Moving From One Set Of Promises to Another

It seemed so majestic, this Harvard College, its ancient ivy draping dignity around us--yes, we were children, raw, terrified, ebullient--as we arrived prepared to devour the world.

We did not know on that muggy, homesick, thrilling day in the fall of 1967 that in a year the blood of classmates--some beaten unconscious by state police (remember their baby blue helmets?)--would stain the steps of University Hall. We had not yet smelled the acrid burn of tear gas wafting down Mt. Auburn Street or cowered in a room in Adams House as angry cops pointed up at our windows with guns that I still picture (in hazy, confused memory) as pointed and shiny, gleaming like bayonets.

It seemed so serene, this Radcliffe College, so safe and cozy, with milk and cookies every Saturday night for the girls who did not have dates and plenty of rules (remember parietals?) protecting the chastity of girls who did. We did not know that strange dislocated freshwo/man year--when boys were allowed in our rooms only on Sunday afternoons (with the door open)--that in a year our roommate's boyfriend would be a permanent guest, that in two years the dorms would be co-ed.

One year we had curfews and were disciplined if we signed in late; the next year we had naked co-ed swimming in the Adams House pool. (Remember the administration's objection to co-ed living? Not morality but amenities: The Radcliffe dorms simply were not nice enough for Harvard men. And the 'Cliffe was so far--how could those boys walk?--I guess we'd better authorize a bus.)

It seemed so noble, this great university that welcomed us (us!) into the community of educated men (men!); we never doubted (yes, we were children) that our university was good. We did not know that soon we would doubt it; that we would recoil in horror from what we came to see as Harvard's complicity--Robert McNamara, Samuel Huntington, Henry Kissinger '50--in what we came to see as an immoral war. Remember the war?

"The shame I feel at belonging to the same species as the men who thought up our little adventure is bad enough," my friend David Hollander '71, now a retired attorney and gay activist, wrote 25 years ago in The Crimson, "but to think that I actually enrolled in a school that trains such beasts."

We entered college, the Harvard/Radcliffe class of 1971, so ready, or not, prepared, or not...but it did not matter, ready or not, the change had already begun.

"A lot of us went in with one set of expectations and came out with another," says Deborah Johnson '71, my Adams House roommate and lifelong friend. "I got there believing that I was getting a good education in order to be a good wife--I really believed that. By junior year, it was all blasted away."

The fripperies--parietals, coats and ties in the Freshman Union, Jolly-Ups (remember Jolly-Ups?)--simply faded away, pathetic relics. The war, fighting the war--fighting against the war--engulfed us. We were fighting to change the world. We held sit-ins and mill-ins and teach-ins, marched in protest to Boston Common and past the White House, went on strike, boy-cotted finals, spoke frequently of revolution...and yes, I do remember, we were young.

Look, I don't know what to tell you. I think that maybe my view of that time is hopelessly warped. I know that people went to class, played frisbee on the Radcliffe Quad and fell in love, but I remember running through Harvard Yard, barefoot because my sandals fell off and I was too scared to stop, fleeing the cops swinging night-sticks, crying, fleeing the blood.

They pulled a kid out of a wheelchair and beat him, I remember that.

I know that people wrote honors theses, ate roast beef specials at Elsie's, joined the football team (I think we had one), but I remember the eight demands ("Smash ROTC, no expansion.").

Harvard changed my life, I guess, but not in the way I--or Harvard--had imagined. And maybe it wasn't Harvard anyway; maybe it was just the time.

Or both: the ordinary Harvard arrogance combined with the special arrogance of the time until we really believed--or I believed--not just that the world had to change but that we had to change it.

It's kind of embarrassing to be writing this, 25 years later. Our college years and our protests seem both real and unreal, surreal (Oh yes, we did take lots and lots of drugs. Remember drugs?). So many of our chants and speeches--I've been poring through torn, yellowing Crimsons--seem just as naive and self-important as the grown-ups always said.

But our opposition to the war was real. The bombs and napalm were real. College students protesting, just like us, were shot to death at Kent State and Jackson State. The draft was real. (Remember the lottery, the chilling numbers, the saved and the damned? I wonder if there's a man in our class who doesn't remember his lottery number today.) The anger, the passion were real.

"I still think of Vietnam as one of the defining political events of my life," says Johnson, a former T.V. news producer about to launch a second career. "Being at Harvard during those years and feeling that the institution had contributed so many strategists to the war gave it an immediacy I might not have felt in a more detached campus. I was deeply angry then; I find those wells of anger still tappable in discussions of the war now."

Other classmates--sharing thoughts on our class' new e-mail discussion list--agree.

"All in all, I remember our years in college as a very dark time," writes Gregg Kilday '71, a writer for Entertainment Weekly. "The war was always hanging over our heads. There was always some moral issue that had to be wrestled with, debated, resolved...I suspect we were cheated out of some of our youth--which is actually a small complaint when so many others in our generation lost their lives."

And Thomas McLeod '71, now a hospice chaplain, comments, "For me it was a loss of innocence which probably would have come one way or another. But to have it shredded away by a bloody inane immoral political game-war was an especially rude loss of innocence."

I don't know. For me, despite the memories tinged with blood, college was not so much a dark time as an exhilarating one. I loved the sense that we could--we must--make a difference, and I miss it.

In a way, I think I was glad to lose my innocence. I was glad to be in a cyclone, on the cusp of something new.

How new was it really? That's harder to answer.

Miles Kahler '71, a professor of international relations at the University of California at San Diego, posted an unsettling question on our class' e-mail list: "If we had arrived at Harvard/Radcliffe in 1957 or 1977 with exactly the same families and previous education, how different would we be today?"

In many ways--as anyone studying the Class of 1971's 25th Anniversary Report would have to conclude--the answer is not very different at all. Most of us are living the prosperous, satisfied lives expected of Harvard grads.

In other ways, particularly for women, the difference was profound. Feminism really Was a cyclone. It hit Radcliffe (and later Harvard) some-where around our junior year. Women 10 years older went through college without it; women 10 years younger never doubted it. But we, the women of '71, we were tossed up in the air by the cyclone, and some of us never came down.

I'm glad we went to college when we did. We were in at some beginnings, feminism, the "sexual revolution," environmentalism, gay liberation just around the corner--and at least one ending.

As Kahler points out, I think we took our country's economic prosperity for granted. We had lots of plans, or no plans at all, on graduation day, but I don't remember anyone worrying about money. Our goals were higher, broader, shinier (and oh yes, we were young).

It seemed so full of promise, this Harvard College, this Radcliffe College. We didn't know--how could we know?--which promises would be kept.

Carol R. Sternhell '71 was managing editor of The Crimson in 1970. She is currently a professor of journalism at New York University.

"The shame I feel at belonging to the same species as the men who thought up our little adventure is bad enough," my friend David Hollander '71, now a retired attorney and gay activist, wrote 25 years ago in The Crimson, "but to think that I actually enrolled in a school that trains such beasts."

We entered college, the Harvard/Radcliffe class of 1971, so ready, or not, prepared, or not...but it did not matter, ready or not, the change had already begun.

"A lot of us went in with one set of expectations and came out with another," says Deborah Johnson '71, my Adams House roommate and lifelong friend. "I got there believing that I was getting a good education in order to be a good wife--I really believed that. By junior year, it was all blasted away."

The fripperies--parietals, coats and ties in the Freshman Union, Jolly-Ups (remember Jolly-Ups?)--simply faded away, pathetic relics. The war, fighting the war--fighting against the war--engulfed us. We were fighting to change the world. We held sit-ins and mill-ins and teach-ins, marched in protest to Boston Common and past the White House, went on strike, boy-cotted finals, spoke frequently of revolution...and yes, I do remember, we were young.

Look, I don't know what to tell you. I think that maybe my view of that time is hopelessly warped. I know that people went to class, played frisbee on the Radcliffe Quad and fell in love, but I remember running through Harvard Yard, barefoot because my sandals fell off and I was too scared to stop, fleeing the cops swinging night-sticks, crying, fleeing the blood.

They pulled a kid out of a wheelchair and beat him, I remember that.

I know that people wrote honors theses, ate roast beef specials at Elsie's, joined the football team (I think we had one), but I remember the eight demands ("Smash ROTC, no expansion.").

Harvard changed my life, I guess, but not in the way I--or Harvard--had imagined. And maybe it wasn't Harvard anyway; maybe it was just the time.

Or both: the ordinary Harvard arrogance combined with the special arrogance of the time until we really believed--or I believed--not just that the world had to change but that we had to change it.

It's kind of embarrassing to be writing this, 25 years later. Our college years and our protests seem both real and unreal, surreal (Oh yes, we did take lots and lots of drugs. Remember drugs?). So many of our chants and speeches--I've been poring through torn, yellowing Crimsons--seem just as naive and self-important as the grown-ups always said.

But our opposition to the war was real. The bombs and napalm were real. College students protesting, just like us, were shot to death at Kent State and Jackson State. The draft was real. (Remember the lottery, the chilling numbers, the saved and the damned? I wonder if there's a man in our class who doesn't remember his lottery number today.) The anger, the passion were real.

"I still think of Vietnam as one of the defining political events of my life," says Johnson, a former T.V. news producer about to launch a second career. "Being at Harvard during those years and feeling that the institution had contributed so many strategists to the war gave it an immediacy I might not have felt in a more detached campus. I was deeply angry then; I find those wells of anger still tappable in discussions of the war now."

Other classmates--sharing thoughts on our class' new e-mail discussion list--agree.

"All in all, I remember our years in college as a very dark time," writes Gregg Kilday '71, a writer for Entertainment Weekly. "The war was always hanging over our heads. There was always some moral issue that had to be wrestled with, debated, resolved...I suspect we were cheated out of some of our youth--which is actually a small complaint when so many others in our generation lost their lives."

And Thomas McLeod '71, now a hospice chaplain, comments, "For me it was a loss of innocence which probably would have come one way or another. But to have it shredded away by a bloody inane immoral political game-war was an especially rude loss of innocence."

I don't know. For me, despite the memories tinged with blood, college was not so much a dark time as an exhilarating one. I loved the sense that we could--we must--make a difference, and I miss it.

In a way, I think I was glad to lose my innocence. I was glad to be in a cyclone, on the cusp of something new.

How new was it really? That's harder to answer.

Miles Kahler '71, a professor of international relations at the University of California at San Diego, posted an unsettling question on our class' e-mail list: "If we had arrived at Harvard/Radcliffe in 1957 or 1977 with exactly the same families and previous education, how different would we be today?"

In many ways--as anyone studying the Class of 1971's 25th Anniversary Report would have to conclude--the answer is not very different at all. Most of us are living the prosperous, satisfied lives expected of Harvard grads.

In other ways, particularly for women, the difference was profound. Feminism really Was a cyclone. It hit Radcliffe (and later Harvard) some-where around our junior year. Women 10 years older went through college without it; women 10 years younger never doubted it. But we, the women of '71, we were tossed up in the air by the cyclone, and some of us never came down.

I'm glad we went to college when we did. We were in at some beginnings, feminism, the "sexual revolution," environmentalism, gay liberation just around the corner--and at least one ending.

As Kahler points out, I think we took our country's economic prosperity for granted. We had lots of plans, or no plans at all, on graduation day, but I don't remember anyone worrying about money. Our goals were higher, broader, shinier (and oh yes, we were young).

It seemed so full of promise, this Harvard College, this Radcliffe College. We didn't know--how could we know?--which promises would be kept.

Carol R. Sternhell '71 was managing editor of The Crimson in 1970. She is currently a professor of journalism at New York University.