Student Radicals Unite on Anti-War Messages

During this era, Dancis and other students – many of them members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) – helped put Ithaca on the map alongside Berkeley and Ann Arbor as the epicenters of student opposition to the war.

"I probably helped turn the heat up, but I certainly didn't start things," said Dancis, who came to campus as a freshman in the fall of 1965. Earlier that spring, a student-faculty ad hoc committee on Vietnam had been formed, busloads of Cornellians and community members attended anti-war rallies in Washington, D.C. and a May teach-in brought more than 2,000 people to Bailey Hall.

When Dancis arrived, he helped to form a Cornell chapter of SDS that first fall and took part in protests about the requirement that universities release class rankings to draft boards and administer selective service exams that could result in revoked student deferments. As a sophomore, Dancis gained prominence as the first Cornell student to destroy his draft card.

"I felt I couldn't accept my student deferment," Dancis said. "I was a middle class kid who was expected to go to college. My parents could afford to send me. What about all of those kids who weren't in my situation?"

But his draft card "was burning a hole in my pocket," he said of the Dec. 14, 1966 event in front of Olin Hall, where he destroyed his draft card while university administrators sat inside debating Cornell's selective service policies. Dancis eventually dropped out of Cornell to lead draft resistance movements in both Ithaca and New York City

"My goal was to build a movement large enough, with so many men resisting the draft that we would fill the courts and the jails and the U.S. Army would have a hard time finding enough men to go to Vietnam," he said. But he found that many of the resisters weren't prosecuted – only two of the 50 + draft resisters in Ithaca ever spent time in jail, he said. Dancis spent 19 months in federal prison.

Still, Dancis said Cornell's movement had an impact on the country, with anti-war candidates winning national seats, public opinion polls swaying against the war and politicians eventually voting to stop funding the South Vietnamese. Dancis ended up with a bachelor's from the University of California, Santa Cruz, a master's in American history from Stanford University and a career in journalism.

Activism on Many Fronts

"I didn't consider myself a very political person at that time," said Frank Dawson, who arrived in Ithaca as a freshman in the fall of 1968 from New York City. "Activism wasn't even on my radar."

But the Afro-American Society had sent him a letter the summer before his freshman year. Dawson learned more about campus rights issues and became involved. "I didn't want to go to 'Nam' and I knew that many of my friends back in the projects were going," he said. "It was unfair that my friends were being drafted and sent away, but many things were also unfair at Cornell."

Dawson took part in every protest set up by the Afro-American Society.

"I was very impressed by the black upperclassmen that had experience dealing with this environment," he said. "They knew what needed to change, and they needed the brash incoming freshmen to make it happen."

But Dawson said for students like him – first generation college kids – there was always a risk in getting involved. You could lose a future you'd worked so hard to secure if you got arrested or kicked out of school.

Dawson, who became a media executive at CBS and Universal, and then a professor of communication and media studies at Santa Monica College, has captured this era at Cornell and other universities in a new documentary, a part of which will be shown during the Vietnam event on campus.

"Agents of Change: Black Students and the Transformation of the American University" was co-produced by Abby Ginzberg '71 and Dawson and tells the story of the Willard Straight takeover and similar events at campuses across the country.

"One of the greatest things about being at Cornell at that time was what happened outside of the classroom," Dawson said. "The discussions, dialogues and debates that went on forged in a me a focused lens through which I've considered everything for the rest of my life."

The feeling is mutual among his classmates, Dawson said. "People have gone into various careers –doctors, lawyers, poets, educators – but everyone was really shaped in some way by their involvement on campus at that time."

What Students Are Doing Today

Daniel Marshall '15, a resident of Telluride House and an assistant to Kramnick in organizing the project, said his interest in this time period began in 2012 when he read "Cornell '69" by Donald S. Downs about the Willard Straight Takeover.

Through the book, he was drawn to the story of the Barton Hall Community, "the occupation of Barton Hall by thousands of students and faculty who were acting in support of the Afro-American Society's demands from within the Straight," he said. "The occupation turned into a mass democratic assembly, passing resolutions and making decisions about what actions to take."

The description reminded Marshall of his own experience participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement. "The descriptions of the Barton Hall Community captured my imagination precisely because they articulated my experience of possibility, solidarity, and rupture."

Marshall said he's not a fan of discussing issues in terms of a "generation," but does think that students (as well as working-class people, people who are unemployed, immigrants and indigenous communities) are coalescing around issues they feel strongly about, in ways similar to activists of the 1960s.

Kramnick notes that Marshall is an exception. "Most students at Cornell are generally apolitical," Kramnick said. "Meeting with these 60s activists will make it clear to them that political commitment is not incompatible with a successful career, that, in fact, it can help shape and ground that career."

Marshall is a history major whose honors thesis will focus on the memory of Cornell 1969. "It's interesting because you can see the traditional pattern of youth political engagement re-emerging," he said. "You have horrific injustices going on all over the world, and when young people measure that suffering against the complicity of their own institutions, it's only a matter of time before they try to change those institutions."

He hopes alumni returning for the November event can speak about the conditions that caused them to get involved and to stay involved.