Protests Turn Inward, Shift To College

On a warm morning in the spring of 1977, the “Eggshell Alliance” mustered just after 8 a.m. at the Mather and Dunster House dining halls.

Chanting “we want it hot,” about 50 demonstrators blew whistles and clashed cymbals as they marched toward University Hall and the old Union dining hall in protest of the decision by then-Dean of the College John B. Fox ’59 to omit Mather and Dunster from a group of Houses that would begin serving hot breakfast in 1978.

“Sometimes it’s hard for Fox, sitting in that little office, to know what 6,000 people want,” proclaimed Mather House Council Chair Charles L. Diana ’78 at the time. “I think the message is clear after the demonstrations.”

With the substitution of hot meals for the Vietnam War, the spirit of protest refused to die at Harvard just as Fox refused to budge on hot breakfasts.

Yet times were changing, and members of the Class of 1977 continued a march away from the radical idealism that characterized the late ’60s and early ’70s.

“In ’69-’70, the place was blowing up,” says John P. Reardon ’60, who worked in the admissions office before being named director of athletics in 1977. “By ’77-’78, life was getting pretty normal.”

By 1977, though, the transition away from activism was still far from complete. Protests continued, but without the same international importance that they carried in the early ’70s, when the Class of 1977 was entering college. Late ’70s protests often voiced dissent over issues of local rather than international importance.

At the same time, students began to spend less time furthering social change and more time worrying about life’s more practical concerns, such as graduate schools and careers.

College in Transition

The Harvard undergraduates of 1977 thus saw a campus torn between the old and the new, undergoing a sometimes rough transition from idealism to social conservatism.

First-years, for example, first broke the seven-year boycott on the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities in 1977, which was established as a student-faculty disciplinary body after the 1969 takeover of University Hall.

First-years once again agreed to serve on the committee after students in the past had complained about issues like the committee’s denial of legal council to students and its admittance of hearsay evidence.

For first-years entering Harvard in 1977, working with College authorities rather than against them seemed appealing.

Students also began looking with an eager eye toward the world of business and profit, which was eschewed by many student activists just a few years earlier. When the class of 1979 arrived at Harvard as first-years, only 3.8 percent of them said they hoped for a career in business; by 1979, that number had changed to 18.4 percent.

Harvard’s wealthiest alum, Bill Gates, would have graduated in 1977 had he not left after two years to found Microsoft.

His business partner, Steve Ballmer, graduated in 1977.

Spirit of Protest

But as if clinging to a radical past, Harvard students of 1977 were willing to protest just about everything.

In addition to the demonstration over hot breakfast, students organized marches in front of University Hall to demonstrate against a variety of local concerns.

They opposed a raise in tuition and agitated to curtail ringing the morning bells at Memorial Church, which they said prevented sleep in the Yard.

Students living in the Quad also organized outside University Hall to decry Fox’s proposal to make all first-years, even those assigned to Quad Houses, live in theYard. Previously, Quadlings had spent all four years up Garden Street.

Students involved in the protest said preventing them from spending their entire College careers in the Quad relegated them to second class citizenship.

William B. Trautman ’79, who was also a Crimson editor, described the atmosphere as “more of a sort of look back to the ’60s than anything else.”

Yet while no 1977 student protests matched those of the Vietnam-era in magnitude, at least one international issue moved Harvard students to similar outrage.

On April 29, 1977, approximately 100 students gathered on the lawn in front of Lamont Library to urge Harvard to sell its holdings in South African companies due to apartheid. The students marched through the Yard and onto Mass. Ave, chanting, “Hey hey what do you say, down with minority rule today.”

Earlier in the year, demonstrators from across Boston had joined Harvard students to rally at the Brighton headquarters of WRZ-TV after the station continued air commercials for gold coins sold by South Africa’s government.

But the 1977 protest with the most serious consequences for those involved had a local bent.

A number of Harvard students drove to Seabrook, NH to participate in a two-day occupation of a nuclear power plant there and were arrested.

While most of the students involved bailed themselves out of jail, three declined to pay and languished in detention for 12 days.

Gideon Gil ’78, who was also a Crimson editor, remembers organizing many of the campus protests that year.

“We were still trying to hang on to activism,” he says. “I don’t think it was quite dead yet.”

Internal Focus

Just as the thoughts of Harvard students returned to their studies and more local concerns, so too did the College begin to address academic and social issues on campus—some of which still resonate today.

Perhaps 1977’s greatest academic contribution to Harvard College was the development of the Core Curriculum. Though the College did not adopt the Core Curriculum until two years later, 1977 saw a faculty committee propose a curriculum divided into five sections— “Letters and Arts,” “History,” “Social and Philosophical Analysis,” “Mathematics and Science,” and “Foreign Languages and Cultures.”

The Core was designed to replace the old general education program, which members of the Faculty felt did not guarantee students a full liberal arts education.

The College also wrestled with the issue of grade inflation in 1977, although many College officials at the time considered “grade inequity,” in which grading policies varied among professors, to be the real threat.

That year, the College began providing professors with a chart comparing their grades to those awarded by other professors.

Then Dean of the Faculty Dean K. Whitla said “several [Faculty] council members said they would like to do more” about grade inflation.

1977 also saw significant changes to College life.

In addition to the Fox Plan, Harvard President Derek Bok and Radcliffe President Matina Horner signed an agreement that gave Harvard full responsibility for managing undergraduate education at Radcliffe.

The movement toward a women’s studies concentration also gained steam in 1977. Members of the women’s student group leading the charge petitioned the Faculty council throughout the year.

Perhaps the growing number of women in the undergraduate community at Harvard influenced the change. The incoming freshman class in 1977 boasted the lowest-ever male to female ratio: approximately 1.89 to 1.

Outside the Yard

At the same time that Harvard experienced ideological detente in 1977 and embarked on important policy initiatives, the Boston community beyond Johnson Gate proved far less corrigible.

Two crimes rocked the Harvard community in 1977.

The most shocking event of the year was the murder of Andrew P. Puopolo ’77, a member of the Harvard football team, who was stabbed to death after the team visited Boston’s red light district during their season-ending celebration.

He was killed in an area of Boston commonly referred to as the Combat Zone when he chased after prostitutes who had stolen a friend’s wallet and was fatally attacked by their pimps.

In January of 1977, three teenaged youths harassed and then assaulted a student taking a self-paced math exam in Science Center B.

One alumni says students knew never to walk through Cambridge Common alone after dark.

To help keep peace on the streets, students participated in a student security patrol under the control of the Harvard University Police Department, which was criticized in 1977 for hesitating to hire more professional officers.

Since the late ’70s, the Boston and Cambridge communities have seen crime rates drop dramatically.

But while 1977’s most visible and horrible moment occurred in the Combat Zone of Boston, the significance of 1977 for Harvard at large lies within the changing ideological interests of that year’s undergraduates.

College issues, such as the Fox Plan and the serving of hot breakfasts, grabbed student attention as the “Eggshell Alliance” became the new face of the ever-fading radicalism.

—Staff writer William M. Rasmussen can be reached at wrasmuss@fas.harvard.edu.