In Upending the Ivory Tower, Stefan Bradley fills a surprising gap in the literature on black students in the Ivy League. For all that has been written on race and the Ivy League, until now the field lacked a comprehensive history of black student activism in those eight prestigious institutions during the 1960s and 1970s. Bradley's work is a welcome addition, revealing black students’ difficult struggle to combat entrenched racism.
Bradley chooses a difficult organizational method. After a chapter on black students’ experience at the Ivies from the early twentieth century to World War II, each subsequent chapter focuses on activism at a different Ivy League institution. To make the book feel less like a set of case studies that tell the same story in a different place, he centers each chapter on one of four battles: reforming admissions policies, avoiding assimilation, controlling spaces around campus, and creating black studies.
The book's most valuable insights, though, do not come from learning the origins of affirmative action at Brown University or the birth of black studies at Harvard University. The strength of the book is Bradley's engaging analysis of the activist experience. For example, he argues that black students faced “double marginalization.” The privileged position of attending an Ivy League school could make black students feel like outsiders in their home communities. At the same time, their white peers on campus never fully accepted them. As a result, Bradley shows that black students in the Ivy League experienced a unique sense of guilt and obligation. Student activists felt the constant burden of proving that their privilege did not undermine what they perceived as their “authentic blackness.”
Bradley highlights the diverse strategies that black students utilized to win concessions. But one thing is clear: fear was a powerful motivator. When white administrators and faculty feared protest tactics, black students often won significant concessions. That fear sometimes resulted in comical reactions before institutional leaders agreed to initiate reform. For example, Harvard faculty members took turns guarding the library because they believed black students might destroy valuable artwork. Fear also led to change in unexpected places. Bradley's chapter on Dartmouth College, for example, reveals that disruptive black protest had far-reaching consequences. Due in part to its small black student population and its rural location, Dartmouth wasn't a hotbed for black protest. And yet Dartmouth's campus leaders initiated campus reform that rivaled other Ivy League institutions that were experiencing disruptive protests on campus. Dartmouth officials’ fear that black students would wage similar demonstrations led to preemptive reform. As a result, black students successfully made demands on Dartmouth's leadership without strikes or taking over buildings. It is unlikely that Dartmouth officials would have been so willing to negotiate without Cornell's Afro-American Association occupying Willard Straight Hall with guns or other tactics at Ivy institutions that led to confrontations between students and the police.
Another important theme is the strength black student activists drew from local black communities and, in turn, the ways in which local black communities benefited from student activists. Given Bradley's excellent first book, Harlem vs. Columbia University (2009), it is no surprise that Bradley's coverage of university expansion and community displacement is especially strong. In Upending the Ivory Tower, he offers two chapters that provide a fine-tuned analysis of how Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania tried to control the land around campus and push black community members out. These chapters are especially good at showing that as black enrollment rose at Columbia and Penn in the 1960s, black students found themselves living in black communities that had been fighting against institutional racism for decades. Students at those two universities played important roles in giving black community members a voice in future land use around campus walls. At the same time, local black communities provided important resources to black student activists working to make the campus more inclusive for current and future students. For example, black student activists at Brown depended on a local black church for temporary housing and organizing space during a demonstration.
While this book will clearly be useful for scholars pursuing research, it will be especially useful for introductory undergraduate courses on race and ethnicity and the Black Freedom Movement—courses that many students come to with preconceived ideas about the irrationality of black power. Bradley, more than most, goes out of his way to explain why student activists utilized the core ideas of black power. In painstaking detail, he uncovers the campus environment black students struggled within and the intellectual choices that were available. In accessible language, Bradley effectively explains the rationality of black power for student activists in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Upending the Ivory Tower is a great achievement that will be of great use for researchers and teachers for years to come. As we move forward as a field, I hope that more scholars will build on Bradley's work and think as much about the black campus movement's failures as its successes in the Ivy League. Bradley ends his work in the mid-1970s as black student activists began to lose their organizing power on campus. The book correctly highlights the important concessions activists won. But the mid-1970s ushered in a period of racial retrenchment in the Ivy League that needs attention. Bradley's work offers the foundation for any scholar who wants to take on the story of that retrenchment.
