Complex Problems; No One Had Answers

It was September 15, 1963--four days before the freshmen were officially to become freshmen--that the class of 1967 undertook its first collective venture. Trunks still lay open in the bare rugless living rooms, and strange smells of mothballs, home-baked cookies and detergent mixed ungracefully with the fragrance of Indian Summer in the Yard. Outside Stoughton, under the quickly darkening sky, twenty-five of the new arrivals plotted with furtive relish their first attack on the 'Cliffie: a Panty Raid.

The mere idea would now mortify the fifty or so who eventually joined the group, but the results on that occasion were doubly humiliating. The freshmen soon lost their way, and wandered vainly down dark side-streets, wondering how any girl could ever be worth so long a trip. Their ranks thinned, and their enthusiasm diminished at every turn--until finally in desperation they arrived at a large brick building that had all the trappings of a women's dormitory: gardens, flower-potted windows, matching curtains, etc.

It turned out, however, to be the Continental Hotel, and their urgent entreaties to the windows brought forth only the doorman, who told them with bewildered politeness to get the hell off the property.

The failure was ominous. For, in addition to being the class' first collective venture, it also proved one of the last. With a few minor exceptions, the class of 1967 did not gather again in any joint activity until Commencement. The Harvard experience did not encourage any sort of class identity or consciousness. As freshmen moved out to the Houses, they drew friends and ideas from the classes above them; and they passed many of these to the classes that followed.

Being "Serious"

In a more significant, perhaps symbolic sense, that still-born raid on Radcliffe reflected the premature end of a certain frivolous irresponsibility. The class of '67 soon learned that the business of being a student was serious stuff and that to be taken seriously (a major criteria for all action), students would have to allow commitment, and involvement.

One very important form of commitment was to social and political action. This was one last class to enter Harvard while Kennedy was President and the first to feel the direct intrusion of the war in Vietnam on the University. Kennedy brought most of its members to political consciousness. As juniors in high school, they watched his long campaign to the White House, his urgent calls for an awakening after the long sleep of the fifties, his stirring inaugural and the first one-thousand days in office. Most of them felt the frustration of his failures in Congress on domestic legislation, as well as the bitter grief of his death. After 1964, the Vietnam war came to dominate almost all political activity and discussion, deepening that frustration with the established processes of government.

Like the classes which preceeded it, this one broadened the scope of student activism, involvement in the University community and national politics. Many members went south in the summer of 1964 to participate in sit-ins, pickets and other civil rights organizing in Mississippi. In one form or another, almost all were drawn into the Vietnam debate; increasingly, they signed petitions, or marched; and, increasingly, they turned against the war.

More Than a Minority

Activism spread beyond a small minority. On other campuses, the broad majority might still be silent, leading Clark Kerr to claim that a few noisy malcontents had exaggerated the dissatisfaction of this college generation. At Harvard, however, political and social activism--expressed in a variety of service in the slums as well as anti-war demonstrations in the Cambridge streets--became an important class-wide phenomenon. Though there were outstanding individuals, one of the things which impressed Dean Monro about his last senior class at Harvard was the "breadth of involvement."

More activities became politicized at Harvard than ever before. As a result of the war in Vietnam and civil rights, even theatre and literature acquired increasingly political meaning. Writers and Loeb-wonks joined the protests and signed the "We Won't Go" petition, as the draft threatened to puncture the protective walls of the University.

The differences in terms of activism between this class and the most recent preceeding ones were mainly in degree, not kind. The lack of any clear demarkation in these trends between classes meant that movements and causes spilled over from one year to another.

Powerlessness

And yet, certain important aspects of this activism, though born in other classes, have come to fruition in this one. What was most significant about the commitment and involvement in the class of '67 was not so much the range or depth of participation -- which, after all was a characteristic of activism throughout the sixties--but rather the sense of frustration and impotence which it produced.

The activists of '67 leave college with a far more profound sense of the limitations to political action, in many cases a feeling of dismay and disillusionment. Some of them have moved from dissatisfaction with one aspect of the system to a much, broader, radical critique. But even those who accept the present social machinery for decision-making have become keenly aware of the compromises and sacrifices which must be made for the sake of "effectiveness." Among both radicals and moderates, there is a greater appreciation of the strength of forces resisting change, the ambiguities of problems and the failure of pure morality to provide any politically relevant solutions.

Perhaps their activist predecessors also gradually learned of the complexities of power, and became frustrated in the prcoess. But for other classes, one senses, the fact of commitment and activism was more important than the immediate consequences. That is, the experience was in some way its own reward. Eventually, it was assumed, the system would yield; the movement for change would spread from the "prophetic minority" to students across the country; the clear demonstration of injustice and stupidity would reach the conscience of the nation and bring pressure to bear on the government. The experience in the south, where nonviolent demonstrations clearly distinguished the forces of evil from the forces of rightness, encouraged students to believe that the government could be prodded into substantive social reform. There was still hope that the Administration would negotiate some solution to the war, or that public opinion might once again be mobilized.

The Persistent Problems

The student activists of the past two years, however, have seen the limited success of civil rights legislation in the south, and the outright failure of attempts to end discrimination in the north. They have learned painfully the imperviousness of the government to persuasion by protest on Vietnam. In dealing with both of these problems, they have lacked the black and white issues which made confrontation possible. The facts no longer speak for themselves; it is no longer a matter of demonstrating the situation of discrimination or war to the rest of the country. The "war machine," the "system," the opponents of equal opportunity -- all appear much larger and better masked than they did before.

Few classes have entered Harvard with more faith in government (stirred by calls to action from a young, vigorous leader) but few have left with less. The ineffectiveness of activism among moderates, particularly in altering the course of the war, has caused many to become far more concerned with the "system" itself--the total distribution of power. If the power structure would not yield to reasonable demands and if real authority was somehow masked, then those who sought to gain reform would have to first figure out how the system worked. The most important goal would be to alter the distribution of power, rather than achieve immediate substantive ends.

This concern paralleled trends in other parts of society -- in the civil rights movement, for example, where leaders became more concerned with registering Negro voters than with desegregating public places; or in state government, where one of the major issues became the distribution of power between urban and rural areas. The Berkeley explosions gave impetus to demands that the students themselves be allotted some kind of control over curriculum and living conditions. In their last year, a number of students in this class helped make student participation in University decision-making an important issue, leading Dean Monro to devote a day-long hearing with a visiting Overseers Committee to the subject.

Control

Not all of this concern with the "power of power" resulted from the frustrations of political ineffectiveness. Much of it was inspired by a much more personal feeling among individuals that they were losing control over their own lives, that somehow decisions about the quality of life now belonged to huge inhuman bureaucracies over which they had no influence. The "bigness" of modern organizations led students to be far more concerned with preserving their autonomy, finding ways of living that would leave them as much control as possible and allow them to relate "meaningfully" to other human beings. Though few supported the conservatives on specific policies, many shared the out aversion to the "dehumanizing," all-pervasive power of modern corporations and government.

The concern about autonomy and the quality of life permeated almost every aspect of college activity. It applied to political activity but, even more importantly, to career choices, decisions about graduate school, the draft and off-campus living. It was associated, in general, with an aversion to manipulation, a distaste for shows of force or power over other men and women. One of the things which bothered them most about the country's behavior in Vietnam, for example, was the high-handed imposition of American values and way of life on another people.

Many came to distrust people who wanted to "change" other people, suspecting that many of these reformers were trying to prove the superiority of their goals to themselves as much as to their subjects. In social service, they wanted to learn as well as teach--open new opportunities to Negroes in Roxbury, or criminals in local prisons, but a so absorb new perspectives and perceptions. Their doubts about the "system" thus led them to seek wisdom from those who had been kicked out of it, the men and women who had been denied a place in that great race up the middle odalss ladder and who had learned to get along without it. It was less a rejection of the old values and goals than a concern for searching out new alternatives, less a need to avoid being middle class (which most of them could not do anyway) than for remaining receptive to adventures and commitments that would make middle class life more satisfying.

Learning to Live

Along with these doubts about the old goals, and the aversion to imposing them on other people, there was also a very strong sense that such objectives (whatever they were in specifics) must be made more relevant to the process of living. There seemed to be less reason to aim at all the conventional ends -- money, a house in the suburbs, the top job in the bureaucracy, etc.--if the process of of getting there was frustrating and dehumanizing. Rather than getting somewhere, more people set about to lcarn how one could enjoy the process of living. Only a few, of course, shared completely the spirit of the Bein. But many shared partly (even if unknowingly), and many more sympathized.

There was, all in all, a shortening of time horizons, a demand that things be made more worthwhile in the present. Somehow people had been saving since the pioneer days and the era of industrialization, with the assurance that the returns on all this investment would produce happiness and satisfaction. But the activists of the sixties, who had been born with the returns already in hand, found satisfaction neither in the increasing abundance of consumer goods, nor in the saving which made it possible.

Having known only affluence--with out having worked for it themselves--they saw an emptiness and crassness in material wealth; they criticized the arrogance and insensitivity of the world that this drive for abundance had produced. Although more and more students came to Harvard from lower-middle income families, fewer and fewer went to Business School and into business.

The concern for the present, then, did not focus so much on consumption as it did on creative or intellectually satisfying experience--again, individual autonomy and the quality of life. As the activists made the University a force for change in society, a growing number of students duplicated the life-styles of creative adults while still at college. In addition to studying and taking exams, they played newspapermen (with all the hard-bitten, aggressive story-mongering of real journalism), or actors (all the back-biting, trauma and brilliance of the real stage), or writing (all the intense competition, as well as talent, of literary circles beyond Cambridge). Students generally favored roles which would allow them to be their own boss--at college and, even more importantly, in careers afterward. More went to law and medical schools than ever before. Also increasing was the number going on to graduate school and into academia, where employees (after they reached a certain level) could plan their courses, writing, and lecturing as they pleased.

Drugs

Other students, shortening time horizons in a different direction, sought to heighten the quality of sensual and mental experience with hallucinegenic drugs or marijuana. Their drug-taking was often seen as a form of escaping or opting out of the system. But most of those who experimented with drugs--and itwas pre-