History professor Richard Polenberg was appalled by Cornell's diplomatic response to the 1969 takeover of Willard Straight Hall and the sit-in at Barton Hall that followed. The university had set a disastrous precedent, he and other faculty members argued, by allowing gun-toting Afro-American Society (AAS) members to emerge triumphantly from the Straight on April 20, 1969.

Yet now he is relieved that President James A. Perkins did not heed calls to bring in police to clear the buildings and arrest protesters.

"I did not think that concessions ought to be made to student radicals," he said, addressing 80 alumni at an April 17 event in Manhattan. "But I'm glad that my advice wasn't followed -- I think it would have been tragic."

The events of April 1969 continue to prompt debate among Cornellians and historians, but most of the alumni present viewed the takeover as a positive step in the civil rights movement, particularly as no one was seriously injured.

"There are mixed emotions in the Cornell community about this event, but it's a part of our history, it's who we are," said Gayraud Townsend '05, vice president of the Cornell Black Alumni Association, which sponsored the event with Cornell Mosaic. "We stand on the shoulders of giants."

In 1969, increased enrollment of black students, accelerated by the Committee on Special Educational Projects (COSEP) initiative signed by Perkins in 1964, had led to an influx of underprivileged youths coming from "communities that were on fire," explained Ed Whitfield '70, former AAS president.

"By that time, we were no longer the handpicked handful of people who would have been easily tolerated, that people could try to easily assimilate and acculturate into the climate of the campus," he said. "We were a contrary bunch of folk."

AAS students at the time agreed the university should quickly establish a black studies program and address their safety concerns, but not on how to achieve those goals. Even as they marched into the Straight on April 19, angered by a cross-burning outside the black women's cooperative the preceding morning, Zachary Carter '72, former AAS vice president, recalled that someone had asked, "Why are we doing this?"

Ultimately, they stuck together and defended their decision to bring guns into the Straight after a group of Delta Upsilon fraternity brothers tried to forcibly evict them. "There was a sincere belief that there was a threat to our safety," Carter said.

In the following years, black students and faculty still had security concerns, said James Turner, a professor who came to Cornell to direct the new Africana Studies and Research Center in 1969. Arson destroyed the university's first Africana center in 1970, he reminded the audience, and his own family required police protection for a time, including escorts for his children to school.

But unlike other universities caught up in the student uprisings of the era, Cornell managed to emerge with no deaths or serious injuries -- which Polenberg now credits to Perkins' refusal to allow police to storm campus buildings.

"Once you do that, you never know what's going to happen. People get killed; people get their heads broken open," Polenberg said. "It just wasn't worth that kind of thing."

Over the years, Polenberg said he gradually changed his mind as he realized that his academic freedom had remained intact, and the wave of student protests he had predicted never materialized.

"The events of 1969 did not lead to what I had feared they would lead to," Polenberg concluded. "I've come to believe that the university did the right thing under those circumstances, and I'm glad to say that my advice wasn't followed."

Nicole Neroulias '01 is a freelance writer in New York City.