Radicalism Not the Spirit of '76

Colorful banners hung off of Mass. Hall. Student protesters yelled out the occupied building’s windows. First-year residents in the Yard complained about the noise as the occupation continued. The Faculty caucused as the Yard gradually turned from brown to green. Rumors of a strike by University workers over low wages swirled around campus.

The year was 1972, though, not 2001.

And as members of the Class of 1976 wandered around Harvard as pre-frosh in the spring of 1972, many thought they would be attending a radical and active campus—as witnessed by the campus protests over University investment in Africa and over graduate student protests over pay.

In fact, the activism by members of the black community convinced a reluctant pre-frosh William G. Fletcher, Jr. ’76 to attend.

“I was very inspired by [the protests]. It was good to see that there were students who were active,” says Fletcher, who explains that he had been a “radical” ever since reading Malcolm X’s autobiography at 14.

However, the protests in the spring of 1972 perhaps misrepresented a College whose days of dramatic radical social protests were numbered.

The 1,137 members of the Class of 1976 who matriculated in the fall of 1972 found a campus tired of a decade of social protest and upheaval, and a student body increasingly willing to work with, not against, the administration.

Members of the Class of 1976—born in the early 1950s, raised during the turbulent ’60s—found a world still coming to grips with itself.

“The students in the ’70s were interested in looks and material possessions less and social causes more,” Aliza Karney Guren ’76 recalled. “We were raised with Women’s lib, Civil Rights and Vietnam.”

By 1972, however, the protesters found that they had won many of their former causes: the U.S. was withdrawing its troops from Vietnam, the drinking age had been lowered to 18, and—more locally—Harvard and Radcliffe had ended their rigid male-female admissions ratios and, starting with the Class of 1976, both male and female first-years lived in the Yard.

“The de-escalation of the war had the biggest impact in making the campus less politically active,” Dennis J. Saffran ’76 says.

The End of Vietnam

Perhaps the largest change, class members say, was that their high school class, the Class of 1972, was the first not to face a draft upon graduation.

Although a final lottery for the draft was conducted in February 1972, no new draft calls were made in 1972 or 1973.

Without the fear of a military posting to Southeast Asia hanging over their heads, the Class was content to watch the war wind down on television—even during the final campaigns of the controversial war.

Joel F. Feldman ’76 recalls one wintery day walking out of Holyoke Center and finding a one-man protest against the Christmas bombing campaign in Vietnam in 1972.

“It was a surreal image of this one lone man on a snowy night, beating his drum, playing his harmonica and holding a ‘Stop the Bombing’ sign. There was no mass protest,” he says.

A general apathy settled over campus in the early ’70s, alumni say, as the nation and the student protest movement turned inward to lick its wounds and both focused on the growing scandal surrounding Watergate and President Nixon.

Watergate

Even Watergate—arguably the largest political scandal in American history—failed to ignite the Harvard campus.

While the campus saw some small, scattered protests calling for Nixon’s impeachment, most students watched passively from their rooms as the Watergate drama unfolded.

“Being at Harvard, I think the majority of students of my class had a very cynical perspective of Nixon to begin with,” Feldman says.

“We all figured that of course he had done these wrongs. We weren’t really surprised,” Mary Johnson Osirim ’76 says.

Much of the drama of Watergate unfolded in the summer of 1974, while school was out of session, possibly explaining the lack of campus interest in the drama.

“Everyone was monolithically anti-Nixon; people on campus were euphoric about the outcome,” Saffran says.

Where Did the Revolution Go?

In fact, campus politics had ebbed to the point that it seemed inconceivable to many students that just years before the Square had been rocked by riots and that final exams had been cancelled.

“By the time we arrived at Harvard, the time students collectively thought they could make a difference had waned,” Feldman says.

For students who came expecting to find the Revolution still in full-swing—with the street corners and sidewalk cafes alive with the radical New Left—the actual apathy on campus was saddening.

“If anything disappointed me, it was that students were much less politically active,” Saffran says. “We viewed 1969 as the good ole days.”

The politics had not changed, though, just the level of action. Saffran, who served as the head of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), says his organization was considered by many to be one of the more conservative political groups on campus.

When he arrived on campus, the College Democrats were as “far-right” as any of the organizations.

“It was mind-boggling that anyone would be dealing with the established political parties,” he explains.

But as the ’70s passed—Watergate came and went, Saigon was abandoned and Nixon resigned—college students became more and more willing to work within the institutions that their predecessors had fought and protested so vigorously.

“We became more focused on the electoral process and less on the ‘Overthrow,’” Osirim says.

The Institute of Politics (IOP), then only about six years old, led the way for many students to get involved in more formal ways.

In 1975, the IOP began its internship program, allowing students to spend the summer working on Capitol Hill or the White House. By its second year, during the summer of ’76, more than 220 students participated in the program, eight of which were sponsored financially by the IOP.

Guren was one of several IOP Associates who, in January 1973, helped inaugurate the orientation program for newly elected congressmen—many of whom were elected on a platform of cleaning government up after the Watergate scandals.

Even the established political parties began to make a comeback on campus. The Harvard Republican Club (HRC) saw the largest growth in its history during the early ’70s, as the group grew from 35 members to over 400 members. Both the HRC and the College Democrats recruited busloads of students to dispatch across New England in the fall of 1972 and in 1974 for get-out-the-vote efforts during the November elections.

Similarly, black student groups organized in ’72 and ’74 to send students down to southern states to campaign for black candidates.

“The support for candidates of color was particularly strong,” Osirim says.

However, student support for working within institutions to exact change stretched only so far.

At several Commencements in the early 1970s, students from the Business School were booed by College students when they stood to receive their diplomas.

“There was still an anti-corporate, anti-establishment bias in many members of our class,” Osirim says.

Radical Remnants

Overall, though, the number of hard-core activists on campus had fallen from about 400 at its peak in 1969 to less than 200 in the mid-1970s, according to University estimates—but students were active in the radical movements on campus say they never felt isolated.

“The politically active students didn’t feel that we were a fringe, and we weren’t treated like a fringe,” Fletcher recalls. “The broader body recognized that radicalism had a legitimacy at Harvard. There was interest in what was going on.”

Radical students did find an outlet in a cause familiar to Harvard students today: labor wages and workers’ rights.

On the West Coast, Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers led boycotts of grapes and lettuce to protest workers’ conditions and low pay—causes which groups at Harvard picked up on.

Harvard students picketed the Harvard Provision Co. because it sold several kinds of non-union wine, and sporadic demonstrations broke out.

Chavez himself came to Boston in 1973, leading a protest march along the Freedom Trail in Boston, in support of his UFW boycott of A&P supermarkets.

On campus, black students protested to support the fledgling African-American studies department and the W.E.B. Dubois Institute—both of which faced administrative assaults during the Class of 1976’s time at Harvard.

“It did a raise a lot of consciousness. Many people who were involved went on to be involved in the national fight for social justice,” Fletcher says.

As the years passed, though, perhaps the biggest change occurred as students graduated and entered the workplace, Fletcher says.

“Those who came in the late 60s tried very hard to make a connection between their politics at Harvard and their occupations,” Fletcher explains. Many politically active students in the classes before him went on to become doctors or lawyers. As the ’70s progressed, however, Fletcher says more students began to adopt an “I’m going after the money” attitude and went into financial careers.

“Even for those that were politically active there was a complete disconnect between their work at Harvard and what they did after school,” Fletcher says.

Indeed, while some members of the Class remain active in the same causes as they at Harvard—Fletcher works for the AFL-CIO—for many members of the Class of 1976, their politics have been an evolving process.

Saffran, once head of the DSOC, is now running for City Council in northeast Queens, N.Y.—as a conservative Republican.

—Staff writer Garrett M. Graff can be reached at ggraff@fas.harvard.edu.