Walls: Essays, 1985-1990

Between Yes and No

Between Yes and No When they came in and said that if we stayed we would be officially arrested, I decided to stay. I decided to stay and accept punishment and a police record not only because I thought it was important for us to maintain our stand, but because at that moment I was questioning the fundamental principles of this University that would condone apartheid and oppression in South Africa by maintaining their investments, and punish us for our freedom to speak against them. -Kristin Bole, a Cornell student, in testimony before the University Hearing Board on May 4 , 1985 Recently I was a willful spectator at a "shanty raising" by a large contingent of Cornell faculty members-some ninety or so spirited souls. I say willful because I will ed myself to be inactive, but I am getting ahead of myself. The haphazard structure-three-quarters good intentions and much architec­ tural luck-symbolized the faculty'S protest against Cornell's continued investment in South Africa, and their further outrage against a university-imposed court injunction which, in its far­ ranging legal implications, effectively stifled all manner of campus dissent. The faculty shanty, however bedraggled, was in direct opposition to a university prohibition. With hammer and nail, the faculty were demonstrating their support for students who had previously erected numerous "outlawed" shanties, only to 111 Walls: Essays , 1985 � 1 990 find themselves arrested, their shanties torn down. More impor­ tantly, the faculty members-after great debate and much fear­ were finally placing themselves, and their j obs, in jeopardy. No longer could the faculty condone the wanton arrest of their best and most humanitarian students. As one faculty member stated, "At Cornell, we used to award degrees; now it is court appear­ ance tickets. " As a rule, university faculty do not act precipitously. Professors always have reasons-good ones-for further consid­ eration and debate. In this case, the university could arrest the " shanty builders" for criminal trespass (a felony in New York State) . since the participants would be violating a New York State court order; or Cornell could, citing precedent , move for their immediate dismissal from university employment. B oth options, of course, were considered highly unlikely; ninety distinguished faculty members is no insignificant number. Yet for people who spend their lives probing the seem­ ingly minuscule for the cosmic , the stakes were high. One professor, although he strongly agreed with the faculty's decision to build the shanty, could notbring himselfto face the possibility of another arrest. Incarcerated for six years in Chile, he had lost his hearing in his left ear from police torture. He wanted to help (he knew, as few others do, the horrors of state-sanctioned oppression) , but the fear-like the hot wire formerly stabbed in his left ear lobe-would not go away. That the ninety faculty members undertook to build a shanty evidenced their profound disillusionment in the Cornell administration. It is an "especial evil" that can get five faculty members to agree, not to mention ninety variously impassioned souls. Yet, clearly, it was the horror of watching nonviolent students routinely arrested, seeing their dreams turned belly-up by contemptible, cynical old men, that so angered everyone. Kristin Bole , cited above , was certainly indicative of the student protesters. The administration might talk about "reasoned debate" and "moral character," but it was quick to summon the police; the demonstrators, with their minds and their lives, were evidenc1 1 2 Between Yes and No ing moral integrity. The university president might preach about the horrors of apartheid: he might even believehis words; yet, as in Soweto, he was quick to send the dissident to jail. The proscriptive injunction had been handed down by a New York State Supreme Court justice in the spring of 1985, when the university faced repeated acts of mass civil disobedi­ ence at Day Hall, the administration building. During the two months of peaceful sit-ins , the university had arrested more than sixteen hundred students, faculty, and staff-the largest tally of arrestees ever recorded at an American educational institution. In fact, Cornell, incredibly, had arrested more than one-tenth of itstotal constituency, making arrest, as someone joked, "Cornell's largest major." I should describe how these protests occurred. At about three P . M . each day, hundreds of divestment protesters would congregate in the halls of the administration building and form two orderly columns on...