty and Justice for All,” Cornell faculty, staff and students built a simulation of a Guantanamo Bay holding cell on the Arts Quad. Matching the exact dimensions of the actual prison, the structure was made based on the blueprint of Guantanamo available through the Haliburton website, according to Trochim. It was comprised of a prisoner’s cell and a museum cell where visitors could walk through and experience the feeling of being confined in the jail. The structure was placed on the Arts Quad, in a highly visible locale outside the windows of Olin Library. About 2,000 people went through the exhibit.

The theatricality of the display, in conjunction with the procedure by which professors were captured while teaching, arrested without explanation and imprisoned in public, incited much campus debate about the practices of the United States Government: a government built on what many consider to be the foundations of law and justice. Amidst its dramatic presentation, Professor Emeritus Moncrieff Cochran, human development, emphasized that the simulation was an educational demonstration, not an act of protest. It represented a divergence from earlier acts of aversion to the University, but still sent a message to the Cornell community. “There is good evidence that carefully organized demonstrations have been effective at Cornell,” Trochim said. “There is always a question surrounding activism on campus: to what extend do you engage the University, and to what extent do you set yourself in opposition?”

Looking Forward

Cornell activists have received national media coverage in outlets such as Newsweek, The New York Times and the Associated Press. Students have taken over three buildings on campus: Willard Straight Hall in 1969, Carpenter Hall in 1972 and Day Hall in 1993. They have slept on the Arts Quad, chained themselves to trees, traveled to D.C. in mass.

But such acts are not only part of the past. Just last week, students at NYU took over their student union in an effort to pressure their university to make their investments more transparent and centered on socially responsible causes. The students remind us that public protest is not the voice of the past, but of the present. And it is up to this generation of Cornellians to make sure it rings in the future.

“Where are we going?” Edward D. Eddy ’44 wrote in A Century at Cornell. “The whole world may be going to hell, and the confusion that faces us now is whether to worry about the details of the voyage or to plot the course in another direction, or just to climb aboard and enjoy the trip.” RLD