Remembering 1969

Why, on its thirtieth anniversary, does anyone still care about the student takeover of University Hall? The students who occupied the headquarters of the Harvard administration a generation ago were fighting for causes we can barely understand now. They lived not in the apathetic environment of today's college campuses but in a political climate dominated by the shadow of a war that ended before we were born. They subscribed to political philosophies we now tend to dismiss as anachronistic, or as mere curiosities.

In the last 30 years, students have moved on from the fight over Vietnam to battle for divestment from South Africa, for gender and racial equality on campus and today, in the living wage and anti-sweatshop movements, for stricter University labor policies.

Yet memories of 1969 persist. The picture of an anti-war student in the Faculty Room of University Hall remains one of the most famous images of twentieth-century Harvard. Student activists ever since then have had to contend with implicit, sometimes unfair, comparisions to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at University Hall.The University remembers 1969, too: anyone who lives in a building constructed after the takeover can sleep soundly at night in a riotproof dorm.

Debate over the justification for the takeover continues as well; just in the five years since we marked the last anniversary, controversy over the takeover was reignited when former Dunster House Senior Tutor Roger Rosenblatt published hisComing Apart, a memoir of Harvard at the time of the takeover. Like so much of the 1960's--the abstract concept of "the sixties" is condemned by conservatives as the root of every problem from drug abuse to the Clinton presidency and praised by liberals as the heyday of the civil rights movement--University Hall has been inflated to near-mythic status.

We care about University Hall because it was, depending on whom you talk to, the nadir of civility at Harvard or the birth of student activism.

There is a danger, through, in reducing 1969 to a symbol.We shouldn't forget that the protests also set into motion a number of important institutional changes whose effects are still felt today. The basic goal of SDS and the protestors was to force the University to server its ties with the military and in particular to eliminate the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program on campus. It is ironic that as this anniversary passes, a bill is before the Undergraduate Council to reverse this hard-won reform.

Though it was not one of the six demands they originally presented to the administration, the students who took over University Hall were also fighting for a department of Afro-American Studies, a demand the University agreed to later that year. Today, the department is one of the best in the country. The fight begun in 1969 isn't quite over yet, though: students have been asking for an ethnic studies program for years, to no avail.

Perhaps the most important institutional change brought on by takeover was a change in the administration's attitude. The University's response to the 1969 takeover put into sharp relief its disdain for students: Nathan M.Pusey '28, president of Harvard at the time, was willing to send local police into University Hall to drive his own students from the building.

Though we may complain of the administration's shortcomings today, it is hard to imagine President Neil L. Rudenstine ever doing something so outrageous. Rudenstine and his predecessor Derek Bok, in fact, were selected partly for their ability to work with student protestors.

The events at Harvard in the spring of 1969 have an undeniable cultural significance. In Harvard parlance, the University Hall takeover is practially synonymous with the '60s, with all that decade's social and political connotations. But on this anniversary we should also remember the real and lasting changes to the University the protestors won in 1969.