Please join the Wagner College community on Saturday, April 10 at 4 p.m. in Spiro Hall, Rm. 2, for an alumni seminar. The program is entitled "Reflections on a Year of Activism, 1969 to 1970: The Seeds of Change." The seminar, to be moderated by trustee and former administrator Michael Kelly '66 M'72, will feature several alumni speakers who will provide first-hand accounts of the events of 40 years ago:
- Margaret Burnham, one of the attorneys hired by the NAACP to represent students charged in a discipline hearing after the occupation of Dean Harold Haas's office;
- Alonzo “Lonnie” Brandon '72, president of Black Concern, the African-American student association;
- Phillip Straniere '69 M'73, student activist, today a Staten Island civil court judge;
- Dr. Milfred Fierce '60 M'67, former trustee and a pioneer in the field of Africana Studies, and
- Col. Sharon Richie-Melvan '71, Ph.D. (USA, Ret.), Wagner College's first African-American homecoming queen, a White House Fellow, former recruiting chief for the U.S. Army Nursing Corps, and co-author of the new book, "Angel Walk: Nurses at War in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Forty years ago at Wagner College
Forty years ago, on March 11, 1970, a Staten Island Advance reporter wrote that the Wagner College “student body seems oblivious to political activism and satisfied with their environment.”
She could not have been more wrong.
Less than a month later, on April 2, two groups composed of students of color — Black Concern and Alma — petitioned the Wagner College administration for more black and Latino administrators, admissions counselors and faculty members, more scholarships for minority students, and more courses in minority studies. A response from the administration issued 4 days later was not considered adequate.
At 10 p.m. on Wednesday, April 15, about 90 Black Concern and Alma members climbed into Cunard Hall, then the college’s primary administration building, through an unlocked bathroom window, beginning a two-day occupation designed to ramp up the pressure on Wagner administrators to address student demands. A Thursday night offer by administrators to meet some, but not all, of the demands led to the end of the occupation Friday evening.
All appeared to be well — until Saturday.
On April 18 — College Day — the Admissions Office had invited scores of prospective students and their families to visit campus. Unable to rally participants for a student strike the day before in support of the Cunard Hall occupation, between 100 and 200 Wagner student dissidents marched through campus on Saturday, disrupting a music and drama program in the Main Hall auditorium and bringing College Day to an abrupt end.
Administrators were outraged.
On Monday, April 20, the Wagner administration issued a statement saying “it is now unable to project what it can do in the area of black and Puerto Rican demands.”
Three days later, a group of 27 Black Concern members, trying to force a meeting with Wagner College President Arthur O. Davidson to discuss their earlier demands, entered the office of Harold Haas, the dean of the college — and there they stayed for 7 hours, demanding that Haas arrange a meeting with Davidson. Dean of Students Bill Maher, claiming that Haas was being held hostage, expelled all 27 students involved.
An NAACP lawyer sought a federal court order to have the expulsion overturned, but the wheels of justice moved slowly — too slowly to have any impact on the events unfolding on Grymes Hill.
On May 13, about 120 white students began a new occupation of President Davidson’s office, demanding that the college reinstate the 27 expelled students. The occupation continued for a full week, breaking up only after the college board of trustees met on May 20 without taking action on the case of the 27 students.
The next day, the nine-member Faculty Council began a two-day meeting to consider an appeal of the expelled students, who claimed that Dean Haas had not been held hostage “and at no time did anyone prevent him from leaving.” The Faculty Council, however, didn’t buy their account; its only accommodation of the students, at Haas’s suggestion, was to commute their expulsions to suspensions for the Spring 1970 semester.
On May 31, most of the Sunday Daily News’ front page was devoted to a summary of the case. The headline read, “Wagner Penalties Called Unfair to Blacks.”
Ironically, over the following summer and fall, Wagner College fulfilled every one of the pledges it had made to the minority students to end the Cunard Hall occupation. Black administrators were hired; Admissions recruiting incorporated a new focus on bringing minority students to Grymes Hill; new African-American scholars joined the faculty, and new courses were added to the curriculum that examined the experience and history of minority communities in America.
Today, 40 years after the occupation of Dean Haas's office:
- 15 percent of Wagner College's undergraduate population consists of minority students;
- 13 percent of full-time faculty members come from minority communities, and
- the Wagner College curriculum includes a diversity requirement for every student seeking an undergraduate degree, incorporating 28 courses from a dozen academic disciplines.
