Dave Ross: University president’s resignation all too familiar
Nov 10, 2015, 5:14 AM | Updated: 6:27 am
Students cheer while listening to members of the black student protest group Concerned Student 1950 speak following the announcement that University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe would resign Monday at the university in Columbia, Mo. Wolfe resigned Monday with the football team and others on campus in open revolt over his handling of racial tensions at the school. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
(AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
This sounds very familiar.
Under pressure from students who didn’t think he’d done enough to stop a series of racist insults on the campus, Tim Wolfe resigned as President of the University of Missouri.
For me, seeing this was like falling into a time warp.
I remember in April of 1969, right before I started my freshman year at Cornell, a group of black protesters took over the student union, in response to a cross burning the previous day.
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Police were called in from across New York State and in response, the students decided to arm themselves. It was a catastrophe in the making. Fortunately, cooler heads negotiated a truce, and the occupiers walked out carrying their rifles. They were not punished.
The University President, James Perkins, had actually started the first significant affirmative action program for black students six years earlier. He’d even chaired the United Negro College Fund.
But, like Tim Wolfe, what he hadn’t done was to get the message to whoever burned that cross that you just don’t do that stuff. And so, like Tim Wolfe, he resigned.
What I didn’t realize — until I looked it up — was that a remarkable thing happened years later.
One of the leaders of the ’69 takeover, Thomas Wade Jones, went on to become an investment banker, ultimately running Global Investment for Citigroup. And in 1995, he established the James A. Perkins prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony. It was named after the President whose resignation he had helped to bring about.
So conflict can work, provided both sides know when to pull back.
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