Then and Now

Every Wednesday, a small column of students march through Harvard Yard to protesting the Iraq War. Each week, 29 other students leave their dorms for exercises and training, learning how to become officers in the armed forces. Outside those two groups, awareness of the Iraq War on campus hasn’t come close to the level of student engagement during the Vietnam War, two professors with memories of Harvard during Vietnam said.

“There was almost no protest by comparison and much lower level of feeling,” Government professor and vocal conservative Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 said about Harvard at the beginning of the Iraq invasion. “Even though most American people are against the Iraq War, no one’s out in the streets saying it should be condemned.”

The silence in Cambridge was noticed by those on the left as well.

“I thought it was terrible,” said international relations professor Stanley Hoffmann, “People couldn’t have been bothered.”

A DIFFERENT CAMPUS

Four decades ago, a large number of students were certainly bothered by American military action abroad.

On the afternoon of April 9, 1969, 350 undergraduates occupied University Hall, the central administrative building of the College.

Early the next morning, after the Yard had been locked and administrators had repeatedly told students they would be subject to criminal charges if they stayed in the building, the Massachusetts State Police stormed University Hall.

“Finally, at exactly 4:50, a voice, louder than anything I had heard all evening said, ‘O.K., this is it, they’re coming,’” Jody Adams ’69 wrote in The Crimson that year, “We all began to sing, ‘We Shall Not be Moved,’ but all anyone knew was the first verse so we stopped.”

“All at once I heard a loud commotion outside on the steps...I heard the movement of feet and material against the concrete,” Adams wrote. “The cops were rushing into the landing way behind the steps, smashing their clubs down on the kids who were waiting, helpless.”

The event immediately polarized the campus, forcing those like Mansfield and Hoffman into different corners, diving the faculty between those who supported the students and those who called for restraint.

“Two caucuses instantly formed the morning after the police action,” Hoffmann said. “It had never happened before. There had been individuals taking positions, but we didn’t have a two party system, which was entirely provoked by the protest.”

For many professors on the Right, their commitment to authority came from their own experiences with student protest and activity before coming to the United States.

“Many colleagues thought all students were Nazis if they themselves had been refugees from Hitler’s Germany, or Bolsheviks if they were refugees from the Russian Revolution,” said Hoffmann.

At a Faculty meeting shortly after the University Hall occupation, Hoffmann said, economist Alexander Gerschenkron, who had lived through the Russian Revolution, said that there are only three things you can do to students: “Beat them! Beat them! Beat them!”

A DIFFERENT UNDERSTANDING

The debate over control of student activity naturally led to a debate over Harvard’s role in the world, and the world’s role within the University—a debate that was sharply different from today’s dialogue.

“Many students believed there was a direct relationship between Harvard as an institution, and the Pentagon and White House,” said Timothy P. McCarthy ’93, a lecturer in History and Literature who teaches a class on protest literature.

For those on the Right, there was an insistence that war happens outside the university.

“The students wanted to run the University into a source of political protest, diverting it from its path of learning and teaching,” Mansfield said. “The anti-war sentiments should not have been felt or expressed. It was not an ignoble war and we would have won it if not for the protest.”

But Mansfield said Harvard can have a role in the war in Iraq.

“The University shouldn’t get involved in a partisan way, but in a patriotic way,” Mansfield said.

For the faculty on the Left, the idea that war can be kept out is simply not realistic.

“The notion that the only thing one should do is concentrate on academic issues, do the next term paper, is idiotic,” Hoffmann said.

But that engagement with the world has had its consequences on campus.

A lot of alumni who graduated during the Vietnam era do not give money to Harvard, McCarthy said.

Hoffman said that many of his colleagues, some who helped to create the Social Studies concentration with him in 1960, did not speak to him for a long time.

Despite these personal losses from the Vietnam War era, Hoffmann said he still would encourage activism within Harvard.

“I couldn’t understand why there was so much passivity,” he said about the atmosphere at Harvard when the war in Iraq began five years ago. “Nobody wanted to listen. Nobody did what should have been done.”

—Staff writer Rachel A. Stark can be reached at rstark@fas.harvard.edu.

For comprehensive coverage of the Iraq War's impact at Harvard five years later, check out The Crimson's Iraq Supplement.