Getting the questions right

Reunions are not by chance Nostalgia needs its antidote, a brief re-creation of those moments of the hard, gem-like flame. So I may finally feel at home in Harvard Square, more, at least, than I ever did back then I am certain to find the same films at the Brattle, the same books in the Coop, and much the same music streaming from the windows in the Yard on those warm, sunny mornings of early summer. What will surprise are the students, how young they will be. Time has passed, and there will come in a rush the sense of time lost, the memories of the last adventure of youth, the all-nighters. Mazola parties, touch football along the Charles. Certainly, University Hall still stands in the center of Harvard Yard, and upon seeing the solid construction of Ivy-draped stone masonry we held for 16 hours. I know I will shudder and then remember the Harvard Strike of 1969. And then it will be time to face those very different people we were 15 years ago.

What astonishes me about the Harvard Strike--which stands here as an example of the radical student movement of the 1960s--when I think of it a decade and a half later, is the peculiar disproportion between means and ends, between what we then called our "militancy" and the unprepossessing, almost trivial nature of our demands. We shut down Harvard University, but our initial demands--the abolition of ROTC and a halt to evictions in Harvard-owned housing ("Smash ROTC, No Expansion!" Remember?)--touched only peripheral, almost tangential concerns of Harvard as a university. Today they seem virtually irrelevant. ROTC was not crucial to the war effort and most of us realized that; Officer Candidate School could easily have trained all the officers the Army needed. And frankly, I can no longer reconstruct the reasoning for allowing 182 run-down flats to stand in the way of a modern hospital. If the tenants are offered decent alternative housing, why not build the hospital?

The nation's best scholars seemed to have learned nothing from the millions of volumes in Widener Library.

Yet now that I look back on them, our demands seem to have been no mistake. Not only did we never doubt them; they represented precisely what we wanted, and not just at Harvard. ROTC became a target of nationwide protest, and students struck against university expansion from People's Park to Morningside Heights. We were willing to risk expulsion, police beatings and jail in order to obtain precisely these two concessions from Harvard University. On one level, it is clear why. ROTC and expansion were the closest embodiments at Harvard of what we believed were the crimes of the nation. Harvard was there in evident unholy union with the military; whites were removing Blacks from their homes. There was nothing more to be sought and nothing more to be said.

Yet if that were all, there would also be nothing more to be written. But there is more there is the conclusion, reached without discussion, that Harvard should be destroyed for its sins. As we picketed in front of Burr Hall on the sunny spring morning after the Bust, an aged member of the Harvard Corporation, a dark hat shielding his face from the heavy sun, stormed and raged at us, demanded that we consider what we were doing asked whether we wanted to destroy Harvard University. No reason occurred to me why Harvard should not be destroyed. Harvard's only use was as a forum for our protest I, at least, did not need to ask whether Harvard should expand, because I had found nothing at Harvard worth saving. The War, racial discrimination, police brutality and the violation of University autonomy may explain the actions of many of those who struck after the Bust, but for me, at least, something very different was involved, something that seems when I call it up today, like self destruction.

The question is how so many of us came to regard the University as evil why students literally around the world at Berkeley. Columbia and Harvard, in Paris, Berlin and Italy, felt such bitterness at their universities that they were willing to immolate them in protest.

The familiar explanations cannot explain this intensity. The draft was not really a threat to wealthy college students, and the tightening job market would have hardly inspired such revolutionary fervor.

Though wrong, both of these explanations the draft and the economy show how easy it is to pass, as in the night by the meaning of one own experience, how natural it is to explain the daily world in terms of individual interest. In the 1960s however, we were following not our inclinations, but rather what we saw as our duty. In those brief years of privilege, for one of the few moments it seems to have been possible in this century, we were free. Our protest was not one of the hungering masses, caught in imminent destruction, but rather an expression of our submission to a moral law. The fact that such words may hardly be written today, only a few years later, and will certainly not easily be understood, is an indication of all that has changed since.

The place to begin is the fact that ours was a college student's protest, and not, as I remember claiming at the time, the action of a vanguard of the urban proletariat and Third World peasants. We were born in the most powerful country on earth in its history and grew up entirely within the post-War economic boom. Life came so smoothly, so almost without incident, that almost no memories remain, no signposts to draw the boundaries. In the 1960s we came of age in the nation's best, or at least its elite, colleges. Most of us never knew economic difficulty. I remember wandering around Cambridge for days without spending a dollar, except on books and movies. I had no money, but I also needed none tuition, room, and board were paid. I never bought clothes, never had cleaning bills, never ate out except at a sandwich shop called Elsie's, and traveled exclusively by thumb and backpack.

In other words, many of us lived in a world quite different from the world of daily preoccupation, of the business day, civil society. To some extent, everyone's existence is structured by the competing demands of two different worlds. In civil society we largely follow our inelinations. We seek our selfish best interest, try to make the best deals possible, move forward in our careers, invest correctly, take care of our own. In political society, on the other hand, we discuss the issues and then vote for the candidate who will do the most for the nation as a whole. Some live in political society daily as they build critical judgments reading the newspapers some are political citizens only every two or four years in the election booth and some do not have enough political education or moral uphousing ever to take part.

Almost no one of course, spends his life in political society. No once except, perhaps, the President of the United States, the Justices of the Supreme Court and one generation attending college at the end of the 1960s. Many of us had no cares about? Indeed no touch with, civil society, and could live our entire day as political citizens. We had enough education to ask what would be best of the world and enough time to dedicate ourselves entirely to the quest for the answer.

My own brief it occurs to me now, remained remorsessly conceived in all of this. It astounds the me to realize that there was a time, only a decade ago, when there was something more important than one's individual future, when life could be dedicated something beyond itself. I did not have a term for it then, but I now know that I measured my life by the concept of duty. I did not know how I would use my future, but I knew that I would prefer none at all if it meant a life of mere personal success. In the end my use of the term "ruling class was not a political or economic category but rather interpression of moral disdain. It signified a very different group of people, different not in education, culture, or individual interest but rather in then conception of political society. They were the economically powerful who acted in political matters to their own personal ends. With them one could have no discussion.

With rare exceptions, there was also no hope for discussion with the Harvard Faculty. Most of those who taught at Harvard had other cares, were engaged in the treaty business of college academics. Having been called to Harvard in an earlier age, by quick circumstance, after a decade or more of painstaking specialization, they were even less prepared for the challenge of the time than were we. They were not ignorant professors, but they were unable to demonstrate how a life might be dedicated both to books and action, learning and justice. The nation's best scholars seemed to have learned nothing from the millions of volumes in Widener Library, and only the Lord knew what solace they found in their footnotes.

Their lack of inspiration and wisdom helped form our willingness to destroy their university, for it began to appear to us that scholarship itself yields ignorance. Without discussion and as if without choice, I, at least, broke with my scientific calling. There was no reason to the reading, no purpose to the concentration requirements, no joy in a well-written blue book or even a good grade. The rejection came all the more easily in the obnoxious prep-school atmosphere of Harvard in those days, from the sherries, proctors and parietal halls to the ceat and tie dinners and the joyless Anglo-Saxon outline.

It seemed there was nothing to do but begin again, elsewhere, in a far different latitude. And so began the Sisyphean strivings, the apotheosis of praxis to the source of all knowledge. What I was trying to uproot and destroy was a part of myself, the very talent that had brought me to Harvard in the first place. I buried my hopes for a career with the great books, and those buried hopes became a throbbing pain.

That is how I explain to myself today, in a far different time, what remains in memory of having lived the ecstatic yet hopeless frenzy of the 1960s. To the normal trauma of adolescence--the pain of being stood up, of breaking up, of being alone--was added the rejection of self and future. I remember trying, for the first time, to live with personal failure. I could not get papers finished before the extensions expired or even begin the reading before the final exam. Others were elected to Phi Beta Kappa, awarded scholarships, admitted to graduate school. I did not understand how they did it. I never suspected, of course, that these were social problems. It was a frightening new experience in which I no longer recognized myself. Drugs were only an aid in the conscious cremation of talent and possibility. Many of us, I think, lived in the light of a flame passed from matchstick to matchstick.

It was this self-hatred that yielded the program for the destruction of the University. Though the mediation was not merely an excuse--Harvard and ROTC. Harvard and classified research. Harvard as landlord, Harvard as strike breaker--we found no reason to doubt the logic of the syllogism: Smash Capitalism, Harvard is Capitalism, Smash Harvard.

I think I now can explain what, at the time, was a real mystery: why was Karl Marx not taught at Harvard? At the time I suspected that Capital contained a shameful truth, and that Harvard professors refused to teach it because they recognized that. How much, I now realize, I overrated them. Of course they had not read Capital either. The shameful truth was that they could not. And that is why Capital was not taught at Harvard.

An intelligent reading of it requires an education very different from the one obtained by the average member of the Harvard Faculty. It requires not analytical philosophy but Hegel, not marginal utility theory but Smith and Ricardo, not quantifiable political science but reflections about revolution. It also requires a serious interest in labor, from the way most people spend their lives to the history, and especially the mistakes, of the labor movement. Since many of these subjects are now taught, it is difficult today to recall accurately how narrow was the gamut run at Harvard between behavioust psychology and studies in the new criticism.

We were philosophers of sorts. One can be a philosopher in writing, but one can also be a philosopher in action. That means not only that the praxis is the conversion into action of a certain theory--Philosophers have interpreted the world, etc.--but also that one's actions can be read theoretically. We were, in a certain sense, vulgar empiricists. We were insensitive to anything we could not see, and we never made distinctions where we found none in empirical reality.

The hatred many of us felt for Harvard led us to reject entirely the idea of the University, of scholarship, of study. Yet at the same time, there were books that we wanted desperately to read, and which I, at least, could not understand alone. I remember trying to acquire on my own a certain philosophical culture, and how frantic and depressed I became at my failure. What we needed and wanted, in the end, was not less University but more. Our most serious failing was not to have recognized that, and not to have used our momentum to try to improve the University. The exception was our third demand, the establishment of the Black Studies Department. After 15 years and some struggle it has become an institution. It was the only immediate success of the Harvard Strike.

I still find it difficult to describe precisely what was wrong at Harvard. It was not merely the lack of experts in certain fields, nor the feeling of stolid complacency, nor even the absence of interest in teaching and discussion. The real problem seems to me how to have been that many members of the Harvard Faculty simply were not intellectuals; they lacked tradition and avoided risk. Intellectual creativity is not an individual matter. It seems to involve, above all, the mastery of classical intellectual traditions, the examination of the changing world from that perspective, and the courage to take the risk to explain what one sees. Many Harvard professors, however, especially in the humanities and social sciences, did not stand on anyone's shoulders, but instead, like tubs, sat on their own bottoms. The ideas they produced in dialogue with their typewriters were well behind where the tradition had arrived.

At the same time, to be fair. I do not see how we could have had much success. Had we sought to broaden Harvard, we might have succeeded at most in institutionalizing a trivial and pedantic approach to the fields of knowledge that mattered most to us. There were few experts in those fields at the time and I doubt whether Harvard would have recognized a Benjamin or an Adorno had one applied. In the end, there was no way for us to have followed our vision at Harvard or for Harvard to have followed us in our quest.

Our second mistake was to prefer a clear conscience to any meaningful conception of politics. The anti-war movement was gestated in miniscule groups of moral protest, like the Boston Resistance, with a quasi-religious fervor for martyrdom. For many of us, it was simply enough to be right. So to the extent we were moved to action, we were interested not in convincing or compromise, but rather only in the direct expression of our political beliefs. The passion for directness was a kind of style. We dressed in our politics, and we wanted all who met us to confront them. "Some people talk about the weather," my favorite poster at the time announced, and below silhouettes of Marx, Engels and Lenin, proudly proclaimed: "Not us." We therefore did little to create a convincing program, and we left to the liberal organizers of the mass demonstrations the tedious labor of welding alliances. We attended those demonstrations only under the condition that we could hitch on a Bobby Seale Brigade and spar with the police.

Most importantly, we refused to reflect on an alternative for ordinary university students. Our message to them was to choose sides, to give up their reactionary fantasies of moving with the ruling class and to dedicate themselves full-time to the revolution. When we had the ear of hundreds of thousands of students across America and around the world, we convinced them that there was no way to combine a profession, a career and a family with a contribution to political change. They believed us and made an uneasy peace with the system. Sooner than we, they realized that they would have to earn their way after graduation, and they returned to their books, their exams, and graduate school. We left them, at most, with a bad conscience, but without a clue about what to do with their lives and knowledge.

Our third error was not to have tried to democratize Harvard University. The arrogance of Harvard's Administration was matched only by our own narrowmindedness about what we disdainfully labeled Student Power. We recognized that institutions die when no movement supports them, but we did not realize that movements that produce no institutions disappear.

Of course we had our reasons. We knew that we were, and would remain, a minority. But more importantly, we assumed that capitalism's power came, as we used to say, from the barrel of the gun: the Vietnamese, the Panthers, and the protestors in University Hall seemed to prove that. The fact that the vast majority of American voters, by secret ballot in free and general elections, vote for the capitalist system every time they are given the chance seemed to us some kind of trick.

As a result, there are few democratic institutions at Harvard. Though there now are some student-faculty committees concerned with problems of undergraduate life, students still have no voice in questions of curriculum development and faculty search. The student government, which was finally formed two years ago, unfortunately will find no support in our words and deeds.

It may seem that I have missed the point. We protested to stop the War and Harvard's expansion, not to reform Harvard as a University. Perhaps the movement may best be judged by its own goals.

We recognized that institutions die when no movement supports them, but we did not realize that movements that produce no institutions disappears.

As far as Harvard's expansion is concerned, we did not have much success. The affiliated hospital complex--now called the Peter Bent Brigham and Women's Hospital--has been built. My class agent reports that the University's coffers are full and the alumni ready to pledge. Especially when compared to some of the other victims of the 1960s--the destitute University of California, the scattered remnants of the dissected Sorbonne, the catatonic spray-painted Italian universities--Harvard has indeed prospered. The alumni magazines and donation solicitations bear witness-among others, buildings such as a new library, underground it is true, with our arch-foe as eponym; the Harvard President who, as John Finley once remarked, thought he was a Greek and turned out to be a Roman.

It may seem that we had more success with the War. The War is over. But did anything we do in and around University Hall in the Spring of 1969 contribute to that end? As a result of the Strike, the Harvard Faculty did eliminate the ROTC program. But did that help end the War in Vietnam?

There was certainly no direct effect. The abolition of ROTC at Harvard did not materially hinder the war effort. ROTC was abolished at many universities yet there were still, a year after the Strike, enough officers to lead the ground troops into Cambodia. Nor did our protests put the war-makers in imminent peril. When the War finally stopped, those in control were faced not by a militant alliance of the forces of dissent, but rather by students and Panthers in considerable disarray.

The anti-war movement as a whole, of course, certainly made its contribution. Daniel Ellsberg claims that the March on Washington in November 1969 prevented Nixon from dropping the Bomb on Hanoi. Our building occupations, however, had nothing to do with the mobilization. Some have surmised that militant protest expanded the spectrum of reaction to the War, and made of conservatives liberals and of liberals anti-imperalists. Others claim that we sparked the massive insubordination on the battlefield that forced the withdrawal of American ground troops.

The fact is that we do not know. We did change the minds of much of America, including some of its leaders. But anti-imperialism was certainly more firmly anchored in American consciousness by argument than by acts of bravado. As far as the insubordination is concerned--which, at the time, seemed more like race war--the example came from Malcolm X and the Panthers rather than from college students. In the end, we simply do not know why Nixon and Kissinger decided to end the War. But when that history is written, I suspect that our building occupations will find their place in a footnote.

We did not transform Harvard, we ignored politics, our militant action probably had little effect on the War in Vietnam, and we did not even enjoy ourselves very much. Is there anything that can still be said today for our part in the 1960s?

Politically we certainly asked the wrong questions. A better world does not lie at the end of the road that begins at the administration building door out of which one carries a Dean over one's shoulder. Yet intellectually, autobiographically, we may have asked precisely the right questions. We asked about the role of revolution in politics, the role of force in history. We asked about the importance of action, of the individual in social change. These question, it turns out, are very productive. A serious response requires recourse to intellectual traditions which, though wholly ignored at Harvard are the source of much of contemporary European thought.

It is easy to summarize what we were taught at Harvard. The individual free, in the sense that he makes his own truth, can follow his whims, of whatever does not harm his fellows. For away is the world, it does not change and he cannot change it. He develops his personal vision, creates works that reflect it, and analyzes the individual visions of others.

There are, however, other traditions, individuals are born and substained into society, where freedom is not chiefly frolic, but rather the author, ship of the laws by which one is bound. The individual is not beyond the world but in it. It changes and he can help change it. History is considered in its dynamic, theory seen in practice, philosophy and art as activity, intervention. Intellectual creativity is not only vision but responsibility, not merely social but also intellectual responsibility.

Some of the generation of the 1960s, having lived with struggle and contradiction, through war and in prison, may work through their experiences with what they have learned by responding to these questions. What may be most interesting about our part of the 1960s is not how we changed the world, but how the world changed us. Historians will settle the accounts, but we may not have to wait until then. Perhaps in another 20 years, by our first reunion in the new millennium, we already will know those creations of the generation of the 1960s by which the future will remember us all. And then, of course, we will want to speak again of the meaning of the Harvard Strike of 1969.

Richard Hyland was a member of the 1969 Harvard Strike Committee. He is now a lawyer working for a Washington law firm. The author wishes to thank William Logan and Jay Mark Iwry for their suggestions and encouragement.