From Cambridge to Berkeley---'A Wild Year' Nationwide

When Harvard students stormed University Hall, boycotted classes and demanded campus reforms in the spring of 1969, they weren't in the vanguard of the student protest movement.

Instead, the student radicals at Harvard joined an already well-established network of campus movements across the country that had taken on the military-industrial-university establishment with a fervor that eventually found its way to Cambridge.

The Harvard student strike was anything but an isolated event, as it coincided with violent protests at Cornell, San Francisco State, Berkeley, Wisconsin, Michigan and many other universities.

The issues were unique to the particular colleges, but across-the-board they reflected a growing sense of discontent with traditional education and its social implications. Black studies, draft resistance, anti-war protest and community relations dominated the activists' demands, as students joined with progressive faculty and community organizations to challenge the power of the university.

"Nineteen-sixty-nine was a wild year," as students on campuses nationwide poured out of the classrooms and into the streets to protest, says Ronald J. Grele, who is the director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University and recently helped to compile a book on the 1960s student movement.

"Harvard was one of the major strikes in the spring of '69," Grele says, adding that the campus "had one of the largest SDS [contigents] in the country." SDS--Students for a Democratic Society--was a national progressive student organization which helped to spur campus demonstrations nationwide at the height of its membership in the late '60s.

Harvard's SDS chapter of 800 members was active since the mid-'60s, and although sharply divided, it mounted what many former students say was a particularly democratic demonstration. "Unlike Columbia, we did not have leaders or official spokesmen--the media had a hard time figuring out who was quotable," says Jon Weiner, who was a graduate student and SDS member during the strike. "There were meetings of 1000 people every night and different chairpersons every time," Weiner adds.

"The strike was a very clear example of SDS participatory democracy," he says.

The SDS national network contributed to the widespread effect of the 1968 and 1969 student protests. Activist leaders watched events on other campuses, learning new tactics and drawing strength from the others' efforts.

"There was an enormous snowballing effect of campuses following after other campuses," says Andor Skotnes, an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley during 1969 and now a historian at Columbia University.

And Jim Murray, an SDS organizer at Cornell University during the 1969 protests, says that "in 1968, when Columbia happened, people followed that very closely."

At Columbia, nearly 1000 students occupied five administration buildings while several thousand massed outside, virtually shutting down the university. That affair, and the student protests in Mexico and France the year before, may have provided the immediate impetus for Harvard's strike.

"In certain respects, Columbia was the first of a series of protests around campuses; it became the great fear of what could happen," says Molly Nolan, who was a graduate student at Columbia University during the building takeover there.

In fact, Nathan M. Pusey '28, the Harvard president during the 1969 takeover, has said that he sent police into Harvard Yard during the conflict in order to avoid a situation similar to the one at Columbia the previous year. Pusey also says he brought in Law School Professor Archibald Cox '34 to deal with the student demonstrations because he had headed an investigation into the Columbia protest.

In a recent interview, Pusey said, "We had the example of what had gone on down at Columbia as something to give us a little advice about it. The decision from my point of view was very simple. I said, 'Either we get the police and throw these people out right now, or this is going to drag on for weeks and months and it's just not going to stop.'"

But many, including Molly Nolan--who participated in the student protest and was arrested while occupying one of the buildings--continue to disagree with Pusey. She says, "The lesson we should have learned from Columbia '68 was not to send in police [because] it was a particularly brutal event--especially to those outside the building on campus protesting the police."

Nolan, who is now a history professor at New York University, says the takeover was "about conditions at Columbia and the community, and about the school's connections with the military."

But even if Harvard's protest was spurred by the example of Columbia's upheaval of the previous year, the history of student activism that culminated in the large-scale protests of the end of the decade had its roots earlier in the '60s.

Berkeley, for example, traced its protests back to 1963. The administration there had been faced with "almost eight years of dealing with unbroken confrontation," by the time of the massive anti-Vietnam war protests in 1970, says Skotnes.

And, in 1969, the Berkeley fight was over People's Park--a university-owned lot which had been taken over by the community and which the administration wanted to take back for use as a parking lot.

People's Park "became one of the legendary struggles" of the late 1960s, Skotnes says, adding that the debacle resulting in "major street fighting and riots unified campus and community radicals" and led to further demonstrations on a number of other issues.

In the subsequent fight to abolish the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) on campus, Skotnes says "there were very frequent demonstrations that got more and more confrontational. The demonstrations were striking because there was participation by young kids and the confrontation would start, and then all hell would break loose."

But he says, "By April, 1970, the demonstrations became more and more crazy, and there was a powerful sense of apocalypse at Berkeley."

"It was a very, very frightening time," Skotnes says of the the spring of 1970 when there was a student strike at Berkeley. "It was a direct result of Nixon's invading Cambodia and the Kent State [conflict]," where four students were shot and killed by the National Guard during an anti-war demonstration.

"We were dealing with the escalating use of tactics all over the country," Skotnes says. And while the U.S.'s involvement abroad prompted conflict at some campuses, issues closer to home also resulted in confrontations between students and universities.

For example, Black students' demands for Afro-American studies courses and a more relevant curriculum came to a head in 1969 at a number of campuses, including Cornell and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. And at Harvard, too, the Black student groups joined the fray, temporarily aligning themselves with SDS anti-war activists after the University Hall takeover.

"Nineteen-sixty-nine was the year Black students called for Black studies," says Teresa Meade, who was an undergraduate at Wisconsin in 1969 and is now a historian at Union College.

"The issue at a lot of places was Black studies," Grele says. At Cornell, he says, "Black students took over the student union and made Time magazine."

"What was remarkable is that the president and students compromised and there was no violence," Grele says. But, he adds, Cornell's president "got a lot of heat for not coming in and busting heads."

"You saw Black students with guns in the media, but not the 3000 white students in support of them," says Murray, who was a Cornell undergraduate in spring, 1969, when Cornell's Black students took over the student union. But Murray adds that even at the mass demonstrations, "we never got any heavy busts at Cornell because we were well-sheltered by the liberal faculty."

"Because Cornell was so isolated, we never had a situation where the cops came down on us; there was never the kind of crunch that other campuses faced," Murray says.

At Wisconsin, the fight to establish Black studies fueled the movement for a variety of other student causes, eventually resulting in large-scale student protests against the war in Vietnam and the draft.

During the spring and fall of 1969, Wisconsin students held one-day moratoriums where "we demanded that the school close and professors who held classes should discuss what the war meant," Meade says.

Violence, too, marked the protests at Wisconsin, as they had at Harvard and other campuses. "Whenever there was a demonstration, they did not hesitate to bring in the national guard," says Meade.

"In 1970, it became increasingly more violent," Meade says. "I'd never heard of Kent State until that happened," she says, adding, "it scared me a lot, and I was just shocked because they could have shot me."

"Sometimes when I heard something, it was so incredible, I didn't know if I should believe it," Meade says.

The Kent State shootings in 1970 shocked the country and blasted through the illusions of the student protesters whose numbers had swelled as the Vietnam war became more and more unpopular.

But the events at Harvard were perhaps an earlier foreshadowing of the violence to come. The tactics used by the police in arresting the student occupiers of University Hall were widely condemned as excessive and brutal, but Harvard administrators defended the actions, saying that the protesters had threatened the University's basic ability to continue.

"We felt that Harvard was an imperialist force in Cambridge and one of our chants was, 'U.S. out of Vietnam, Harvard out of Cambridge,'" says Temma Kaplan, who was arrested in the University Hall bust. "We had a very strong sense that Harvard was complicitous in the war in Vietnam," she adds.

Kaplan, now director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, wrote for the The Old Mole, an alternative, progressive newspaper on campus that published daily during the takeover.

During the takeover, Kaplan says, "we sort of hoped that [Pusey] would send in the police," although, she adds, "we were a little scared." But, she says, "we saw these guys with shields and we started to giggle because we didn't see ourselves as a threat."

"The police were completely horrible. They played their role to the hilt and they beat up everybody. It was a textbook case of police brutality," says Weiner. "Their strategy was to send in the cops when there would be the fewest witnesses--at 5 a.m."

But despite the violence that shocked the Harvard community, Weiner says the upheaval caused by the SDS takeover here was an important step for the national student movement. He says, "If anti-war students could shut down Harvard, the most prestigious university in the country, then the student anti-war movement was a force to be reckoned with."