A Sit-In, a Raid, a Strike

discontent. And The Crimson is no longer the only student newspaper on campus.

But while we can understand the changes, understand them in the context of the University that we know today, the "carnival-like" atmosphere of what has variously been described as the spring of student liberation and the months of University disaster is harder to grasp.

Harvard was not shut down--but it was different.

During the two-day takeover and the three-day student strike that followed, classes didn't happen. Or they went outside. Black students held colloqiua of their own, because Harvard's curriculum didn't address "relevant issues." Striking teaching fellows met for rap goups in what became known as the "Harvard New College."

Those students who did attend class had to cross picket lines--at the height of the strike, two-thirds of the student body observed the boycott.

A strike office, headquartered in the offices of sympathetic faculty in Emerson Hall, was the nerve center of the operation--guerrilla theater, thousands of leaflets, nightly meetings, "political brigades" all emanated from the crowded rooms in Emerson.

But even as political activity enfolded the campus, day-to-day life continued. The Crimson's front-pages from 1969 are marked with conflict and court cases, bold headlines and political strife, but scattered throughout the old newspapers are play notices and sports stories, advertisements for movies and cars.

The strike itself bred a culture, as the University adapted itself to the uproar. Professors placed notices in the newspaper, urging students to attend class or noting that mid-terms were cancelled, section meetings changed.

One notice, for Natural Science 4, read, "Dr. Thach requests that you show up for a class meeting on Wednesday and Friday morning. Discussion topics, whether scientific or otherwise, will be decided democratically."

An oblique, but fitting, reminder of how Harvard responded to the crisis that saw its troubles splashed across the front covers of Time and Life magazines.

The conflict, the upheaval was real. It divided the faculty into factions that often affect debate even today. It prompted President Pusey to justify the police actions because "the future of the University was at stake." It sent more than 100 Harvard and Radcliffe students to a Cambridge city jail.

But there was a humor to the confrontation, too. One classified advertisement read: "Missing: Striped straw bag, left in University Hall during the bust. Contains library books, i.d.'s, etc."

The bag probably never was returned to its owner. Lost in the scuffle between police and students. But there was a hope in the notice placed in The Crimson, as though the sense of community had not died, but had simply changed.

"There were a lot of different ideas [that spring], but we were of the generation of 'let a thousand flowers bloom,'" says Temma Kaplan, a Harvard graduate student who was arrested in University Hall. "But things got rougher after the Harvard strike. We stopped dancing. Things got more ideological."