Students and Community Discovering a Common Struggle

Nothing like the student takeover of University Hall had ever hit the city of Cambridge before.

Takeovers, protests and riots were commonplace all around the country in 1969. San Francisco State, Berkeley and Columbia had each had been disrupted, often violently, when students stood up against their schools. But not at Harvard.

Harvard had always been an untouchable, elite institution, maintaining an uneasy coexistence with a large industrial city. City residents tended to be suspicious, if not hostile, to the Harvard community. The University, for its own part, tended to ignore community concerns.

But that situation changed in April 1969, when several hundred students, led by members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), took over the University's main administrative building, calling for an end to campus Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs and Harvard's expansion into the community.

Suddenly, Harvard and the city were forced to take notice of each other.

"It was the first time that town and gown ever came together on issues," recalls City Councillor Saundra Graham, at the time a community activist in the Peace and Freedom Party. "We just felt that [Harvard students] were all these rich, white students who didn't care about social issues."

Graham, who had emerged as a leader in the Black community in the years preceding the strike, had spent her time fighting many of the same issues the students were protesting--the Vietnam war, Harvard's rapid expansion into the predominantly, Black Riverside neighborhood and the city's lack of a rent control law.

In the SDS activists, Graham found an unexpected ally. When students started organizing to protest University policies, she began to talk to them, trying to find a common ground. When the takeover began, she actively supported it, helping to feed the students camped out in the building.

"At that time there was a rapport between the students and the community," she says. "We told them our concerns, and they listened."

Everybody was making demands in 1969. The students in the University Hall takeover had six--divided into two distinct categories. The first three called for the abolition of ROTC and compensation for the students receiving ROTC scholarships. The next three concerned community issues, calling on Harvard to freeze rents in University-owned buildings and to preserve the homes of workers near new University developments at the Kennedy School of Government and the Medical School.

Press coverage at the time gave far more attention to the Vietnam war and the ROTC issues than to the demand that Harvard reassess its role in the community. But the fact that student activists and community activists could come together on any issue signaled a great change in the way Harvard and the city looked at each other.

In the late 1960s, Cambridge was one of the largest industrial centers in the state. Although the two universities--Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--often dominated the scene, it had never really been a "university city."

Many of the city's 100,000 residents viewed the universities with alarm and distrust, particularly as they began to expand and take over local neighborhoods.

"It's a good bet that about half of them--those who proudly label themselves 'lifelong residents of Cambridge'--have muttered the word 'Harvard' like a druid curse at least once in their lives," The Crimson wrote in 1968.

Some city politicians--notably Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci--have practically made careers out of battling Harvard.

Recognizing that the vast expanse of tax-free buildings the University was using for educational purposes could be put to far more profitable uses, Vellucci proposed a variety of "creative" measures to combat Harvard. Among the less well-received proposals of 1968 was Vellucci's plan to bulldoze Harvard Yard to make way for a bus depot.

Harvard's rapid expansion in the 1960s did not help matters. As more students and academics moved into the city, landlords began to divide up apartments and raise rents, often driving out the city's working class tenants.

In January, 1968, a faculty committee headed by Professor of Government James Q. Wilson found that the University community was rapidly displacing local residents, and recommended that Harvard commit itself to creating new housing and recruiting workers from nearby city neighborhoods. The report also called for the creation of a new vice president for external affairs to handle the University's dealings with the city.

"If [Harvard] should be passive and let events take their course, it will implicitly choose a certain type of environment--one, perhaps, in which all Cambridge slowly becomes like Harvard and MIT, until we find that we are no longer an urban university, but one which has allowed there to grow up around itself a kind of inner-city suburb with a single kind of life style, carried on by professors, students, psychiatrists, and the executives of electronics and consulting firms," the Wilson report read.

But University administrators paid little attention to the findings of the Wilson report. In March, 1969, Wilson said that despite his expectations, the report had been "greeted with unusual critical silence."

A month later, the situation had changed. The SDS demands at University Hall--and the subsequent, slightly different platform approved by a meeting of 6000 in Harvard stadium later that week--signaled that students and the city could unite. Harvard could no longer simply ignore its role in the city.

"Before that, we used to say that Harvard students thought "the community was a subway stop somewhere beyond Park St.," says Wesley E. Profit '69, a former president of Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA). "I think it meant that people had to be on guard, that this link between the students and the community had been forged, and you didn't want it to happen again."

"The sense of unity wasn't just ideological," says State Sen. Michael J. Barrett '70 (D-Cambridge). "It was not simply people of a leftist stripe. When armed forces took over a community, there was just as much outrage from the working class community as from the students."

But even though student and community activists often worked for common goals in 1969, they represented a wide range of viewpoints and ideas.

"It was kind of a smorgasbord politics," recalls Charles E. Allen, Jr. '70, who worked in city housing projects for PBHA. "There were very few people who had any kind of coherent world view."

Many city residents were strongly opposed to the student movements, particularly the climate of violence that they brought to Cambridge.

"It had a terrible impact on the city," says City Councillor Walter J. Sullivan, who was mayor at the time. "It was in turmoil and we didn't have too many men to handle the situation."

The day after police--some of them from Cambridge--arrested, and in some cases, beat the students who had taken over University Hall, Sullivan received threats on his life. While no attempt was ever made to kill him, he says he took the threats seriously enough that he and his family left town immediately.

Sullivan says the climate of violence was primarily the result of activist groups from outside the city. Radical fringes of SDS, such as the Weathermen, converged on Cambridge in the late 1960s, as wave after wave of protest and revolt hit the universities.

Community activists like Graham began to openly challenge Harvard. In 1970 Graham staged an open attack on the University's most sacred tradition--the annual Commencement Exercises. With the aid of students, several community activists walked on stage and demanded to meet with President Nathan M. Pusey '28 and the Harvard Corporation.

"We were in about the fifth row from the front," Graham says. "That gave us the attention. Harvard, the Ivy league, the most prestigious college--that makes good headlines."

Nonetheless, Graham says that the spirit of unity created in 1969 was short-lived. She attributes it to a change in the type of student admitted to Harvard in the early 1970s.

"They were conservative, they were white males, and they were Republican," says Graham.

But the events of the year did have some effect on University policy. In September, 1969, Harvard announced a plan to sponsor 389 units of low- and moderate-income housing. And Sullivan says that today the University is much more responsive to city needs.

"They put more time into community efforts now, which they never did before," says Sullivan.

Other changes--not directly linked to the student uprising--forced Harvard to reevaluate the way it dealt with the community. In 1970, the city enacted its current rent control law--designed to put an end to the practice of landlords splitting up apartments and to provide low-cost housing for the city's residents.

Graham took her campaigns off the streets and into the city council in 1971, and eventually entered the State House as a Cambridge representative.

"Rent control, which was originally put forward by Communist students and militant Blacks, has become the dominant issue in city politics," says William B. Cunningham, an activist who worked to get rent control enacted.

Many of the same complaints still exist. Community residents still criticize Harvard's role in the real estate and development markets. For example, Harvard's proposed hotel on the former site of the Gulf Station has ignited once again the charge that the University is ignoring community concerns.

The turbulent events of 1969 thus had few tangible consequences for the city's relationship with its largest landowner. But the short-lived alliance between student and community activists did serve as a benchmark in the way the two groups thought of each other.

"It raised people's consciousness about how the University's run, and how the city's run," says Allen. "It raised student consciousness about themselves and their University and their world."