8
Shutting Down Harvard
One April day in 1969, the phone rang in our small house in an alleyway near Harvard Square. Mark Dyen, one of the SDS leaders two years behind me at Harvard was breathless, his voice agitated.
“Michael, we need you. Can you possibly come to the meeting tonight?”
I had stayed away from Harvard, focusing my work on state and community colleges, and while I felt a strong attachment to Mark and the other younger SDS leaders there, I was not enthusiastic.
“What meeting?” I asked somewhat distractedly.
“We are getting somewhere on getting rid of ROTC, but I’m worried that the PL people will ruin everything. You know how they are. Always attacking anyone in SDS who isn’t part of their faction. And tone deaf. They are trying to force a seizure of a building. We’re for that but only when we have broad support for it. We are gaining support for doing away with ROTC but if we aren’t careful, PL will blow it. We need you. People still look to you here. Not the PL people of course. But can you come tonight?”
“I would rather not. I haven’t been doing anything at Harvard for months. “
“Come on. We need you. Don’t leave us in the lurch. We are going to have a huge crowd at the meeting tonight, maybe eight hundred or a thousand. Come and if we need you, be prepared to speak. If we don’t need you, you don’t have to say anything.”
Since I lived a five-minute walk from the meeting and did not have anything pressing to do that evening, I reluctantly agreed. I would show up, sit in the back, and be there if they needed me.
The number of supporters for SDS at Harvard had grown to well over a thousand students, and a much larger number opposed the war.
In the last couple of years, the Progressive Labor Party (PL) had gained increasing support within SDS. The Progressive Labor Party was formed after several of its leaders were expelled from the Communist Party. Early on, its opposition to the war attracted a number of younger activists. When its own youth organization was rapidly outpaced by the growth of SDS, PL started organizing within SDS. There it argued for a “Worker Student Alliance.” The very success of SDS brought Marxist grouplets like PL rushing to it. Because of our rejection of reflexive anticommunism, SDS was peculiarly ill equipped to deal with these parasitic organizations.
Like all Leninist organizations, PL was disciplined, well-organized, and constantly organizing in opposition to “misleaders,” those who disagreed with them. Most of the Harvard students who joined PL and its “Worker Student Alliance” were very decent young people who in their anguish and anger embraced a strident and reductionist politics. I had known and liked many of them, although now they detested me. Desperate to make sense of endlessly head-spinning news, they were attracted to the simplistic politics of this bizarre, self-proclaimed Maoist organization. The organization made its biggest inroads into SDS in the most elite schools. By April of 1969 PL and its Worker Student Alliance had won a majority on the Harvard-Radcliffe SDS executive committee even though they represented a minority of the total SDS membership on campus.
Those not sympathetic with PL had loosely organized under the banner of the New Left Caucus. The New Left leaders were the most active, most committed SDS members who did not share PL’s fantasies. They were focused on ending the war, supporting Mothers for Adequate Welfare, and challenging the university to be an authentic center for critical thought and debate. The PL people were focused on attacking anyone who was not loyal to their group. The New Left activists were simply not emotionally equipped to wage a fierce sectarian battle. They were too honest, too sincere, too open, too willing to struggle with complexity. They played fair. They knew that they represented the larger group of students who cared about ending the war. But they were not adept at packing meetings, exercising iron discipline, or keeping their supporters in their seats no matter how late into the night the meeting went.
On that evening of April 8, the large public SDS meeting was to decide the next steps in the ongoing SDS campaign to get the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program shut down at Harvard.
The hundreds of students packed into the large hall ratified the proposed demands: the university should abolish the ROTC program, provide alternative scholarships for the kids in it, freeze or lower rents in Harvard-owned off-campus buildings, and make a pledge not to demolish residential buildings in the Harvard Medical area. The demands mirrored the demands at Columbia the year before.
SDS had been campaigning against any form of university support for the war effort in Vietnam. The ROTC program was an obvious target. Our position was gaining strength. The previous December, one hundred SDS students, angered by not being allowed to sit in on faculty meetings on the status of ROTC, held a sit-in at Paine Hall. Fifty-seven were eventually placed on probation.1 As the Harvard Crimson editorialized: “ROTC is based on the notion that the country’s universities should serve the needs of the warfare state” and the “over-expansion of the American military machine has become perhaps the greatest threat of all.”2
At this meeting, the PL faction pushed hard to get a vote to seize a building right away. The New Left people attempted to get authorization for the executive committee to be able to seize a building in the future, much like a union’s vote to authorize a strike if negotiations break down. Michael Kazin, the New Left SDS leader chairing the meeting, took multiple votes, trying to get to a majority vote for authorization. Finally, he got what they wanted. No building seizure immediately but authorization for it if the university failed to negotiate.
The meeting ended; 300 students marched to Harvard’s president Nathan Pusey’s residence to tack their demands on his door. I went home, happily thinking everything was on an even course, and that I was not needed.
I was quite surprised when I received another call the next morning asking me to rush back to Harvard.
Early that morning, hearing that the PL faction of SDS was massing at University Hall, New Left leaders rushed there to find Jared Israel, the PL leader, haranguing a small but growing crowd on a bullhorn. He argued for the necessity of seizing the building now. The New Left students started a chant—“Vote, vote, vote.” This demand for another vote infuriated Jared, who had no interest, as he readily proclaimed, in “bourgeoise democratic norms.” The chant grew in volume until Jared seemingly relented and called for a vote. As it had the night before, the majority rejected the immediate seizure. Jared snarled through his bullhorn, “Great, now you have had your bullshit vote and now we are seizing this building.” A small squad of students supporting Jared—perhaps with visions of the 1917 Bolshevik storming of the Winter Palace—marched into University Hall determined to occupy it.
University Hall sits in the middle of Harvard Yard, its gray stone surrounded by trees, grass, and the older brick buildings of the freshman dorms. It contains a large room with rugs on the floor, sculpted busts of famous professors and great intellectuals scattered around, and walls adorned with gilt framed paintings. A room of quiet and opulence, history, and classical echoes, a room that could have been in the Enlightenment, or held the great antebellum debates of the 1840s and 1850s. A room removed from the present, distant from the grubby realities of the everyday life of most Americans, now or ever. A room of the cloistered elite.
University Hall also housed the college deans, the middle management of Harvard, loyal and narrowly focused. Some were born to be at Harvard. Some had made themselves into Harvard men and Harvard had made them. As the students marched into University Hall, they confronted deans totally unprepared, despite having repeatedly discussed this possibility. Since the Columbia uprising, they had undertaken studies and debated the proper responses. One could reasonably have expected them to be ready. But they were not and could not be. Their world view simply did not allow for this. As the students rushed in and manhandled the deans out of the building, two parallel universes collided.
The dean Robert Watson was a product of St. Mark’s and Harvard (’37). In World War II, as executive officer on a destroyer, he survived five hours in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. He told his children that his St. Mark’s letterman sweater had saved his life. Watson returned to Harvard in 1946, spending the next decades as the associate dean and then dean of students.3 In 1963 when there was a debate over parietal rules, Watson proclaimed, “It is not appropriate for a Harvard student to entertain a girl in his own room. It’s our positive duty to deal with fornication just as we do with thievery, lying and cheating, by taking severe disciplinary measures against the offenders.”4
The dean Skiddy von Stade was also in every way a perfect Harvard gentleman. While a student there (also class of 1937), he played on two championship polo teams.5 As reported by the Harvard Crimson, he had this to say about women and Harvard:
When I see the bright, well-educated, but relatively dull housewives who attended the Seven Sisters, I honestly shudder at the thought of changing the balance of males versus females at Harvard. Quite simply, I do not see highly educated women making startling strides in contributing to our society in the foreseeable future. They are not, in my opinion, going to stop getting married and/or having children. They will fail in their present role as women if they do.6
As the PL squad rushed to evict the deans, Archie Epps, the first African American dean of students and my boss from the 1963 March on Washington, was the most physically resistant. The students hustled the deans out, pushing them, shoving them, physically forcing them from the building, the stupidest thing they could have done. Compared to what was happening in Vietnam that day, this behavior should never have registered on any accurate scale as violent. However, the “violence” of the morning burned the events of the entire strike into the minds of the deans and most of the faculty as the days when the “mob” attacked Harvard. Forty years later, Harvard faculty members still referred to the events of that April as the “Harvard riots of 1969.”
My friends were fuming at PL for ignoring both votes against seizing the building. Once the building was taken, however, they were in a bind. If they left them alone, the PL faction would become isolated, behaving in ways that would most probably bail the administration out of having to deal with the demands around ROTC just as SDS was winning a majority of the students and a sizeable portion of the faculty to their position. So, they made the bitter decision to occupy University Hall and urge other students to join them. They fanned out and, using the relationships built over the last years of steady antiwar organizing, soon had several hundred students occupying University Hall. Then they called me.
When I arrived, solemn-faced students “guarded” the entrances. A few of the doors had been chained, but the rest remained open as dozens of students flowed in and out, checking out what was going on. Outside hundreds of students milled around the Yard. Some chanted slogans against SDS. Some offered support. Many were simply curious to see what would happen.
In University Hall itself, there was chaos, as the PL kids focused on guarding the entrances and failed to organize anything inside.
Many of the students sitting in disliked the PL leadership, but they hated the war more and wanted to see the university step decisively away from anything that either symbolically or materially supported it. Without thought or discussion, I easily slid into a familiar leadership role. Quickly I worked with the younger SDS leaders to organize inside and outside of University Hall.
We assumed that there would be an inevitable call to the Cambridge police to clear the building. Some SDS members, especially those already on probation from earlier actions, were detailed to avoid arrest and, after the expected mass arrest, to help organize a university wide meeting.
In the large room the light filters in through the big windows. Two hundred students are debating tactics, strategy, and issues germane and issues that come out of some haze. There is a sense of impending catastrophe as well as a sense of desperate purpose. There is no euphoria, at least not yet. A small group has forced this on us. I do not want to be there. But I have friends to support. Harvard being Harvard, whatever happens will be big news and could help the antiwar cause—or hurt it.
Members of the Old Mole team arrive. We secure select offices, claiming that we do not want there to be any vandalism that could discredit us and distract from the demands. In the sealed-off offices, a team of close friends goes to work conducting a thorough search of the files of the administration. All the file cabinets are locked. One graduate student brings an electric drill so we can drill out the locks, but we discover that a simple, bare metal book end, turned sideways, held with one hand and whacked hard with the other, quickly pops the locks. Soon we are working to a muffled beat, whack pop, whack pop, as we systematically go through the private university files taking any file folder that was marked CIA, Department of Defense, ROTC, and the like. These files are surreptitiously wrapped in jackets, some handed to Danny Schechter, my former traveling companion, who walks out with them; others are passed out a back window to runners to take them off campus.
I am surprised at how easy it is to gather definitive documentation that the Harvard administration has been lying. They have been saying the university is not doing work for the war effort or for the CIA. They have been lying to the faculty and working to undermine any faculty decision against ROTC. It’s all there spelled out in their files, letters, and contracts. It never occurred to the administration that we would pop the locks on their filing cabinets and steal their documents. We carefully replaced file folders without the critical documents that we had stolen and pushed in the locks so that whenever the administration regained control of the building, it would not be immediately obvious what we had done. We know we are committing a crime. We feel strongly that our greater purpose more than justifies it. The fact that the administration lied so frequently makes us feel even more confident that it is our duty to expose the truth.
We work in haste as we expect the Harvard administration to retake its building at any moment. But hours go by. The dean Franklin Ford orders everyone to leave. No one does. The day slowly passes. Inside I think my mission is to make sure that this move by the PL people does not result in disaster. We have everyone discuss whether they are willing to get arrested. At the first sign of the police, those who do not want to get arrested, and do not want to risk getting kicked out of Harvard, are to leave. We stress the need for nonviolence.
All day interested students come and go. Endless debates about the nature of the war, the nature of the university, and the strategy for the movement swirl inside. Outside there are endless arguments between supporters and opponents. The whole campus tenses. Everyone knows something will happen, but no one knows what or when.
If the university simply had let us stew in place, it would have been a disaster for SDS. A majority of Harvard University students, undergraduates and graduates, teaching fellows, and even many professors had come to oppose the war. In that sense the majority are sympathetic to the demands of the demonstrators. Still as night settles on Cambridge, the great majority are against this actual occupation. The “manhandling” of the deans is thoroughly opposed—indeed even by a majority of those of us occupying University Hall. If President Pusey had simply sat back, issued a statement condemning our tactics, and argued there were better ways to press the demands, support would most likely have petered out, students would slowly have left to attend classes, take their tests, visit their loved ones, and eat dinner. Over several days with a diehard group endlessly debating each other and getting smaller by the hour, the occupation would have come to an end.
However, the Harvard task force that studied the Columbia revolt concluded that the mistake made by the administration there was waiting too long. Instead of waiting us out, Pusey and the Harvard Corporation reverted to the only alternative response, violence. I am sure they did not see unleashing police as initiating violence; instead, they saw it as restoring the rightful order of things. They certainly should have foreseen the inevitable consequences of their decision. We did.
We expect violence. We expect that the violence that we believe lay just under the surface, the violence that rages every day in faraway Asia and in the nearby ghettos, the ever-present violence of America, will finally be made manifest, even on this most serene, cloistered, pampered, elite campus. Violence we think was the only way the old men who run Harvard and the world can maintain their crumbling order.
Many of the police summoned to Harvard Yard early in the predawn hours of that April morning simmered with rage—rage at Harvard, rage at its elite, rage at the privileged students. It enraged many of them that protesting students were “throwing away” a chance, a privilege, that so many cops would have died to give their own kids. Some of them have fought in Vietnam and their sacrifices require that the war be necessary. All of them have friends from their blue-collar neighborhoods who were killed or maimed in the war. Many of them have grandparents who had seen the signs “no Irish need apply.” Everything about Harvard reeks to them of affluence, elitism, and privilege—and they are not wrong. Now the elite masters of the universe cannot even take care of their own fucking campus! Many of those police marching into Harvard Yard that morning, march in with generations of well-earned resentments merging with new angers at us, the privileged antiwar students. The job they are assigned that day gives them a once in a lifetime opportunity to let loose for one paroxysm of officially sanctioned violence.
At 3:00 a.m., the police march into Harvard Yard to confront 500 sleepy, scared students, standing in bunched rows in every entrance to University Hall, arms locked, fearful but determined to resist nonviolently. The police do what they have been trained to do, but with a vehemence and a rage that should not really have surprised anyone.
As I link arms with students on either side of me, I cannot really see what is happening. The hall is crowded. We pack ourselves as tightly as we can; we know the onslaught is about to hit us. State police, black boots polished to the proper sheen, visors obscuring their faces, break through the line of students in front of me. They are furious. They swing their nightsticks, and you can hear the thunk as they land on skulls and shoulders. They want to break the lines of students, and they want to break some heads. As they hit us one after another, we reflexively reach up to bloody hair and as we do, police grab us, yank us forward, and the line breaks. The police haul students, toss them and drag them down the stairs onto the moist spring ground.
My turn comes. I hear the crack of the club on my head, and then it is hard to see because the blood pours down into my eyes. My head does not hurt as much as I was expecting as I am hurled down the stairs and given an angry choice: I can walk to the police wagon or I can be hauled and beaten to the police wagon. I walk. It is all happening too fast to have any coherent thoughts. Everywhere kids are bleeding. A dozen of us are jammed into each police wagon—normally called the “paddy wagon” in derision of the Irish that used to be the ones being hauled away. We are taken to the police station in Central Square and packed into crowded cells, our adrenaline-fueled energy bleeding away, leaving us dazed, exhausted.
After clearing the building, the police indiscriminately lay into any student they encounter. Sleepy but excited freshmen pour from their dorms into the Yard to see what is happening. The police club and punch any of them they can catch. Students from nearby Harvard houses, hearing the noise, rush to the Yard to witness an early morning scene of chaos and blue-coated violence totally outside their realm of experience. Policemen do not beat people, especially young, white people. Yet here are hundreds of police doing exactly that with lights strobing the early morning gray light, screams and cries and blood and shock everywhere. Even the students who had been screaming at SDS as unpatriotic only hours before suddenly find themselves subject to a police attack.
No one seeing the sight of the police rampaging across Harvard Yard can believe it, nor believe this is the right way to handle the protests. Shock soon gives way to anger. Those watching, those caught up in it, and then those hearing about it are outraged. All the anxiety about the war, about their future, about their lives, is crystallized into anger. There is no question that now the Harvard community is ready to rise up against Pusey and against the war brought so visibly home to Harvard Yard. The leaders of Harvard will wring their hands over the manhandling of the deans. Harvard students are pushed over the edge by the violence they experience firsthand, a police ferocity sanctioned by Harvard. All the organizing of the past five years, the demonstrations, the dorm meetings, the flyers, the teach-ins, the sit-ins, the marches, the discussions, all suddenly make sense. Thousands of Harvard students, both undergraduate and graduate, are furious, fed up with the war and appalled at the leadership of their university.
As the police withdrew, having restored control of University Hall, and early dawn begins to break, dozens of stunned students gravitate to the long, wide steps of Widener Library. There the PL leadership has one more chance to kill the brewing revolt and almost succeeds. One PL person has brought a bullhorn. He rants about the police violence and the need to fight back and then declares that the assembled students should join him and burn down the colonial house inhabited by President Pusey. “Burn it to the ground now!” he declares. His demand for more violence in the aftermath of what has happened produces an uneasy silence. The crowd of students is ready to walk away.
Kazin, steps forward. His thick, dark hair is matted with blood. Blood drips down his face. He grabs the bull horn and starts to talk about what everyone has just seen. No matter what, he says, we all now have to stick together. All of us must work together to answer the violence of the administration. All of us must stick together to say no to the war, no to ROTC, no to police violence. He outlines the beginning of a plan to arouse all of Harvard and regroup in a mass meeting of everyone, not just SDS, in Memorial Church. The crowd comes back. They feel their anger transform into determination. The Harvard Strike of 1969 commences.
Meanwhile those of us arrested are sitting in cells. Included in our ranks are at least two reporters. Chris Wallace, then an undergraduate, has been reporting for the Harvard radio station from inside University Hall, as has my friend Parker Donham, who works for the Boston Globe. When Parker is spotted by the mayor of Cambridge, Al Vellucci, he asks the notoriously anti-Harvard mayor to get him released so he can file his story. Vellucci orders his release. The rest of us sit sleepily in our cells for several more hours.
Finally, we are booked, arraigned on trespassing charges, and released. We make our way back to Harvard to catch the tail end of the mass meeting in Memorial Church. At that meeting the call goes out for a university wide strike. A committee is created to lead the strike with representatives of both SDS and the “moderate” non-SDS students. I make a plea for an inclusive and democratic strike committee: there should be an elected representative for any Harvard House, any academic department, any graduate school, and any reasonable group that votes to go on strike and support our demands. Somehow, I am chosen to be the chair of the strike committee, even though I am no longer an official student.
House after house, department after department, have mass meetings and vote overwhelmingly to go on strike. The Med School. The Design School. The Law School. The Ed School. Teaching fellows. And as each group votes to go on strike, they select their own leaders to sit on the strike committee. Many of these new leaders had not even thought about going on strike before the events in Harvard Yard. The self-described “moderates” play a large role. Many are new to activism, against the war, and fed up with the Harvard administration. Now, along with SDS, they are leading a massive and complete shutdown of the oldest and most famous university in America.
Harvard’s Black students, under the banner of Harvard Afro, demand an African American studies department and stage their own demonstrations. Many faculty and the administration believe a totally fallacious rumor that Harvard Afro was planning to take over Widener Library and destroy its books. Nothing of the sort was ever discussed. Over the objections of the PL folks, for whom race is always a “distraction from the class struggle,” the strike committee adds a new demand: that the university institute a full-fledged Department of African American Studies.
A few days later, the strike has taken hold. A crowd of over 10,000 students from every part of the university marches into the ivy-covered stadium. Waves of undergraduates, medical students in their scrubs, grad students from labs in their white coats, design and architectural students with gorgeous posters, and somber law school students, all march into the stadium. It is an awesome display of the entire student community of Harvard rising up in opposition to President Pusey, the deans, and the war.
For SDS this rally is a moment of triumph and joy. We are making headlines around the world. This gathering of the Harvard community yells as loudly as possible to ratify the core demands. The opposition to the war has broadened and become the dominant force on campus. This level of mass movement is incomprehensible for the PL leaders. For them, attacking those closest to them is not a tactic—it is core to their politics. So as the overwhelming majority of Harvard rises up against the Harvard Corporation, all they can do is intensify their attacks on the misleaders—their fellow SDS members and now the “moderates.” Speaking to 10,000 people in Harvard Stadium, they denounce the crowd, accuse them all of selling out because not every single one of their demands is incorporated in the unified strike committee’s demands. Luckily, most of the crowd is not even listening.
For the Harvard faculty and administration, the strike of 1969 is a tragedy that will haunt them for decades. They have lost control of their university. Students suddenly stop obeying them and stop following the rules. President Pusey, Dean Ford, the various other deans, and the elite Harvard Corporation have lost all legitimacy. The strike was heady and hopeful as is any peaceful revolution where people create their own leaders, their own new rules, their own fresh forums, and governing councils. Classes are held outside of the regular classrooms with new subjects created by younger faculty and students. Students study the economy of the military state. The poetry of protest. Creative artwork blossoms all over campus. For a short while Harvard is completely engulfed in debate and discussion of the very real and powerful issues of the day: the war in Indochina, the role of the university in society, the legacy of America’s original sin of slavery, how the university should interact with the community around it, how students could live lives that were moral and meaningful. As with any upheaval the thinking is passionate and sometimes sloppy, sometimes insightful, occasionally brilliant, often foolish.
There is one poster that above all else captures the mood of those spring days. The silkscreened poster has the red fist of the youth revolt. Imposed over it are these words written by a young aspiring novelist, Jay Cantor:
Strike for the eight demands
Strike because you hate cops
Strike because your roommate was clubbed
Strike to stop expansion
Strike to seize control of your life
Strike to become more human
Strike to return Paine Hall scholarships
Strike because there is no poetry in your lectures
Strike because classes are a bore
Strike for power
Strike to smash the corporation
Strike to abolish ROTC
Strike because they are trying to squeeze the life out of you.
Strike
This seemed like nonsense to Pusey and the old men who ran Harvard. It seemed foolish to a few students like Eliot Abrams who would become Republicans and lead America into new wars. But for six weeks in the spring of 1969, there were thousands of students at Harvard who understood exactly what that poster said and were doing their best to live its lines.
I was consumed with making sure the strike committee was democratic and fully represented every segment of the Harvard community on strike. I went from one small group to another, and then another, in the Harvard Houses, in all departments and graduate schools, urging them on and encouraging their imagination and creativity.
In the Harvard Design School silk screened posters were everywhere. There were t-shirts with red fists worn by kids who only weeks before never imagined that they would be on strike. Music blared from open windows. Harvard Yard was dotted with small groups holding alternative classes. Teaching fellows felt liberated to offer the courses they had always fantasized about. The spring flowers bloomed and with them a heady excitement and a sense that for a moment, we were winning, that this most elite of institutions has been seized by the young, that the old men were in retreat. Classes and final exams were canceled or transformed. The strike was total.
The Old Mole came out with a Strike Special, “Reading the Mail of the Ruling Class,” with the university’s private documents splashed across its pages, documents showing CIA contracts with the university when the university had sworn there were no such contracts. The faculty was horrified to read in the Old Mole that Dean Ford and President Pusey had been lying to them and were working on ways to circumvent any decision they might make to curtail the ROTC program. Whatever the faculty thought of us, they could not forgive Pusey and Ford’s dismissal of them. Under enormous stress, Dean Ford was hospitalized and finally resigned.
In the end the strike committee negotiated a successful conclusion with the Harvard Corporation. It was a stunning victory for us and an astonishing capitulation by them. The ROTC program was abolished. The scholarships for ROTC members were retained. The ROTC building became a day care center. An African American studies department was created. Harvard committed to better treatment of the community around it.
Because it was Harvard, these events generated enormous media coverage. Both Time and Life devoted their covers to the strike. Because it was Harvard, segments of the Harvard faculty and the entire administration thought the events of that spring were a historic tragedy. Because it was Harvard, the elites were shocked, stunned.
With its unbounded creativity, amazing posters and t-shirts, slogans of poetry and humor, the unbounded debates, forums, discussions, and changed classes, the strike was a brief, marvelous moment. However, it is important to see the larger context. What happened for those weeks in the spring of 1969 at Harvard was simply one small part of what was happening on campus after campus. The war galvanized students to action. Campus administrations reacted predictably, stupidly, and with a heavy hand, turning the majority of their students and younger faculty against them. African American students, feeling part of the Black liberation struggle, took up their own demands, occupied their own buildings with rumors of guns being stockpiled (usually false), and fought for Black studies programs and for increased numbers of students and professors of color. While the war and racism had been at the heart of the struggle, over the following years university life would be changed in other ways we never anticipated, best symbolized by coed dorms and salad bars.
At Harvard, over the next years the vindictive administration would “expunge” and “separate” many of the most militant students, mostly supporters of the Progressive Labor Movement. For a number of those students who evicted the deans, a hand on the shoulder, a push in the back became violent assault, and at Harvard’s request they were tried, convicted, and a few sent to prison. Others were “banned” from ever setting foot on the campus, and one, who innocently returned to visit friends, was jailed for trespassing.
I, however, was long gone and glad to finally be rid of Harvard.
For years, the faculty and the administration relitigated the events of April 1969, always focusing on the “mob” of radical students, always referring to those events as the “Harvard Riots,” and never focusing on the behavior of the police and the men who unleashed them. Harvard could never see itself as other than special and different. For a few heady weeks in the spring of 1969, it was swept by the movement that had spread to campuses from one end of America to the other and burst forth in Paris, Mexico City, Prague, and Berlin, a movement sparked first and foremost by the American disaster in Vietnam, that then turned into a hopeful explosion of youth, of rebellion against elites, against the grinding wheels of materialism, against the realities of violence, and barbarism. For one brief moment, the men and women of Harvard stood in solidarity with the young of America and the young of the world in opposition to the war and in favor of hope, democracy, and an attempt to stop the life being squeezed out of all of us.