Perspective: Trailblazers at Princeton together again at Penn

Pulling up a chair at one of the long dining-room tables, Robert Engs, Princeton class of '65, sat down to enjoy a meal with some of his fellow undergrads. When the food came out, Engs recalls that Casper Ewing III, seated across from him, remarked, "Let's see what the niggers in the kitchen prepared for us today."

Engs, now a History professor at Penn, was the only black student in his class.

"The next thing I remember, I leaped across the table, I had my hands around Casper's neck, and my buddies were pulling me back," he said.

"Probably worst of the whole thing was that, after I had let go of him and I was back seated, steam coming out of my ears, he apologized. He says, 'I'm sorry, I didn't see you there.'"

As difficult a time as Engs had with his classmates, he got along extremely well with his more liberal-minded professors. So well, that when Engs was working on-campus in the summer of 1966, a young new addition to the faculty named Sheldon Hackney invited him to his house for dinner.

"It was kind of like he treated me like a younger colleague and an interesting person," Engs said. "I thought he was fascinating."

Fifteen years later, the two would reunite at Penn, Hackney as president and Engs as a History professor. Together, they worked toward drastically improving Penn's racial climate.

But Penn's progress had its roots in Princeton.

"While he was president, we worked closely together," Engs said, "but it was on the basis of that earlier friendship and confidence in each other."

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A senior in high school, Engs visited Princeton for the first time on a magnificent early spring day in 1961. The campus's trademark magnolias gleamed in the sun, and Engs was overwhelmed by the campus's beauty.

"I hadn't yet read This Side of Paradise, but it really did seem like that," he said. "They really did a great job of showing me around and everything. Kept telling me how important it would be if I came."

Engs accepted, but he had no idea he'd be the only black student to do so. He got an inkling when he was assigned a single dorm room - the housing form had said there was no point in even requesting one, because they were generally reserved for seniors - but only gradually realized his isolation once he arrived on campus.

The environment quickly became oppressive, as the little things, like the playing of "Dixie" at the halftime of basketball games, compounded with the big things.

Engs recalls walking out of his American Literature course when the lecture on Southern humor "essentially became a string of nigger jokes." When segregationist Mississippi governor Ross Barnett came to speak on campus, Engs says he was locked in his dorm room "for his own protection." (He snuck out his window to attend the speech anyway.) Those, he says, are only a few of the memories he hasn't repressed.

"There was a sense of 'you don't belong here'" for African Americans, said Robert Durkee, a 1969 Princeton graduate who currently serves as vice president and secretary of the school.

Despite his social problems, Engs excelled academically. He also, by necessity, became highly political.

One of his most memorable coups came when he and his fellow black students packed a segregationist-student-group meeting with sympathetic white classmates.

Elections were being held for the group's vice presidency, and, to the mortification of the president, the conspirators nominated Engs for the post and easily voted him in.

He proceeded, of course, to make a mockery of the whole affair.

"It ultimately ended up with us having the president over to our club for lunch to talk about the whole business," Engs said.

Durkee says students like Engs were instrumental in Princeton's evolution. He identifies a turning point in 1968, when black students successfully lobbied the school's president to cancel classes for a day of reflection after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death. It represented a new sense of empowerment for black students on campus, he said.

"What I just described in 1968, probably couldn't have happened in earlier years," he said. "But we wouldn't have been where we were in 1968 if there hadn't been students in earlier classes who had paved the way. That's where Bob Engs came in."

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Engs's other major contribution to racial advancement at Princeton was his role in the Princeton Summer Cooperative Program. It was also how he first came in contact with Hackney.

The PSCP was an initiative that brought local underprivileged high-school students on campus for summer courses taught largely by Princeton professors.

Starting as student director of the program in 1965, Engs stayed on after his graduation to serve as the PSCP's only full-time employee. He says he essentially ran the school, doing everything from recruiting students to having water fights. Hackney, meanwhile, taught in the program.

They were both thrilled by the progress they saw in the students - most of whom were black - and Engs even calls the PSCP one of the most rewarding things he's ever done. It also provided him an opportunity to get to know Hackney.

"We had a lot in common," Hackney said, "so we saw each other outside of formal settings."

Engs went to his house two or three times for dinner that summer, where they discussed current events, Princeton affairs, the PSCP and the civil-rights movement in general.

Hackney later went on to serve as director of the PSCP, which according to Engs, was hardly a conventional career move for an up-and-coming junior professor.

"People who taught in the Princeton Cooperative Program were sometimes looked on by their fellow colleagues as bleeding-heart liberals," he said. "They should be out researching their next article, not wasting their time with these urchins from the city. And it really was this class and racial thing."

The PSCP wasn't Hackney's only non-conventional career move. A noted sympathizer with the Civil Rights Movement, he chaired the committee that recommended establishing the Afro-American studies program.

"I sort of got that through the faculty," he said. "Getting agreement on that and designing it, I was very pleased."

Hackney also served for a year as the program's acting chairman while he looked for a permanent chairman.

Engs said Hackney's choices were "unorthodox and, in some senses, career-wise, dangerous."

"Those [decisions] weren't the established track for upward mobility at Princeton."

Nevertheless, one night in 1972 after attending a Princeton basketball game (where "Dixie," no doubt was played at half time) with President-elect William Bowen, he walked back with Bowen to his office.

There, Bowen offered Hackney the post of provost.

The decision was surprising, and the appointment of Hackney - who was, in his words, seen as a "member of the left-wing" - represented a turning tide at the school.

"Princeton was at that point in the middle of this evolution to co-education," Durkee said. "Becoming fully coeducational, becoming fully diverse, part of the message was that those trends were only going to accelerate, and the leadership of the institution was going to consist of people who were committed to those changes."

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When Hackney arrived at Penn in 1981 after five years as president of Tulane University, Engs was one of the first to invite him over to his house for dinner.

The two had not kept in touch very much after Engs left Princeton to study at Yale University, but they had remained cordial.

Engs originally came to Penn in 1972 because he had previously served as a consultant on the University's establishment of an African American studies department, as well as of DuBois College House.

Though he said the racial situation at Penn was vastly different than at Princeton, Engs believes Hackney's arrival brought on a period of accelerated progress, especially in terms of recruiting black faculty and further diversifying the student body.

"It seemed to go much more smoothly once President Hackney and Provost [Thomas] Erlich arrived," he said. "There wasn't as much resistance, and I think there was less resentment. . Certain issues like whether or not there should be a black resource center [that] had been going on for like five years got settled very smoothly."

Hackney - who is also now a Penn History professor - entrusted Engs with helping to strengthen programs like African American studies and the African American resource center, as well as dealing with various other black student affairs.

"The Hackney administration advanced race relations at the University of Pennsylvania in a way that no other presidential administration has done either before or since," said Mark Frazier Lloyd, director of the Penn archives.

"We were doing things at a time of great transition, both in the country and in higher education," Engs said. "When we started out, basically, elite education in America was all white. During the years that we were both most involved in university life, those things changed."

Over the course of nearly 50 years, then, the two colleagues have helped transform the culture of not one, but two Ivy League universities. Most of the differences are obvious, but some are less so.

"I asked somebody," Engs said, "and, apparently, they don't play 'Dixie' at halftime of basketball games anymore."

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