Counter-Culture Comes Full Circle

The dichotomy of business vs. service at Harvard, and the domination of the former over the latter in its appeal to graduating students, is nothing new. Big business has been the preferred career of Harvard graduates for as long as there have been investment banks to work at, even in the ostensibly counter-culture ’60s.

The Class of 1967 entered Harvard ready and willing to shoulder the task of dismantling the apparatus of segregation and poverty in America. Barely a month later, President John F. Kennedy ’40, the country’s greatest symbol of youth, energy, and progress, was assassinated. The boldest politically minded students embarked on the sorts of adventures still cited today; the group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) sparked University Hall sit-ins disrupted by police force in 1968 and mobbed by the hundreds visiting then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1967 to demand answers about the Vietnam War.

But by the year of their graduation, their inability to effect real social and political change had somewhat exhausted those who entered in 1963 so full of hope. The Vietnam War dragged on, with the worst yet to come, and the civil rights movement had made only superficial gains. “Few classes have entered Harvard with more faith in government (stirred by calls to action from a young, vigorous leader) but few have left with less,” wrote Richard Blumenthal ’67 in an article published June 14, 1967, in The Crimson. “[We] leave college with a far more profound sense of the limitations to political action.”

The same students who, according to one of their own, “shared an all-out aversion to the ‘dehumanizing,’ all-pervasive power of modern corporations, and criticized the arrogance and insensitivity of the world that this drive for abundance had produced,” voted fiscal conservative Ronald Reagan into the presidency—twice—in the 1980s. The Peace Corps and groups like it were the second-most popular choice of employment after college for the Class of 1966, when these occupations also qualified for draft deferments from the war, but members of that class and others of the 1960s are now the CEOs beginning to step down from their positions at the heads of those once-terrifying corporations.

Blumenthal charged “the ‘bigness’ of modern organizations”, both government and business, with paralyzing his peers. Their concern with their eroding autonomy as members of American society, he wrote, “applied to political activity but, even more importantly, to career choices.” In hindsight, the consequences of the choices these college-aged activists made are disillusioning for those who look on the 1960s as a golden age of social progressivism. A feasible way to link youthful service with a lifetime commitment to social consciousness still eludes college students, as it did 40 years ago.