April '69 Shaped Harvard's Relations With Cambridge

The radical protests that swept the University in April 1969 soon spilled outside the ivy walls into the city, shaping Harvard's relation with Cambridge for years to come.

Harvard students at the time emerged from "the ivory tower and became interested in all sorts of issues," says Barbara J. Ackermann, a former Cambridge mayor who served as a city councillor in 1969.

While students protested against the Vietnam War mobilized for civil rights, they also became concerned with problems closer to home, including Harvard's role in developing the community it shares with Cambridge.

Some undergraduates began studying the effects of Harvard's real estate expansion on the city's resident, former Cambridge officials say.

"There was a two- pronged concern by the student body of Harvard," says Alfred L. Vellucci, who was the mayor of Cambridge in 1969. "One was the Vietnam War and two [was] housing for poor people."

During an April 15 rally in Soldiers Field, 6,000 students and faculty included in their demands that the University freeze rent on Harvard-owned property. The Protesters also urged the Harvard Corporation to place limits on its real estate expansion into Cambridge.

Encouraged by student interest in the city, Cambridge residents also took it upon themselves to voice their concerns to the university.

"There seemed to be a lot of correlation that was going on between all the movements," says Alice K. Wolf, Cambridge mayor from 1990 to 1992. "The activist students [came] into contact with, and sympathized with, some of the activists in the community."

Wolf says the new militant atmosphere that pervaded both the city and the University allowed Cambridge resident Saundra Graham to stage a protest at the 1970 Commencement.

Graham. chair of the Riverside planning Team, marched on stage during the Commencement ceremonies and, in front of 40,000 spectators, demanded a meeting with Harvard Corporation members.

Graham's organization had been protesting Harvard housing policies in Riverside, an area of the city near the newly-erected Mather House.

"So there two non-violent protests" Ackermann says of the University Hall sit-in and Graham's takeover of Commencement. "They were non-violent but extremely disturbing.

Pressured by both student and city activists, the University began to listen to the concerns of the Cambridge community, says Ackermann, author of You the Mayor? The Education of a City Politician.

For a start, the University created a new vice-presidential position for community relations. And Harvard agreed to build low-income housing units around Cambridge.

"The Harvard Corporation started taking the neighborhood and the city's complaints about Harvard expansion seriously," Ackermann says.

But Wolf says that in the era of radical protests, it was more convenient for Harvard to agree to the activists' demands than to fight them.

"I think large institutions faced with rebellion often will look at ways to mitigate those," says Wolf, who is now a fellow at the Institute of Politics. "It may be that both Harvard and MIT found a fairly inexpensive way of trying to respond to the criticism which was not only in the University but in the community ."

Whatever the motivations behind the Corporation's new policies towards the city, officials say a more favorable relationship developed between Harvard and the surrounding Cambridge community.

"Out of it all came, I believe, better understanding and relations between Harvard and the city of Cambridge ," Vellucci says.