The class of 1970 entered Cornell when there were rules to live by and women and men were treated as
different species. We graduated the year that anarchy reigned and the sexes began to demand the same
things. In the Fall of 1966, all women, except an experimental one hundred and fifty seniors, were required
to live in Cornell dorms, where curfews were enforced, skirts were required at dinner and women were
assured that wandering around the dorms in bras and panties was safe, as men were prohibited from
setting foot anywhere other than the downstairs lounges, except for three hours on two Sunday afternoons,
one in the Fall term and one in the Spring. Men could live off campus, after enduring a year in the cinder
block U Halls at the bottom of Libe Slope, in Collegetown, further out if they had a car, or in fraternities
which housed a large proportion of sophomores and less of each succeeding class. Fraternities had
Wednesday night date nights when the men cleaned up their acts, wore jackets and ties and invited women
to dinner. Not everyone had a dinner date as the ratio of men to women on campus was five to two and
imports, those women from Colleges in Elmira, Wells and Cortland who came to catch a Cornell guy,
weren’t usually interested in a one hour drive, for a one hour dinner, followed by an evening of studying at
Uris Library with only a thirty minute Ivy Room break at 9:00 PM. This was a time when it was okay for a
dean to tell a female architecture applicant that she couldn’t be a woman and an architect at the same time
and male professors freely expressed their belief that a woman at Cornell was taking up space that could
be put to good use by a man. A woman was, after all, just going to get married and stay home with the kids. Big weekends, Football, Fall, Spring and IFC (Inter-Fraternity Council), dominated our social lives and
fraternities dominated the big weekends. Formals, dinners, beer bashes, toga parties and Fiji Island
events were punctuated by the occasional panty raid on the girls dorms. The Waiters, an a cappella singing group, serenaded below the windows of the women’s dorms during
the few weeks of pleasant autumn weather before the snow set in. Curfews were kind of fun for some, a
defining edge to what seemed at the time a too unfettered existence away from parental authority, and a
red flag to others who squeezed out of basement windows in the middle of the night, or demanded extra
late time in labs and studios, or just never bothered checking in or out at all. There were rules, and printed
signs, about refraining from the public display of affection, PDAing, which were flaunted with as much flare
as we could muster. It wasn’t all ivory tower college fun; in our freshman year a dorm burned killing eight students and a
faculty member involved in an experimental program to grant PhD’s in six years to gifted students and we
all learned a lot about fire safety. We protested the Establishment and the Viet Nam War and found we
had to take a stand when the Straight was taken over at gun-point by black students in the Spring of 1969.
Guns on campus were new to us and everyone else in America and covered the front page of every major
newspaper. We responded by talking, meeting in Barton Hall for days, sitting on the floor and the bleachers
for hours, trying to come up with a plan to put our campus back into some kind of order where everyone felt
safe and had a voice that could be heard. We created the Constituent Assembly and elected members
from every part of the University. Classes and finals were canceled that year, grades were Satisfactory or
Unsatisfactory. The following spring, our senior year, Kent State won the front page sweepstake; students
there were shot to death protesting the US invasion of Cambodia and a pall fell over our ivy covered walls.
Somehow we had upped the ante; it could have been Cornellians shot by the local police. Classes were
canceled again and it seemed that there was nothing to depend on, no order to life. Most of us attended our graduation. Unlike the class of 1969 we had adjusted in some unconscious way
to chaos and sat dumbfounded at our graduation ceremonies as Dave Burack grabbed the speaker’s
podium in Barton Hall and began spouting some anti-war, anti-establishment something. The campus
police rushed up to the stage to take him away but Dave, a small guy, held on to the podium. The Campus
Police ended up carrying Dave and the podium off the stage until Morris Bishop, bearer of the Cornell
mace, disconnected Dave from the podium by whacking him over the head with the club we all thought
purely ceremonial. The Cornell Bear’s lacrosse stick was dented in the process and at the time we are
writing this, the dent is still there and the plan, according to Frank Rhodes at our twenty-fifth reunion, is to
leave it there always, as a memento and reminder that a mace, although mostly symbolic, can come in
handy when dealing with unruly students. |