Thomas Sowell was a professor of economics at Cornell from 1965 to 1969. He left the Ivy League university after becoming deeply frustrated with the administrators. In 1968, while running a summer program for black students, Sowell tried to remove a disruptive student who was not meeting the program’s standards. According to Sowell, administrators overruled him because the student was black. Sowell’s frustration with the Cornell administration culminated in April 1969, when armed black students took over Willard Straight Hall for 36 hours and the university ultimately granted essentially all of the militants’ key demands. In his essay “The Day Cornell Died,” Sowell called the university’s response a “capitulation.” The militants had forcibly evicted visiting parents from Willard Straight Hall, phoned death threats to professors’ homes, and later fired shots into another campus building. Cornell nevertheless agreed not to bring civil or criminal charges or impose university punishment for the armed takeover, reversed earlier disciplinary reprimands against some of the militants, and assumed responsibility for all damage to the occupied building.