In December 1968, Robert Smith, the recently fired president of San Francisco State, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that higher education “is at a serious and crucial turning-point.” Higher education still largely refused to reconstitute itself. The increased demands issued after King’s death had been addressed only partially on some campuses and hardly at all on others. Consequently, even though the San Francisco State strike waned in January 1969, the movement as a whole surged, beginning its climactic semester with a rash of protests, usually to force home those post-King-assassination demands. Brandeis University in Massachusetts, Queens College, University of Pittsburgh, Ohio’s Wilberforce, North Carolina’s Shaw, Wittenberg in Ohio, and UC Berkeley were all sites of protests that month. On King’s soon-to-be birthday holiday, twenty-five Black campus activists at Swarthmore College outside of Philadelphia were engaged in the seventh day of their siege of the admissions office, demanding the active recruitment of Black students, faculty, and administrators. Like his peers throughout the nation, Swarthmore president Courtney Smith was severely strained those seven days. On the eighth day of the siege, shortly before he was to meet with a faculty committee to consider the demands, Smith suffered a fatal heart attack. Shock and sadness unsettled the campus, and in sympathy, the twenty-five students ended their protest.