This is a great account of the struggle between the town of Skokie, Illinois and the Nazis whom the town wanted to prevent from holding a rally. It gives an inside look at all the major (and some minor) players in this dramatic sequence of events and the conflicts that many of them faced. The really great thing about this book, though, is that it's not the standard ACLU dogma of "we have to protect Nazis or the 1st Amendment is meaningless." Downs shows that there are genuine issues working against unfettered free speech. Interestingly enough, though, when I finished the book, I had come to feel more strongly than I did when I started that the town was wrong. Approach this book with an open mind and you may be surprised how you feel at the end.

The reason I came to Cornell was because not only was it prestigious, but also large enough to be truly diverse. It has always been political, but political in both directions. In the Straight, stacks of the ultra-liberal "Progressive" sit next to the reactionary "Review". But what I think bears remembering is that we didn't lose anything by becoming "politically correct". We are free to abhorr violence no matter what our political leaning, but to question the human worth of others is never acceptable.

I was a junior at Cornell in April, 1969, and only after having read this book did I really understand what events happened that weekend. I'm not sure I understand even now what the significance of those events has been, but this book has put my own history in perspective for me, along with Cornell's.

Cornell campus events in April 1969 ran beyond the power of university administrators to manage them. The world witnessed the decline of docile, gentle student behavior, managed by old white men in tweed coats. Students found new, forceful ways to express themselves, and opened an era of campus struggles.

Downs demonstrates that students know enough to know they don't want to learn some of the things that there teachers are teaching, yet they are also young and naive enough to stumble about agressively and sometimes irrationally for a solution. And the senior professors, save a few stalwarts, had no capacity to deal with this new breed of students.

Based on Cornell's desire to "do good", to promote social justice, to provide meaningful educational opportunities, and to add diversity (before there was such a common, abused term on American campuses), the Trustees approved a plan to enroll disenfranchised students from urban areas at their bucolic campus. Cornell was Ivy League, yes, but more rural than sophisticated, more agricultural than urbane. Cornell was to provide a strange environment for a noble experiment. Did it work? After the takeover of the administration building by armed students, most Americans never looked at university education the same way again.

Meticulous archival research of previously unsurfaced or unpublished records brings life and details to a college's uncomfortable history.