1969: UCLA and the High Potential program, and Cornell
1969 was a very big and tumultuous year, and I was paying attention to a lot of things.
But I didn’t catch everything, and I don’t remember this story. In the annals of the follies of higher education in this country in the 60s and beyond, it’s one of the grimmer tales. Now it’s the 50th anniversary of the incident:
The tiny “High Potential Program” was UCLA’s early, experimental form of affirmative action. Unlike today’s affirmative action programs, which primarily benefit middle- and upper-middle-class students, this was a real effort to benefit young people born on the wrong side of the tracks. As one might expect, UCLA relaxed the academic qualifications for this project. One of the founders of the program put it this way: “A high school diploma was not a requisite. We recruited people who were active in their community and who had the ability to lead.”
Here’s the crazy part: In practice, the leadership requirement meant that UCLA wanted—and actively recruited–leaders of street gangs, especially those involved in black nationalism. A history of violence was no barrier to admission.
Not a lot of learning went on in the special classes conducted for the program. Linda Chavez, a UCLA grad student at the time, wrote about her experiences in teaching classes for Chicano High Potential students in An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal. I won’t spoil her story here. Suffice it to say it wasn’t pretty.
Among the students recruited for the program was Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. Carter was the former leader of the Slauson gang, a mega-gang in South Central Los Angeles, and was known as “Mayor of the Ghetto.” Shortly before registering at UCLA he had spent four years in Soledad prison for armed robbery, where he had become a disciple of Malcolm X. In 1967, after meeting Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey Newton, he formed the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party, mostly out of members of the Slauson gang.
This does seem crazy—deluded, idealistic, dangerous. It culminated in a gang shootout on campus in which two of the students were killed (Carter was one of them), and the program was ended. A fitting 60s story.
Here’s a fact that caught my attention:
Shortly before the gun battle, student activists pressured UCLA Chancellor Charles Young to create a Center for African American Studies—complete with an executive director and staff, office space and a generous budget.
This immediately reminded me of the brouhaha at Cornell that occurred the same year (although later) and was brilliantly described by Allan Bloom (who had been a Cornell professor at the time) in his book The Closing of the American Mind. I’ve written many posts about the Cornell situation: please see this and this, for example.
…[Cornell] professors and administrators there proved that they were pushovers more interested in PC thought and placating student pressure (including, in the case of Cornell, the threat of violence by armed students) than in defending any principle they had supposedly held dear.
The issues were somewhat different back then. In Cornell it was race, and the establishment of a Black Studies department, as well as threatening a black student (Alan Keyes, as it turns out) who had disagreed with the protesters…
…Cornell was already slated to get an Afro-American Studies Center [one of the student demands], but that wasn’t good enough for the demonstrators, who said they wanted it to be autonomous.
I had always figured that the black students at Cornell in 1969 had come there as part of some sort of affirmative action or outreach program to get more black students at Cornell in an era when they were ordinarily few and far between.
More:
On Sunday afternoon, following negotiations with Cornell officials, the AAS students emerged from the Straight carrying rifles and wearing bandoleers. Their image, captured by Associated Press photographer Steve Starr, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, appeared in newspapers across the country and on the cover of Newsweek magazine under the headline, “Universities Under the Gun.”
Although physical disaster was averted, deep psychological scars burned into the minds of many on campus. Four decades later, feelings in some quarters are still raw. The university as a bastion of reasoned argument, thoughtful debate and academic freedom seemed to be under siege. Relationships among faculty members were destroyed. Students were torn. An atmosphere of pervasive fear and anxiety gripped the campus and the nation. The AAS students were not punished, outraging some faculty members, students and alumni.
Cornell was fortunate that there was no bloodshed. If you want to know more about what happened, here’s a source:
But despite the efforts of the president and faculty to attract and integrate them, many black students at Cornell felt alienated from the student body and hostile to the administration. In 1966, a group of black students created the Afro-American Society. Strongly influenced by the national Black Power movement, the AAS sought to increase black students’ autonomy and change Cornell’s curriculum to suit its views, rather than pursue integration. A typical AAS statement, in the form of a letter to the Cornell Daily Sun, read as follows:
“If Blacks do not define the type of program set up within an institution that will be relevant to them, it will be worthless. Moreover, the Blacks must have the right to define the role of white students in the program, even to the point of their restriction, if it is to be valid for Blacks or whites. We do not expect whites to understand because their perception is dimmed by the racism they admit they possess.”…
In 1968, a group of AAS members disrupted the class of Father Michael McPhelin, a visiting economics professor from the Philippines who had criticized the economic-development policies of a number of African nations. Without addressing McPhelin’s criticism on the merits, the AAS tried to intimidate him into recanting. The students first tried to read a letter criticizing him in class—without showing it to him first—but he refused to allow it. Then they attempted to take over the class, and he resisted. McPhelin complained to the chairman of the economics department, who, instead of punishing the offending students, praised them for their activism. By the end of the year, McPhelin had left Cornell and, as Tarcov saw it, a pattern had been established…
The pattern continues to this day, is adopted by all leftist activist groups, and has become extremely commonplace. As universities capitulate more and more, the demands escalate rather than subside.
More about Cornell that will sound very very familiar:
On April 18, students at Wari, a cooperative for black women, reported a burning cross on their lawn and blamed racist whites for the incident. The cross burners were never caught, and Ithaca police suspected, but could never prove, that AAS members themselves had burned the cross, trying to create a pretext for further protest. Stephen Goodwin, a Cornell student at the time who served as the AAS treasurer, later called the cross burning “a set-up. It was just to bring in more media and more attention to the whole thing.”
Whether it was a set-up or not, the incident set the stage for a massive escalation…
In carrying out the takeover, AAS students crossed the line between incivility and life-threatening violence. The invading students ran through the building shouting “Fire!,” sending 30 confused parents outside without even a chance to gather their luggage. A number of parents had the presence of mind to call the university’s department of public safety and ask for help, but they were advised, “There’s nothing we can do; do what they tell you.”…
According to Allan Sindler, chairman of the government department at the time, black students then brought rifles to Straight’s loading dock for use by AAS members, and campus police, acting on orders from the administration, did nothing to stop them. Once armed, AAS leader Eric Evans, a senior majoring in communications, demonstrated a proclivity for his chosen field when he shouted through a megaphone, “If any more white students come in, you’re gonna die here.”
The occupiers demanded the nullification of campus judicial action against the students who had overturned vending machines the previous year, the commencement of housing negotiations between the administration and the AAS, and a complete investigation of the Wari cross-burning. They spent Saturday night smuggling in more rifles and preparing for another day of antics. On Sunday, they negotiated with a special committee of faculty members and administration officials appointed to manage the crisis.
That afternoon, the AAS and the administration came to an agreement, and 110 black students left Straight and marched to the Africana Studies and Research Center to sign the deal. Even the exodus took place in a manner embarrassing to the university…
I’ll stop there. You get the picture.
[NOTE: I’m wondering—although I haven’t been able to locate the information so far—whether Cornell’s program that recruited these students was anything like that at UCLA, or whether it more closely resembled the admissions process of today. If anyone finds any information on this please post it in the comments.
Also, that book by Linda Chavez sounds like a very interesting changer story.]
I find the lack of re-evaluation of their own points of view by white students when confronted by incidents like Neo has described to be both fascinating and distressing. I went to a high school which was unsafe due to assaults on whites by blacks and lived in a college dorm where large numbers of students had fled another dorm due to assaults and robberies by educational opportunity students. Yet, I never encountered anyone who was willing to critique the programs and processes then in effect in any way other than “it’s all white people’s fault”. I’m sometimes tempted to say white liberals reveal their racism by accepting attitudes, actions and rationalizations from ‘people of color’ they wouldn’t accepts from other white people. Except that mostly white groups like Antifa are also excused.
i was helped and a darling
but they never wanted you to succeed…
then your on the other side, and an enemy, not a key to a cash machine
i didnt like all that…
even where i am now where they keep the tax money
substandard equipment, treat me differently, and more
it would have been better to stay away from medical college
the capitalists are a lot LESS evil
and they know how to clean up in the toilet after themselves
funny, but how ya gonna save the world if you cant even do that?
sadly, they are robbing everyone from the workers, to the patients, and professional staff they bleed till they leave… huge turn over.
in my day they tried putting us kids in with the NOVA kids
NOVA kids were the gang members and psychopaths
nothing like putting a kid lke sheldon with inner city psychopaths…
most ended up in prison
and thats how i learned to appear normal..
school of hard knocks can almost cure aspergers…
The defeated White South was addled by racial neuroses for a century. As they receded, liberal academics manufactured a new set of racial neuroses in response.
Pathetic beta males beneath contempt.
I read Bork’s ” Slouching Towards Gomorrah: …” roughly when it came out in ’96. It has the same story, except it’s at Yale. It might have a bit of the Cornell story; I don’t remember. I do remember the essence of it was admin. capitulation at every step.
This is a test to see if my comments will post. Yesterday it didn’t work.
It worked. t#s bedtime here, but I did just order the Chavez book for my Kindle.
It’s just another story like the black lives matter protest in Baker Library at Dartmouth.
The white and Asian kids were studying as finals were next week. Why do you think the black students saw no need to study?
Cornell was fortunate that there was no bloodshed.
Considering the actual outcome, I’m not so sure. It would have been better to have confronted those armed radicals with lots of police and sharpshooters, and told them that if they did not immediately disarm they would be shot. And if they failed to comply, shot them until they were all either down or disarmed. A lot of our problems can be traced to cowardice. Many of the rest to treason.
“If Blacks do not define the type of program set up within an institution that will be relevant to them, it will be worthless….”
They did, and it is.
pst314:
Bloodshed and standing up to them are not inextricably linked. It’s fortunate there was no bloodshed, compared to the bloodshed at UCLA. But there could have been a courageous stand by administrators without shedding blood, I am almost sure of that. I believe the guns were a bluff.
Of course, that’s easy for me to say all these years later, when I’m not in the position the administration was in. But if you read the whole story you’ll see that the entire situation developed slowly, and there was plenty of time prior to the guns when the administration probably could have done something effective and instead they caved and appeased.
I finished college in ’63. I remember the 1960s very well, and on reading Neo’s piece am as full of revulsion today as I was 50-odd years ago.
While I agree 100% with pst314 (“A lot of our problems can be traced to cowardice. Many of the rest to treason.”), I still remain perplexed by the spinelessness, the lack of moral fiber, by those in charge, like Kingman Brewster, Yale president.
What gave birth to that wretched limp-wristed spawn of highly placed administrators? Mind, this was all 22 or so years after WWII, when the “Greatest Generation” was in early middle age, not at all edentulous. It seems hard to lay this at the doors of Gramsci or communists. It is more like a very contagious virus limited to academia that obliterated common sense, judgment and morals.
That ‘virus’ has since spread throughout the land, giving us Tlaibs, Ocasio-Cortezes, Betos and more. The common thread between the 1960s and now is the ignorant agitators with violent language (soon to be followed by violent acts) are young, and their vigorously encouraging enablers, the Pelosis and Schumers, are old.
If they succeed, the sun will set on our Republic, never to shine upon us again.
I started college in 1961, when I was 18. My school was Chicago, which escaped most of the actual violence. But I do remember the student agitpropists, SDS, CORE, SNCC — not sure about the NAACP; it seems to me they weren’t much into violence or even rebellion at the time. But those three alone were enough to make you weep and lose your lunch.
The New Left set the stage for a lot of this stuff beginning in the ’50s, I gather from David Horowitz’s confessional autobiography Radical Son. Which is a page-turner and a Must Read.
And a lot of the New Left kiddies had Communist or Fellow-Traveller parents. And not all the Communists had been particularly fastidious about observing the niceties of civility. I remember reading somewhere on the Wonderful World-Wide Web some gentleman who attested to the strong-arm Mafia-like tactics of some of them, who would hold up shopkeepers for protection money; he knew from personal experience, he said, because his father, like others in the area (of NYC, I think), had been among their prey.
Also, people like Marcuse and Hofstatder had captured the imagination of many of the faculties in the ’50s and ’60s. And they came out of the Frankfurt School tradition.
And the Civil Rights Movement itself probably exhibited mayhem as a glamorous way to be recognized by the In Crowd, for those who were so inclined.
Remember, the New Left and even many of the children of that era were enchanted with the Black Panthers. And “Che.” And Mao.
And what an adrenaline rush, to be an active Rebel out there doing things!
I was very, very close to an older woman of considerable common sense who nevertheless fell for Rachel Carson (no shame in that, though, most laymen of the time did, if that sort of thing interested them). And for the Berrigans. I don’t know how much farther her sympathies went down that path; I hope she came to her senses before she died. She always felt for the underdog. Horowitz has talked about the American romance with the Underdog….
I think that there were a lot of factors that went into “that slum of a decade.” (As John Updike called it, I understand, though for reasons just about opposite to mine.)
What gave birth to that wretched limp-wristed spawn of highly placed administrators? Mind, this was all 22 or so years after WWII, when the “Greatest Generation” was in early middle age, not at all edentulous. It seems hard to lay this at the doors of Gramsci or communists. It is more like a very contagious virus limited to academia that obliterated common sense, judgment and morals.
Recall that George McGovern was a combat veteran, and, before entering electoral politics, a college teacher.
Garry Wills made an attempt to explore the issue you’ve raised in Nixon Agonistes, but he didn’t delineate any compelling conclusions. He did note that academics live by their ‘reputation’ and are ever rating theirs against others. Its a trade that attracts other-directed people and inculcates an other-directed disposition. Those who aren’t other-directed often are people who’ve got issues and were attracted to the weak labor discipline of faculty employment. One of the principals in the Cornell surrender was Steven Mueller. I crossed paths with the man a dozen years later. A glad-hander, as far as I could tell. My hypothesis would be that the self-concept of academics induced a grave inhibition about taking a stand. Then you have wretched institutional leadership courtesy James Perkins. On top of that, Cornell is a bulbous university (currently 20,000 students) located in a burgh with about 45,000 people living in it, a burgh which isn’t served by either the Interstate system or the U.S. Route system. Restoring order meant persuading Gov. Rockefeller to send in the state police or the National Guard, probably both. I’d wager Rockefeller’d have been willing (he had a law-and-order bias), but, again, the faculty and administration would have to live with themselves afterward. A normal person certainly could. Faculty are not normal.
I’ve followed Neo’s links to some of her earlier postings on this topic. In one of them, Ymarsakar
https://www.thenewneo.com/2013/10/16/the-day-the-university-died/#comment-673700
includes an excerpt from the 2009 City Journal piece, entitled “Cornell’s Straight Flush,” subtitled “Forty years after the student center was occupied, the destructive effects linger.”
https://www.city-journal.org/html/cornell%E2%80%99s-straight-flush-10659.html
Fascinating article. An overview of the events at Cornell, and mentions of the actions and reactions of many of today’s well-known Names, such as Allan Bloom, Thomas Sowell, Alan Keyes.
The destructive effects lingered, as in 1996 when Al Sharpton showed up….
I’m an idiot. Neo linked to that very article in her posting of that day. Somehow I jumped into Ymarsakar’ comment with an excerpt, and tracked down the article from the excerpt.
Solly. :>(((
Well, Neo was quite right to link to it. It’s very good.