A Quiet Time for Activism

Ask members of the Class of 1975 what significant events happened at Harvard during their stay, and they might be hard-pressed to tell you.

Most of the anti-war protests of the Vietnam era were a distant memory. Even major national events like Watergate failed to generate as much reaction from students.

"I don't remember a major, significant event that engulfed the University at that time," says Peter L. Jones '75, who lived in Currier House and is now a state representative in Ohio.

Instead, the Class of '75 was left with the aftermath of the student activism of the late '60s and early '70s.

"It wasn't a great time to be at Harvard, because the excitement of student activity was over," says Wendy B. Burton '75, who lived in Eliot House and was a Crimson executive. "We were left with the cleanup."

Harvard did clean up. Students became more preoccupied with their careers and life after Harvard, as political activism faded. And at the same time, the progressive causes of the '60s became the policy changes of the '70s. Although they arrived on campus before women and men began sharing dormitories and before affirmative action, the Class of '75 left a Harvard looking much more egalitarian and strikingly modern.

Addition by Subtraction

The Class of '75 arrived at Harvard immediately after the so-called "non-merger merger" between Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, under which Radcliffe maintained its official organizational independence but Harvard assumed responsibility for all finances.

Addition by Subtraction

Change only came slowly, however.

Shortly after the merger, President Derek C. Bok abolished the fixed 4 to 1 male to female admissions ratio--only to replace it with a ratio of 2.5 to 1.

And, although men and women had been attending classes together since 1943, women still faced academic hurdles.

"My TF would often ask me, 'What's the woman's perspective on this', because I was the only girl in the classroom," says Betty J. Mintz '75, who lived in Leverett House and is now a doctor.

Women still had a hard time getting faculty appointments.

"Harvard was painfully, painfully slow in recruiting female academics," says Burton, who later became a writer for young people. "Some of the faculty were certainly bothered by the fact that there were more and more women around and they might be as smart as they were."

By far the most important consequence of the "non-merger merger," though, was that first-year dorms and upperclass Houses went co-ed. The change went into effect the following year. Those in the Class of '75 were the last to live in an all-male Yard and the first to live in co-ed Houses.

"It still had a little bit of that 'Animal House' behavior," says John M. Forman '75 of the Yard. "If you took a poll, I think you'll find more people who are pleased to have lived through that and are sorry to see it go."

It also meant that this class was the first to get "Quadded"--or assigned to one of the three Harvard Houses in the Radcliffe Quadrangle.

"Being sent to Radcliffe when it was time to get a House, that was sort of like being sent to Siberia," says Forman, who was a varsity football player and is now a doctor. "It was like you were assigned to the Gulag. It was horrible."

Co-ed housing was often problematic for women, who, because of the class's 4 to 1 male to female ration, often found themselves one of fewer than 30 women in their House.

"It was a strange situation at first," Mintz says, noting that only 10 percent of Leverett House residents were women. "Everyone knew who we were."

"It was very hard to walk into the dining hall sometimes," Burton says. "The first couple of times, all eyes went to you."

Still, being in the minority was not a complete disadvantage.

"There was no shortage of social life," Burton adds. "As one of 300 girls in a class of 1200 guys, I had no shortage of dates."

Changes

Despite the glitches the status of women was slowly improving. One of the last hurdles to official equality, the fixed male-female ratio, fell with remarkable speed in the spring of 1975. In one semester, an equal access plan--proposed by a faculty committee led by Leverett Professor of Physics Karl Strauch--was approved by the Faculty, Bok and the University's governing boards, the Corporation and the Board of Overseers.

Under the proposal, which went into effect for the Class of 1980, the admissions offices of Harvard and Radcliffe were merged, and the quotas were abolished.

One temporary side effect of this measure was overcrowding. Some Harvard alums opposed equal access, fearing a decrease in the number of men admitted to the College, and forced Harvard to admit more women while only slightly decreasing the number of men admitted.

"We had people sleeping in living rooms," Burton says.

Despite the popularity of the new policy, however, students created little opposition.

"By the time I graduated, there was such a integration between Harvard and Radcliffe, that equal access only seemed to be a natural progression," Jones says. "I don't remember the campus being riveted by this issue."

Forman says most men at the College were indifferent to the Radcliffe situation.

"It was always a much bigger issue with the 'Cliffies," Forman says. "I don't get the sense that the men really cared real much one way or the other."

"I don't even know whether many of the men were particularly aware of it," Burton says.

In fact, the administration may have been more united in favor of equal access than students. Mintz says a main source of opposition to the measure came from women students themselves.

"There were women there who thought that Radcliffe should remain a separate entity so that women could have a force within the University," she says.

"They wanted to have it both ways," Forman says. "They wanted identity and they also wanted equality. That's always the difficult issue."

But by the time the Class of '75 graduated, opposition to integration was shrinking, and the "non-merger" of Harvard and Radcliffe was looking more and more like a simple acquisition.

"Harvard and Radcliffe were really much more separate entities when I started," Mintz says. "There was much less of a reason for Radcliffe to exist when I left."

The End of an Era

Student activism, after a peak in 1969, was in decline by the time the Class of '75 entered Harvard. But the battles of the '60s weren't over yet.

In the spring of 1972, activists demonstrating against the war in Vietnam ransacked the Center for International Affairs. The protesters then converged on Harvard Square and would not leave until police cleared the area with tear gas.

Just two days after the demonstrations in the Square, Mark E. Segall '75 says, he was awakened by loud drums coming from somewhere in the Yard. He called the police to have the noise stopped.

Chanting "U.S. out of Southeast Asia. Harvard out of Gulf," more than two dozen students had taken over Mass. Hall, protesting Harvard's ownership of stock in Gulf Oil, which was doing business in Angola and South Africa.

"I told [the police] to stop the drums, and they said 'Young man, if you can figure out how to get everybody out of Massachusetts Hall, why don't you let me know,'" says Segall, who later became president of the Harvard Independent.

The demonstration, led by the Pan-African Liberation Committee, was resolved peacefully and Jones, who was involved with the protest, says it achieved moderate success.

"Some positive response was had from the Harvard Board of Overseers," Jones says.

But this string of protests was an aberration. By Jones's senior year, they were relatively rare.

"A lot of the activism that engulfed the University died down by the mid-70s," Jones says. "As a consequence, you didn't have a major campus-wide event or occurrence that you would've witnessed during the five years beforehand."

Still, many students retained their radical views. A Crimson editorial in 1975 called for the abolition of the CIA, and Segall says the Independent, founded as a conservative response to the Crimson in the late 1960s, was dominated by liberal executives by 1975.

But at the same time, conservatism was making a comeback. The Republican Club, more than 400 members strong, claimed it was the largest group on campus.

"We were well-organized and had a program of speakers, dinners, debates, position papers and an annual trip to Washington to meet government officials," said William R. Glass '75, former president of the Republican club and now the president of an educational computer software company.

The New Politics

So what happened to student activism?

Students were running out of things to fight for, Burton says. Many of their demands during the '60s had been met. The Vietnam War was over, racial and gender equality were increasing, and college students had won the right to vote.

Yet the decline of student activism didn't mean students were no longer asking for change. Instead of relying on the shock value of mass protests, students began to work within the Harvard bureaucracy

"A lot of the protesters were protesting in the wrong places," Burton says. "They had no idea that it was this small Corporation that really had all the power to run the place."

"To change the institution, you had to learn more about them, and then you had to change them from the inside," she adds.

The decline of activism in the '70s was an economic reaction as well. During the boom times of the '60s, students, especially Harvard students, could take jobs for granted and afford to forgo academics in favor of idealism.

The Class of '75, however, entered Harvard at the beginning of a deep recession, which shifted its focus onto more practical matters.

"That change in the economy put a damper on student activism," Burton says. "There was no longer a guarantee of a job when you left campus. We were one of the first classes to face that reality."

But while political activism was diminishing, careerism was on the rise. Harvard students started becoming more interested in what they would do when they got out of college, rather than what they could do while they were still there.

"I think the pre-professionalism starting creeping in," Forman says. "There was a shift in the focus. It was more focused on getting into law school and medical school."

Equal, but Separate

Although African-Americans made tremendous gains at Harvard during the '60s, racial tensions were still prominent at Harvard through 1975.

Jones, who was a member of the Association for African and Afro-American Students, says that self-segregation was rampant at Harvard.

"There was a black table that we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at," Jones says. "98 percent of the people that ate there were African-American. That's one thing that I hoped would have changed for the current generation of students."

But Harvard made some progress away from its old reputation as breeding ground for the WASP elite. In 1973 Harvard instituted an affirmative action program targeted toward women and minorities.

Yet even affirmative action created tensions. Burton says that many students assumed that most African-Americans got into Harvard because of a quota, not because of merit.

Other racial problems were more subtle. Most African-Americans, Burton says, free to choose their House affiliation, lived in Leverett House. Interaction between blacks and whites was rare.

"[Race relations] were terrible," Mintz says. "Most white students spent their four years at college having said five words to black students, if that many."

Jones says the segregated environment at Harvard weakened students' educational experience.

"In retrospect it was unfortunate, because I think that white, black, and other students suffered as a consequence and didn't learn what they could've from each other."

A Fitting End

In the Class of 1975's last few days on campus before Commencement, the changes at Harvard were especially evident.

A Fitting End

Boxer Muhammad Ali, the draft-dodging symbol of '60s activism, spoke for the seniors at Class Day. But, perhaps sensing the changing political climate on the Harvard campus, Ali stuck to lighter topics, steering clear of any political issues and instead focusing on the value of friendship.

Segall says he especially remembers a Class Day speech by John Kenneth Galbraith, Warburg professor of economics emeritus.

Galbraith spoke about his experience working in the admissions department just after arriving at Harvard. He said that admissions decisions were highly dependent on the prestige of a candidate's high school.

""He was told that the object was to maximize the number of students that were admitted from the most prestigious schools," Segall says.

A student was placed in the leftmost column if he came from Groton or a similarly exclusive school. He was entered in the rightmost column, marked with an 'X', if he was Jewish.

"The object was to minimize the number of those," Segall says.

In the year that affirmative action became a fixture in Harvard admissions, where students from public schools equaled those from private ones, and the last barriers to equal access to the College were abolished, Galbraith's description of an old-fashioned, elitist Harvard seemed more out of place than ever.

"Harvard changed from a place that was the playground of the rich to something that was based on merit," Segall says.

By the time the Class of 1975 left the College, Harvard was catching up with its students' idealism. Students' activism might have been fading, but their causes had not been forgotten.