A graduate of Cornell university's class of 1970 reflects on his experiences as a black undergraduate at Cornell from 1966 to 1970, what affirmative action meant to him and his generation of college students, and the self-education black students experienced at Cornell at that time. William Bowen and Derek Bok recently published "The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions," a study of the effects of affirmative action. Bowen and Bok analyzed data on 45,000 students who entered selective colleges in the fall of 1976. Their study indicates that affirmative action policies have helped minority students prepare for many opportunities and that the racially diverse environment provided by affirmative action policies has helped all students prepare to live and work in the increasingly diverse U.S. society. The study also found that, without affirmative admissions, minority enrollment would decline at selective colleges, and that affirmative action policies did not result in the denial of admissions to significant numbers of qualified applicants. The author reflects on what the affirmative action policies at Cornell meant to his own education, and he describes the climate at Cornell in the late 1960s as the first African American students to enter Cornell used a self-education process to make their formal education relevant to the needs of the black community and to lay the foundations of the Black Studies academic movement. (SLD)