Perkins JamesAlfred

American academic administrator who served as the seventh president of Cornell University from 4 October 1963 until his resignation on 31 May 1969 in the wake of the occupation of Willard Straight Hall by armed African American students. In 1995 Thomas W. Jones, a trustee of the university who had been a leader of the building occupation, established the James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony in his name. Perkins publications include The University in Transition (1966), a series of three lectures in which he argued that a university must balance its three missions of research, teaching, and public service. He died on 19 August 1998, aged 86, in Burlington, Vermont, of complications after a fall while in the Adirondacks. Link to Wikipedia biography Read less