Images of Confrontation: Red Fists, Blue Helmets

"They sang radical songs, received wet pieces of linen and instructions for their use against tear gas, and the phone numbers of lawyers who had agreed to defend those arrested.

"At 4:58 a student rushed in and screamed, 'Cops are coming.' A moment later, the shining blue helmets of the Massachusetts State Police could be seen through the windows."

--The moment of confrontation as described in a Crimson extra of Thursday, April 10, 1969.

A surging mob, clothed in the nondescript chic of their politics and their youth. Posters of red fists, clinched in defiance. A carnival of long hair and bell bottoms juxtaposed against the strict lines and austere faces of the oil paintings in the Faculty room.

And then a hazy, pre-dawn light. The blue helmets of the police, the singing of the students. One set of invaders met another.

The images of April 9 and 10, 1969.

When several hundred students, led by members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), did what had never been done at Harvard and took over University Hall.

When Harvard did what had never been done at Harvard and called the police in to arrest its students.

"The buildings [of Harvard] will remain, but the soul will be gone," said then-Dean of the Faculty Franklin L. Ford, as the students ejected him and the other deans from their University Hall offices in protest over Harvard's continued ties with the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and its expansion in the city.

The images of that confrontation are frozen, immobile. They are the demarcation line between Harvard then and now. Twenty years later, the story seems unbelievable. It is inconceivable that it could have happened here.

And yet, the divisions of that time, the debates and the collective anguish of students and police locked in combat over a Harvard building are still here. It is only that we see the results every day without remembering what it was that happened.

There was blood on the sidewalk in the Yard. There were press conferences, endless faculty meetings. "The New College" convened outside; the old college caucused indoors. Black students marched, SDS marched, moderate students marched.

And there were changes. ROTC was voted off campus by the faculty, an Afro-American Studies Department was voted in. Dean Ford, sidelined by a stroke one week after the takeover, eventually resigned his position. So did Dean of the College Fred Glimp '50.

Two years later, President Nathan M. Pusey '28 stepped down, and Law School Dean Derek C. Bok, who won praise during the student uproar for his moderate stance, assumed the University's top post.

The list of pre- and post-strike changes is endless. Some major, some minor.

For example, 17 Quincy St. is no longer the home of Harvard's presidents--its location makes it a prime, easily accessible target for student sympathetic to student demands and believedthat the University should become more"democratic" and the other representing those whowere more interested in maintaining the statusquo.

"They called themselves the liberal caucus andus the conservative caucus," says Maass. "Wepreferred to call ourselves the responsible caucusand them, the irresponsible caucus."

The faculty in-fighting continued throughoutthe spring and for a good part of the next year,as the FAS shaped a new system for facultygovernance and created a permanent--andpermanently controversial--committee to overseecampus discipline.

Pusey, concerned about the intense divisionswithin the faculty, had created a Committee onRestructuring in February, 1969 to investigatemethods for creating a new faculty governancesystem. Led by Pforzheimer University ProfessorMerle Fainsod, the group was composed largely ofmembers from the conservative caucus.

"I kind of lost my faith in the faculty,because they didn't make the decisions along theline and they let this thing fester until it gotto the point where you had to have real surgery,"Pusey said in a recent interview.

Before 1969, the faculty was overseen by theCommittee on Educational Policy (CEP), a groupwhose membership was appointed by the dean of theFaculty. When specific issues needed to be lookedat, the dean would appoint a special committee toinvestigate.

"[The dean] had to convince the faculty thattheir general views were represented, butnonetheless, he appointed the committees," Maasssaid. "But there developed a demand that thestructure become more democratic."

Faculty members say there was a growing feelingwithin their ranks that unless the faculty hadsome elective governance structure, only thoseprofessors whose views were parallel to then-DeanFord's would be represented. As well, many of theyounger faculty members believed that studentdemands for increased involvement in the runningof FAS should be met.

After all the debates of the previous spring,the Pusey-appointed Fainsod Committee finallypresented its report to the faculty in the earlyfall of 1969. Professors say that the FainsodReport was almost entirely amended after intensedebate to create the Faculty Council, the18-member elected faculty body which is still thecentral structure for faculty governance.

Some professors contend that the most importantchange resulting from the creation of the FacultyCouncil was the institutionalization of thestudent input to faculty decision-making. Underthe terms of the agreement, seats were reserved onvarious faculty committees for studentrepresentatives.

Students, however, continued to assert thatthey were not adequately represented, and mostradicals felt that even the most 'liberal'professors did not really have students' interestsat heart during the protracted debates aboutgovernance.

Still, faculty members contend that the changeswere important steps towards democratizing FAS'structure. Yet some professors say now that thechanges in the faculty could have occurred lesspainfully if professors had not been as concernedabout the militant political mood of the students.

By the early 1970s, the liberal andconservative caucuses had ceased to meetseparately, faculty meetings had returned to theFaculty Room in University Hall, and attendance atthe meetings dropped off to its normal, sparselevel.

But faculty members are still quick to add thatthe tensions which divided them in the spring of1969 did not die quickly. "It took some years forthe faculty to recover from the intensity of thedissents and disagreements that divided us thatyear," Maass says