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Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990, by Wayne Glasker. Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. 238 pp. $34.95, hardcover.
Reviewed by Wanda M. Brooks, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
As an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) during the late 1970s, Wayne Glasker found himself in the midst of a growing Black student population who actively sought to become a respected and valued subset of the campus community. Three decades later, Glasker, now an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, explores the cultural climate occurring at Penn during the 1960s through the late 1980s by chronicling its student activism movement. The author painstakingly constructs the narrative history of the book (which is organized chronologically according to decades) by analyzing primary documents and materials accessible through the University's archives, such as the student, faculty, and community newspapers, official administrative documents, memorandums, and policy statements along with committee resolutions, reports, and minutes.
The activism insightfully described by Glasker undergirds many of the difficult philosophical issues dealt with by the Black college students during those years (both intentionally and unintentionally). These philosophical issues include debates over the benefits and shortcomings of assimilation, separatism, and cultural pluralism. As explained...