# Thomas W. Jones — "Walter Berns is a racist" > [!quote] "Walter Berns is a racist." > — Thomas W. Jones, radio broadcast over WHCU during the Willard Straight Hall occupation, April 19, 1969 ## Context Spoken by Afro-American Society leader [[Thomas W. Jones]] over Cornell's WHCU radio during the [[Willard Straight Hall Takeover]], the line was part of an on-air enumeration of faculty members who had opposed the protesters' demands. [[Walter Berns]] — a popular government professor and constitutional scholar — had been among the small cohort of professors (alongside [[Allan Bloom]]) arguing for the primacy of the liberal arts and "academic freedom" to resist the changes pushed by President James A. Perkins. Named publicly and subjected to personal threats, Berns resigned from Cornell in the aftermath and left for the University of Toronto. ## Why this matters This is the receipt most often cited on the right to dramatize the personal cost of campus radicalism to dissenting faculty — a professor branded a racist on the air and driven from his job for defending the traditional university. Berns's departure, with that of Bloom and others, became a founding grievance of the neoconservative critique of the academy (see [[Neoconservatism]]), and the broadcast is a fixture in conservative retellings of "the day Cornell died." The quote pairs naturally with [[The Closing of the American Mind]], which treats the Cornell capitulation as emblematic of the academy's collapse. ## Verification - **Source:** Donald Alexander Downs, *Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University* (Cornell University Press, 1999), the standard scholarly account; reported in the [Walter Berns — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Berns) entry. - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed; the specific wording is preserved through Downs's history rather than a surviving audio recording. ## Related - [[Willard Straight Hall Takeover]] — the event at which the line was broadcast. - [[The Closing of the American Mind]] — Bloom's book treating the same episode as a turning point.