A Prospectus

The Legacy of Activism at Cornell will be an online archive housed in the Cornell University Library and accessible to the Cornell community and the public in large part through the DSpace Open Access Repository, CUL's venture in online curation and Internet-first publishing . At present, the project consists of a set of categories for organizing major eras and phases of activism at Cornell and a 60-page narrative written by Paul Sawyer and Brian Eden to accompany a photo exhibit presented in Willard Straight Library in April 2006. As the archive materializes, external web interfaces may be added to organize and thematize these materials. The accompanying table of contents of the narrative suggest the projectt's scope.

Background: The project grew out of a photo exhibition, set up in the Willard Straight Library in April 2006, with an accompanying catalogue that functioned as a preliminary, rough sketch of the history of activism as a field of study. The exhibit ran concurrently with a film showing, a visit by Father Daniel Berrigan, and a conference on the Divestment Movement of the 1980s. Our aim was to capture for contemporary audiences some of the very rich history of political engagement on this campus since the 1950s, a narrative typically omitted from official university histories and often overshadowed by the institutional tendency to single out the Straight takeover of 1969 as the one significant moment in Cornell's activist history. Our informal surveys confirmed that even such massive events as the four- year Divestment Movement are unfamiliar to contemporary undergraduates. In our research we were not surprised to learn of the wealth of material on the Straight takeover, much of it housed in the Rare Books and Manuscript Collection of the library; we were surprised to learn of the variety and volume and imaginativeness of extra-curricular political activities on this campus.

Scope: In defining the subject, we found that the University's (equivocal) resistance to the McCarthyite^? inquisition of the 1950s was the logical place to start. We also realized that the word "activism" cann't be limited only to massive, public confrontations--against American foreign policy or against a Cornell administrative policy. Activism can be and typically is quiet, painstaking, laborious, and long-term; it includes agreements peacefully arrived at, programs established, position papers written and revised. It includes the struggle over Redbud Woods but also the Kyoto Now! agreements; the occupation of Carpenter Hall in the 1970s but also the extensive community outreach programs of the 1960s and the founding of the Womenn's Studies Program. We had no wish to subsume the archive under a set of opinions; that's the work of scholars and readers. This is not, in other words, an ideological project except indirectly--insofar as we believe activism is an important part of an undergraduatee's moral and political education and insofar as we recognize that activist events usually (but not always) spring from movements associated with the left. The archive certainly contains space for actions and publications by conservative students and faculty.

Aims: As suggested above, our primary aim is the preservation of memory. When completed, the archive should consist of personal papers, oral interview, publications, memoes and fliers, newspaper articles, photographs, and other materials. These materials should produce and ultimately naturalize a conception of a tradition at Cornell that is as important as any exclusively scholarly legacy, since activism is among other things a form of intellectual debate--a way of thinking, arguing, and imagining that complements the work done in classrooms and laboratories. Ideally, the archive will serve as a source through which generations of activists can learn from their predecessors. Students today should realize that if they fail to participate in this tradition, they will have missed out on an opportunity Cornell richly provides.

To achieve this aim, the archive also needs to be large and comprehensive enough to function as a research source. It should be useful to scholars and available to teachers assigning research projects. It will include some materials already housed in the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections and so in that sense will supplement those collections. It should also be very easy to access, since we plan a clear and full cross-referencing system. (Library materials are often difficult to locate under the rubric "activism" or indeed under any single rubric.)

Needs and next steps: At present no materials have been put online, though we have some materials (the organizing narrative and a set of interviews amounting to an oral history of the Redbud Woods conflict) in preparation. We need funding to digitize materials accessible to us, including library resources and to hire research assistants to collect, identify, and catalog materials to enter the archive. We also need the participation of current and previous Cornell activists to canvas for and in some cases create materials pertaining to the various themes in the collection. We neeed, too, to form a small advisory body of faculty, students and former students, and people with curatorial and technical expertise in preparing these materials for distribution.

-- StuartDavis