Cornell's Class of 1971 was witness to an especially tumultuous era of campus unrest, peaking with the takeover of Willard Straight Hall by black student activists on April 19, 1969.

During a Reunion Weekend forum, June 9 in Kennedy Hall's Call Auditorium, three professors, a Cornell alumnus and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan talked about political activism at Cornell. The discussion, "Student Activism and Politics: Then and Now," was moderated by Donald Downs '71, a professor of political science, law and journalism at the University of Wisconsin and author of a book about the Straight takeover, "Cornell '69."

Panel members addressed campus activism from the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, the Vietnam era and the anti-apartheid divestment movement in the mid-1980s to the Redbud Woods protest in 2005 and recent student-led campaigns against global warming and sweatshop labor.

Downs prefaced his remarks by saying he "didn't sleep a wink" the previous evening. "The last time I went all night without sleeping was in 1969 in Barton Hall," he said, referring to a student vigil that panel member Paul Sawyer, professor of American studies, later said "represented many constituencies coming together."

"Student activism is still alive," Downs said, "but it's become more institutionalized, part of shared governance. It's metastasized, spread to different areas. And it's become more philosophically diverse. [It] is a controversial issue. Even if one admires student activism, does it threaten to politicize the university? The best way to deal with these issues is to let students weigh all viewpoints."

Sawyer, who teaches a course on the politics and culture of the 1960s, referred to a number of Cornell landmarks in activism, including the establishment of the first women's studies program, the administration's refusal to fire a professor accused in the 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the first on-campus shantytown of the divestment movement.

"The university is always a political force whose activities are full of social and political implications," Sawyer said.

He also announced an online archive project now in progress, focusing on the 50-year history of student activism at Cornell. The archive will be available on D-Space.

Also on the panel was Fredrik Logevall, professor of history specializing in U.S. foreign policy and Vietnam, who said that the draft in the late 1960s and early 1970s largely fueled the activism of that time; and Richard Polenberg, the Goldwin Smith Professor of History, who discussed the Straight takeover.

"I have a very different view of 1969 now as I did then," Polenberg said. "I came to Cornell in 1966 [and] I considered myself a left-of-center liberal. It came as a surprise in 1969 to find myself aligned with some conservative faculty members who thought the administration should not give in when students take over buildings."

He now has more sympathy for then-President James A. Perkins, whose wife was dying of cancer in 1969, and less for former faculty member Allan Bloom, whose 1987 book "The Closing of the American Mind" addressed the Cornell incident. "Bloom's view was that the faculty were a group of dancing bears, and the students were rabble, thugs," Polenberg said.

Berrigan, a member of Cornell United Religious Work from 1967 to 1970, recounted how during the Depression his mother helped a vagrant by lying to the police. "That was the beginning of our criminalization," said Berrigan, who went to prison for his role in destroying draft cards from a U.S. Selective Service office in Catonsville, Md., in 1968, and famously eluded federal authorities at a Barton Hall rally in 1970.

After the forum, the Class of 1971 presented a documentary film, "Investigation of a Flame: The Catonsville Nine."