Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s

7. Striking Similarities: Columbia, the Ivy League, and Black People

7 Striking Similarities Columbia, the Ivy League, and Black People What happened at Columbia University in the 1960s was very much a local matter; however, it was not entirely a unique situation. As a white institution that existed in a city, Columbia’s problems matched those of similar institutions. For instance, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania all faced space conflicts in their urban settings. And although schools like Cornell were located in rural areas, they, like Columbia, had strained relationships with black people as well. It is not hard to understand why black people resented institutions like Ivy League universities. Many of these universities rested very near to urban communities but rarely admitted black students or hired black professors. As was the case with Columbia, they did occasionally hire black people, but typically to fill staff positions. Eventually, in the late 1960s, many of the Ivy League schools began recruiting and admitting larger numbers of black students.1 In the process of doing so, however, conflict arose between those students and the universities over issues of curriculum and housing as well as the treatment of the students themselves on campus. As the tentacles of Black Power reached out across the nation, even the most elite institutions felt the impact of the movement. This chapter will place Columbia in the larger context of elite white educational centers that fostered tenuous relations with not only black residents but also black students in the era of Black Power. The Ivy League universities most similar to Columbia in setting were Harvard , Pennsylvania, and Yale. Like Columbia, these universities dealt with issues of expansion. Harvard, whose main campus is in Cambridge, Massachusetts , moved outward into working-class ethnic and black neighborhoods in the same way that Columbia encroached into West Harlem. Similarly, the University of Pennsylvania increased its landholdings in West Philadelphia, a largely black area. The situation was the same for Yale University, as it expanded into the poor neighborhoods of New Haven, Connecticut. As did New York City, Cambridge underwent urban renewal. Universities like Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Cambridge home. After the Second World War, many black migrants moved from the South and settled in Roxbury, a neighborhood bordering Cambridge. Like Harlem, the economic life of Roxbury boomed and then declined in the postwar years. Just as Morningside Heights and Harlem residents wanted to improve their community, Cambridge community members desired a more vibrant residential area. Although the local residents wanted to improve, they did not want to destroy homes. The city was in a difficult position because the lower-income neighborhoods did not produce as much in tax revenue, so it was an attractive prospect to allow large institutions to purchase land and buildings. Although Harvard did not pay taxes per se, the university did make yearly contributions to the city. Harvard, which was established in 1636, observed the changes in the surrounding Cambridge neighborhoods over the years and, like Columbia, went on the offensive. John Harvard built the university in Cambridge, not Boston, to avoid the entrapments of the immoral life that the city wrought.2 Describing Harvard and two other elite universities’ proximity to the urban environment , author Kermit Parsons noted: “By 1920, Harvard and MIT found themselves near the center of a great metropolis; . . . Columbia was again in the heart of New York, and the University of Pennsylvania was still in the middle of Philadelphia.”3 To make space for itself, Harvard expanded. When, in the 1960s, the nation’s oldest university expanded into the neighboring areas, the residents and students from Harvard attempted to keep the university from destroying homes in the community. At Cambridge City Council meetings, various residents raised their concerns about renewal plans. In May 1962 some three hundred citizens attended a council meeting to protest the initiative to develop their part of the city. When one advocate of renewal referred to the homes in the area as “blight,” a council member representing the sentiment of the crowd exclaimed that “homes are not blight!”4 Still, Harvard, like Columbia, wanted to find a way to encourage its faculty to live closer to the university. One Harvard student attempted to describe the situation: “The University today is in the position of a man about to be eaten by cannibals. . . . At the moment, the cannibals are in the form of the 134 . harlem vs. columbia university Boston metropolitan area...