Remembrance of Things Past

It started with snow. Most years do; this one was just unusually cooperative. Snow filled January, floating softly through reading period, building up strength and momentum through examinations, inundating semester break. Then came February, with 27 inches of it, and martial law and Army trucks rattling through deserted streets. Snow set the tone for the coming months: this was to be a year of splendid, horrifying, numbing excess.

February's blizzard offered a lesson in humility, if nothing else. Harvard does not take interruptions lightly, even from on high; as Dean Archie Epps had put it during a heavy snowfall the year before, "Harvard University will close only for an act of God, such as the end of the world." The University had not closed because of bad weather since 1938, when a homicidal hurricane boiled up out of the Caribbean and savaged the entire Eastern seaboard, killing hundreds--as close as you might want to get to the end of the world. The blizzard, it was decided, was also a reasonable fascimile.

And so the world ended, at least for three days, while the Army trucks rattled and the blood lines formed and The Duke looked great on television. Harvard was humbled, the Commonwealth was humbled, but everyone dug out. Except Dukakis, who had already done his digging: he had looked great on T.V., and everyone knew this strong-man governor was rolling into November with the throttle open. No stops.

And so February eased into March, with all the niceties that make a month worth living, if not remembering. The snow blackened and turned to crumbs. The Faculty got ready to make itself famous with this beast called a Core Curriculum, and smiled as The Times and half the other newspapers in the country dropped them onto the front page--not the lead story, to be sure, but still down there on the front page, set in a nice conservative block of type.

And so the Core marched forward, through Faculty Council and debate in the full Faculty. It became A Cause: it was the future of Harvard, and also the past, a way of preparing the school to deal with the future, and also redeeming it to fulfill the goals of its hoary liberal-arts tradition. It was a monument to Henry Rosovsky, the man of the future, and a memorial to James B. Conant '14, the man of the past. Conant's death in mid-February hammered home the point; the death of the architect of General Education, the first Harvard president to become a major force in educational theory, could only be met by raising a headstone like the Core. Looking back, looking forward; the Core seemed a bit unsure of its direction. But its backers were not--they would pass it, for sure.

The Core bulled its way into April, carrying the rest of us along with it, but it was hardly the only distraction. Nothing so structured, so rational, could dominate for long; the world needs too much room in which to go mad. This little island in Cambridge, rising with calm through the storm, still could not but hear the raging of the elements outside: Lebanon, Palestine and Italy, where Aldo Moro's bodyguards lay dead, and where Moro himself would, after a series of pathetic letters, pay the Red Brigades' price. No comfort there; the outside looked ugly.

The outside stepped inside in late April. The Core had muscled its way almost to completion, and likewise, the College's first student constitution in nine years had just about been birthed. But for a week no one cared much about them, for it was springtime, and demonstrations were in the air. Thie year the issue was South Africa, and the protests had to be taken seriously.

It's not clear that they were, though. The week passed in a frenzy, all chants and demands and marches and late-night deadlines. Vignettes: Derek Bok's frozen smile as he crossed the Yard, bureaucratic calm amidst a self-righteous storm; Dan Steiner chatting with protestors on the steps of University Hall, a few left-over torches burning down after the year's most spectacular protest march; the bemused set to the jaws of the University policement covering the demos, unsure of how to handle these kids who, they were told but did not quite believe, might try to grab a building at any minute. But then the show ended, reading period stepped up, and it was over. The demonstrators did not get what they wanted, harvard did, and then it was time for burial in Lamont. Reading period can do that.

It does every year. So many things happen during reading period, it seems, because there is no one around to complain; if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, is there noise? Has the tree fallen at all?

A big one fell in early May; the Faculty got its Core, over the objections of some purists who don't like academic structure, and more than a few scientists who wanted to see a little more of their own turf included under the Core. Bok and Rosovsky rejoiced, as did The Times, which trumpeted a new day in liberal-arts education. The Faculty set merrily about its task of building a new bureaucracy to nurse its fledgling new day; Harvard was returning to structure, shaking off the unpleasant, torchlit dreams f late April.

There is nothing like Commencement, however, for waking up from a reading period stupor. There is, as the man once said, "always something" to slap you in the face, to dash a little cold water at you before you start out on a hot summer day. The slap this year came from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who journeyed down from exile in Vermont to pick up an honorary degree and chide America for flabby morals and a lack of purpose. The national press took note, as it usually does when people start talking about morals or anything else at a Harvard Commencement, and even the First Lady took the time to say she thought America was still strong, still moral. But the slap still stung, on into July, which is about when the letters stopped pouring in to the editors of The Globe.

By that time, however, Boston was oblivious to anything occurring outside the vicinity of Landsdowne St. Summer in Boston is, after all, not much more than a humid, sweaty fantasy, two months of radiant heat and soaking t-shirts designed simply to occupy the space between semesters. And to watch baseball, which is far more of an opiate than religion, at least as far as Bostonians are concerned.

And so July was spent, or was wished it had been spent, in the center-field bleachers at Fenway Park, listening to the gentle animal roar of a bemused crowd as Rice would flick his wrists and explode another hanging curve over The Wall, or Evans would dance and whirl through space before seizing a misguided double. Nothing else seemed to matter; Mideast maneuvers and the difficulties of Dr. Peter Bourne with the Controlled Substances Act--all fell below the headlines screaming Yaz's latest heroism, bewailing Lynn's sprained pinky. And Rice continued to explode curveballs, and Evans to dance in right field, and the world was good.

August brought a sickness. No one could be sure--maybe it was Hobson's elbow, maybe Evans's eyes. Or Lee's mouth. Or Zimmer's head. No one knew, but it soon became clear that these gods were mortal, after all, and that perhaps the Yankees--Billy Martin or no--were not. the Boomer would whiff with two men on, and all of a sudden the news became more noticeable. Weeks before Yaz's foul pop settled into Nettles's glove, the fantasy had ended, and the real world was important again.

But the heart had gone out of it. Derek Bok parried with Adm. Turner over Harvard's right to know what the CIA was doing on campus, and Dean Howard Hiatt took it on the chin from the faculty at the School of Public Health, who wanted to know a bit more about how things got done at their own school. The CIA gave Bok the brush-off and Hiatt settled himself down for a bruising power struggle that would determine the direction the school would take in trying to modernize itself. Still, it was late summer, and the woes of bureaucracy held no spark, no charm. Registration was too close.

There was some heart, perhaps: a smiling little man became pope, and caught the imaginations of more than a few scattered millions. Then he, too, died, and life returned to what passes for normal.

Fall carries with it the charm, if that is the word, of politics. Great names are made and broken in October and November, and the making and the breaking is usually enough to banish the doldrums of summer. Certainly the process produces surprises. If apathy and doldrums still lingered in late September, Ed King banished them.

Primary night brought The Duke, the strongman hero of the winter blizzard, up against the reality of his own spectacular lack of popularity. The mellow man in the crew-neck sweater, the man who had looked so great in February, had come a cropper in November, for the simple fact that he was not a likeable man. Dukakis could not campaign well, and Ed King did. King also had the issue.

The issue was tax cuts, stolen from the newspapers out in California, where they lumped it under the unlikely name of Proposition 13. King took the issue and played it like a fine instrument, caressing it and keeping it polished, and he carried it out of the September primary with a mandate to reverse the trend in government toward human services and other "wastes." The clenched fists were raised and a throaty roar went up when Ed King beat the Duke, because his people knew the issue could not lose.

And so the politicians got to work. A lot of them showed up in Cambridge for the dedication of the Kennedy School of Government--although Jimmy Carter and Tip O'Neill were conspicuous by their absence. There was a flash of April anger, as protesters denounced the naming of the school's library after an industrialist who had made his fortune in the South African gold trade. Mark Smith, a black senior, rose to address the crowd on the issue, and he spoke with power and elegance. The crowd applauded and left, to don their tuxes and gowns for the formal ball that night. The politicians went back to their trade.

November brought the inevitable: Ed King's coronation, and the defeat of Ed Brooke, the senator whose personal life had become a continuing feature on the Herald-American's front page. The fists were raised again at King headquarters, the frightening roar resounded, and the circus was over.

The real world faded into the background after that. Jimmy Carter managed to penetrate once in a while, with some new advance or retreat from the principles of Camp David that he and Time magazine had so carefully formulated; largely, however, the concerns of the campus became internal ones. Salmonella ravaged, or at least attempted to ravage, a good number of Houses, and conversation turned to acronyms: CRR, ACSR, HRDC. Life seemed simple.

But of course it isn't, and so of course the headlines began screaming again soon enough: Guyana, Leo Ryan, Jim Jones. Then George Moscone, and sanity and structure gave way to the theater of the absurd. Nothing profound, naturally--simply a reminder that the neat little island remains surrounded by a world that knows and cares little about the gentilities of life in Cambridge.

And so the things have ended, closing out a tough year. Nineteen-seventy-eight wound up producing the Core and a student government, a new governor and two new popes, the ballyhooed hope in the Mideast and the equally ballyhooed horror in South America. And of course the snow--soft and gentle, splendid in its beauty as in its potentially horrible strength