Ten Years After

TEN YEARS AGO TODAY, at dawn, 400 state and local policemen marched up the steps of University Hall, clubs raised, and began the brutal eviction of hundreds of student demonstrators who had occupied the building. More than 75 students were injured in the raid, and an appalled University came together for a momentous nine-day strike--nine days of the most dynamic political activity this University has seen. Just as the police bust was the last vain attempt of the Harvard administration to restore its own vision of a Harvard that had quite simply ceased to exist, the strike that followed it marked a startling new beginning for students at this school--proof that students can make themselves heard, even in the massive bureaucracy at the center of the Yard.

Ten years later, the lessons of that spring could not be more to the point. A great deal has happened in the decade since that strike, and so it is easy enough to let the message of that time slip out of our minds. Most members of the current senior class were, after all, only in the sixth grade when then-President Nathan M. Pusey '28 ordered in the police; the memory of that day and its aftermath is for them, at best, a muddled one. And so it is convenient to believe those who proclaim that ours is a completely different generation of students, an apathetic and self-oriented one, a generation unconcerned with social protest or political issues. It is tempting to think that too much has changed since 1969.

Tempting, but sadly mistaken. The issues of that spring have not gone away, and the attitudes of an administration bent on limiting students' rights to free expression have hardly changed. The main issues that prompted the University Hall takeover and the strike that followed it were threefold: an end to the preferred status on campus of the armed forces' Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), establishment of a viable Afro-American Studies Department, and an end to Harvard's unconscionable expansion into the surrounding community. Granted, ROTC is no longer an issue--at least for the moment--but the Faculty's shabby treatment of the Afro Department, and Harvard's blatant disregard of the rights and needs of its tenants and neighbors in Cambridge, remain as reminders that some wounds do not heal with time.

EVEN MORE TO THE POINT, the administration of Derek Bok--the man who, more than anyone else, profited from the strike and the ensuing tumult that forced Pusey's early retirement--has shown a familiar contempt for the views of students and junior faculty. When Bok and his Corporation seek to ignore the ethical dimensions of corporate responsibility, when they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of students' calls for a real hand in determining Harvard's investment policy, or when Bok and Dean Rovosky smugly dismiss students' attempts to gain a real say in the formulation of their own curriculum, the silence is an echo. Granted, Bok is a smoother man than Pusey--as the Corporation and Overseers realized when they named him, he is the sort to rely on calm words, rather than police violence, to settle confrontations--but he has shown little more sensitivity to student concerns than did his predecessor. The echoes of 1969 grow louder with each day that Harvard waffles on its ethical responsibilities. The faces have changed, but little else.

This is why we must look to the lessons of that spring of a decade ago. Because, in fact, the strike was a good thing--it produced concessions, albeit small ones, on each of the issues of concern to the students of that day. The victories were hard-fought--most of the violence that so alarmed the press was in fact directed against student demonstrators by the police Pusey had called in--but they were real, vivid proof that students can, when they choose, have an effect on even this school. In the ten years that have passed since then, however, those voctories have slowly eroded--partly from declining student interest, but also from a renewed tendency of the men who run Harvard to ignore those interests.

And so we should look back. But simply remembering is not enough--the students of this school should realize that the myths of student apathy and self-concern are harmful, not only to themselves, but also to the larger causes that are worth working for. They should realize that this time, like the spring of 1969, is one of pressing issues, a time to work hard for serious changes. There need not be another strike if the administration is willing to respond to the voices of legitimate student protest. But students should not be afraid to act if the need arises. For those who see the need for real student protest are not, to borrow Pusey's contemptuous phrase, "Walter Mittys on the left." We are realists. And so after we look back and remember, we must also look to the present, and think hard about its realities.