Consequences > Cox Commission
The Cox Commission Report: Crisis at Columbia. Report of the Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia in April and May 1968 (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1968)
Organized at the request of the Executive Committee of the Faculty, the Cox Commission was given the mandate to establish a chronology of events leading up to and including the Columbia crisis, and to inquire into the underlying causes of those events. The Commission held twenty-one days of hearings during May 1968, heard testimony from seventy-nine witnesses, and compiled 3,790 pages of transcript. The report, published in a paperback edition on September 26, 1968, stressed the lack of effective channels of communication between administration, faculty, and students, and endorsed implicitly the Executive Committee's idea for a representative University Senate.
The commission's membership included: Archibald Cox, chairman, Professor of Law, Harvard University; Anthony Amsterdam, Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Dana Farnsworth, Director of University Health Service, Harvard University; Honorable Simon Rifkind, former Judge, Southern District Court; and Hylan Lewis, Professor of Sociology, Brooklyn College.