THOMAS SOWELL. His defining moment - which came from 2 core characteristics: the CAPACITY TO PERCEIVE and the COURAGE TO ACT on perceptions.

I love Thomas Sowell's work, did not know of this defining moment. For a long time, in fact, I only knew of him through quotes. I kept coming upon really good quotes from him. Actually, this is the first time I heard much about his life.

Two things jumped out at me. He SAW CLEARLY what was happening - the capitulation of educated academics to students with guns and with Politically Correct Hate Ideology. He also had another essential ingredient: the COURAGE TO ACT on his convictions. Those are two vital characteristics: the capacity to perceive and the courage to act on perceptions. INTEGRITY, rather than self-betrayal.

Here is Sowell’s defining moment:

Thomas Sowell was 38 years old when he watched men with PhDs surrender to teenagers carrying rifles. He resigned within months. He has been writing about what he learned that week for the rest of his life.

It was April 1969. Cornell University. A group of students from the Afro-American Society occupied the student union, Willard Straight Hall, and held it for more than a day. When they walked out, they were carrying rifles, shotguns, and bandoliers of ammunition across their chests. A photographer named Steve Starr captured the moment. The image won a Pulitzer Prize the following year. It is one of the most famous photographs in American academic history.

Thomas Sowell was on the Cornell faculty that semester. Associate Professor of Economics. One of the few black professors at the entire university. He watched what happened next from the inside.

The faculty initially voted against capitulating to the students’ demands. Then, under pressure, they met again, reversed themselves, and gave in. Men who had spent their entire careers writing about freedom of inquiry and the courage of the intellectual life folded within forty-eight hours when a group of nineteen-year-olds raised the temperature. Sowell saw it up close.

He resigned from Cornell within the year.

In his autobiography he describes Cornell as the moment that confirmed his deepest worry about the academic establishment. The people inside it would not defend it. They would not defend their stated values. They would not defend their own students. They would not even defend the truth. The credentialed men in the room were the prey. The students with the rifles were the predators. Sowell was the only person in the building who refused to play either role.

He just left.

He went on to spend the next half-century writing about institutional cowardice, the vision of the anointed, the intellectuals who never face consequences, and the slow surrender of the educated class to whoever was willing to raise their voice the loudest. All of it traces back to that week in Ithaca.

Here is the part nobody tells you.

Sowell could have stayed. He was a black professor at a moment when every Ivy League school was racing to keep its black faculty. He could have made the right speech, written the right op-ed, taken the right side, and risen with the moment. Instead, he walked out of a building that was no longer worth being inside of. And he chose to spend the rest of his life telling the truth about what was actually happening in there.

He is ninety-five years old now. He is still writing.

The men who folded that week are forgotten.

That is what one honest man with a long memory can do with a life.

~ Clay

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A big thank you to the friend who reposted this on Facebook, and to the Facebook algorithms which put this in my path, right under my post, the Free Reiner song from Axiom.

Reiner - another man with the capacity to perceive what was happening and the courage to co-create the Corona Committee to spread his knowledge. In Reiner’s case, also one lack of perception - the danger to him posed by Viviane Fischer, which did not related to her as a co-host of the Corona Committee, but to a larger danger, of her betrayal of him.

“They” work with fear, divisiveness, rage, terror (fear to the nth power), addiction. “They” work on getting people worked up, glued to the latest shiny object news story, stuck, enthralled.

How to keep out? How to pull out? How to strengthen being on a life-affirming path? How to strengthen our faith in our perceptions and courage to act on them?

One tool is something I’ve heard of, here and there: heart mind coherence. Instead of thinking and feeling, brain and heart, being separate, we create a coheerence between the two, generally starting from the heart but definitely using our brain as well..

A general “tool” is to be as fully flourishing as possible, as fully developed as possible - perceiving as clearly as possible, feeling our feelings as much as possible, thinking as well as possible, connecting with like-minded others as much as possible, also doing whatever gives us pleasure as much as possible, and on.

_______________________

And then, some final words. I have always liked reading and hearing and, in general, knowing about people like Thomas Sowell. My favorite stories in childhood were about such people - you could call them heroes and heroines. Some were “real people” (as if some people were unreal), some were fictional.

Later on, when I did my MA, I could not find anything that pulled me enough until I came upon the writings of Nellie L. McClung, novelist and a huge activist for women’s rights. She wrote best-sellers and from early on, cared about women’s rights. Cared in general. A warm and passionate woman, thoughtful and creative. Also wife and mother of five children. Another person with integrity.

All the best to all of us, in everything,

Elsa

Posted May 28, 2026