The Politics of Presidential Appointment. Sheldon Hackney

New York where we were to attend a large dinner party that evening that was part of the fund-raising campaign. The easy part of getting to Washington was over; the nightmare would soon begin.

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       The Nightmare Begins

      The nightmare began the following Thursday morning, April 15, 1993. A number of black students, leaving angry notes signed “The Black Community,” took 14,000 copies of the DP out of their free distribution racks around campus. Black students, staff, and faculty had been angry with the DP for some time, accusing it of being insensitive and unbalanced in its coverage of the black community at Penn. I was not aware of it at the time, but confiscating the student newspaper had become a frequently used tactic around the country by groups with a grievance.

      It was not even an entirely new phenomenon at Penn. In 1987, someone in the Wharton School administration absconded with all of the DPs in the distribution racks in Steinberg-Dietrich, the main Wharton building. An important group of alumni was visiting Wharton that particular day, and the DP in its great tradition of adversarial journalism had prominently featured on the front page a scandal involving a Wharton faculty member. On that occasion, I issued a stern warning that interfering with freedom of the press would not be tolerated. On another occasion, after the DP had turned its special reunion edition into a roundup of the year’s most negative stories, the chairman of the trustees had suggested to the student editor, whom he encountered among the reunion tents, that the editor could stuff the paper into one of his bodily orifices. It was not dignified, but I loved him for it.

      By 1993, I had fought my own way to peace of mind about the DP, a tough struggle given the fact that the editor who assumed office soon after I arrived announced that the DP was the only moral voice at Penn and that it would tirelessly expose the immorality of the administration. Under his editorship and several that followed, the DP became very good at ferreting out scandal in the administration—whether scandal existed or not. Whenever I chided DP editors about getting some story wrong, they would reply that the paper regularly won top honors among college newspapers nationally. I pointed out that the judges were rewarding them for producing a well-written and interesting paper, but the judges had no idea whether the information in the paper was true or not. Nevertheless, over the years I discovered that the negative and sensationalist bent of the DP did not affect my standing with students or hinder the progress the University was making. Students seemed able to apply their own correctives to the paper’s bias. I was about to learn, however, that the outside world did not have the same sort of filtering mechanism.

      So, when each year’s front-page announcement of the tuition increase was accompanied by a photograph of me from the DP’s archive smiling broadly as if I were enjoying gouging the students and their families, I simply thought of myself as being in on the joke. I tried to get my revenge in satirical speeches that the editors allowed me to give to the annual DP banquet in January. I remember in particular a skit in which I intoned a laudatory speech about the DP in my most florid presidential rhetoric, while the amplified off-stage voice of my assistant, Tony Marx, translated the pablum phrases into the insulting subtext. Despite the jousting, which I secretly enjoyed, I noticed that an unusual number of DP editors took my seminar on the history of the 1960s. When they weren’t beating up on me, they were terrific young folks.

      A more serious problem was that there had never been many black student reporters or writers on the DP. Some slight progress had been made from time to time, but not sustained. There were no black reporters or editors in 1992 or 1993, but there was a black columnist, Maceo Grant, who wrote regularly about the lack of respect black students felt they received at Penn. The provost and I had encouraged the editors during our informal conversations with them over the years to do something about this situation, and we had advised them that simply waiting for black students to respond to the general invitation to students to try out for staff positions would probably not be enough. Many black students felt like intruders at Penn—outsiders—and they also thought of the DP as belonging to an in-group of which they were not a part. It was not likely that they would brave the imaginary barrier in large numbers without specific and personal efforts to bring them in.

      It is also true that nothing appeared on the crisis calendar during my years as president of Penn more often than matters of race and cultural diversity, and I don’t think Penn was peculiar in that regard. One of the lessons of the 1960s is that the stresses and strains of the broader society are going to show up more quickly on college campuses than elsewhere. In my more optimistic moments, I consoled myself with the thought that we were having so much trouble because we had been so successful. We had created a very diverse campus community, so we were working on a very tough problem that the broader society had not yet begun to face in a serious way. That is ironic but true.

      I remember a conversation I had with a Penn alumnus in San Francisco who I hoped would become a major donor. Finally, he said that he did not want to make a major gift to Penn because he had experienced a lot of anti-Semitism when he was there in the 1930s. Instead, he was thinking about making a gift to Harvard. I wanted to say, but didn’t, that the reason he had experienced anti-Semitism at Penn in the 1930s and not at Harvard was that Penn had admitted him while Harvard had a quota that kept him out. Indeed, one of the things Penn can be proud of is that it never had a Jewish quota, as other elite eastern universities did in the first half of the twentieth century. That is the origin of the strong Jewish presence that is a characteristic of Penn.

      Still raw in contemporary Penn memory were the wounds inflicted by the controversial visit of Minister Louis Farrakhan to speak on the Penn campus on April 13, 1988. The visit was the masterwork of Conrad Tillard, an especially dynamic and articulate black student leader, who is now Conrad X, one of Minister Farrakhan’s lieutenants in New York. At Penn, he dedicated himself to bringing Minister Farrakhan to campus to speak. The invitation from the Black Student League (BSL) that he engineered was as legitimate as the countless other invitations to outside speakers from Penn organizations that the University accommodates on a regular basis. The BSL had a right to invite him, and the University had an obligation to make it possible for him to be heard. There were several worrisome aspects, however.

      One problem was that Farrakhan would attract a large number of people from off-campus: friends, enemies, and the curious. We worried particularly about a confrontation between the Jewish Defense League and the Fruit of Islam. The potential for violence was huge. A bigger problem was presented, however, when we learned that the Nation of Islam, Minister Farrakhan’s organization, wanted to dictate the security arrangements, and in particular insisted on searching everyone who came into the auditorium. That required an extended public discussion on campus that I thought was very healthy. An informed and public decision to use metal detectors at the entrances to Irvine Auditorium made it less likely that the devices would spark hostile reaction or chill debate. We eventually worked out an understanding about security that satisfied the Nation of Islam and that also left us in control of the situation.

      What was not avoidable was the animosity stimulated between Jewish students and black students. There was much discussion in the DP, and there were even meetings between black student leaders and students from Hillel, where the opposition to Farrakhan was being organized. The most disturbing thing to me, as I told the New York Times at the time, was that white students “really do have a hard time understanding how deeply offended and angry black students get when they run into racial stereotypes and insensitive remarks on campus. That is what I hear from my students and faculty all the time.” That, of course, is why someone like Minister Farrakhan appealed to them.

      “At the same time,” I said, “I think black students just don’t understand why Minister Farrakhan is so incredibly offensive to whites and to Jewish students in particular.”[1] The run-up to the speech was tense.

      One day Conrad Tillard burst into my office (with a DP reporter in tow) and denounced the anti-Farrakhan demonstrators who were out in front of College Hall and elsewhere on campus. He demanded that I have them dispersed. I replied that he would probably not want to be part of a university in which the president had the power