When the Class of 1976 arrived at Harvard, ROTC had already been driven off campus. By the time they graduated, it had begun to find its way back.

Bloody protests over the Vietnam War had cratered the campus and forced a 1969 faculty vote to purge ROTC from Harvard. But by 1975, one student found a loophole. But by the mid-1970s — as the draft ended and the fury that had defined an earlier Harvard began to fade — the question of military training returned with far less recoil.

The opening came through a loophole.

Harvard undergraduates could already cross-register at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in theory that included MIT’s military science classes. At the suggestion of MIT’s Air Force director, Charles V. DePriest ’77 went to basic training the summer of his sophomore year, won an ROTC scholarship, and petitioned Harvard to let him take his required military coursework across town.

Then-President Derek C. Bok quietly agreed.

“They kept it a total secret,” said Steven H. Peck ’79, who would become Harvard’s second cadet after the ban on the strength of an Army ROTC scholarship.

For Peck, a quiet workaround was never going to be enough.

“I said, ‘If there’s anything I accomplish in these four years, it’s going to be the right to do this,’” he said.

The exception went unnoticed until the end of DePriest’s junior year, when it triggered a faculty reckoning in the final weeks before the Class of 1976’s Commencement. By then, Peck had joined DePriest in a monthslong fight that ended in a faculty vote allowing students to cross-register for military science at MIT on a strictly extracurricular, non-credit basis.

Fifty years later, as members of the Class of 1976 return to campus, alumni say that quiet reopening is not far removed from today’s strained relationship between the University, the federal government, and the Department of Defense.

‘A Peaceful Death’

ROTC’s presence at Harvard had always been quiet. But by 1969, as the Vietnam War drew the fury of a generation, it had become a flashpoint.

John I. Hook III ’69 was arrested and jailed for his role in the protests, which often turned violent. He remembered a young woman left bleeding on the floor after police beat demonstrators. Hook himself marched in a motorcycle jacket and helmet.

The removal of ROTC, he said, was more a galvanizing cause than the root of the anger.

“People weren’t marching around saying ‘ROTC off campus,’ it was more like ‘end the war,’” he said.

In February 1969, the faculty voted 207-125 to deny academic credit for ROTC courses and end the faculty appointments of its instructors. After the Corporation enacted the resolution but kept negotiating contracts with the Defense Department, several thousand students rallied at Soldiers Field. Days later, the faculty stripped ROTC of any “special privileges or facilities,” and the program left campus.

Then the fury cooled.

When students later caught rumblings of a restart — driven by what they read as Bok’s openness to bringing ROTC back — thousands signed a petition demanding a referendum. The Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life rejected it unanimously, and the Harvard Republican Club’s push fizzled.

“For the most part, the issue died a peaceful death,” Robin S. Freeburg ’75, a former Crimson News editor, wrote in an April 1974 article.

By 1976, three years after the draft ended, most students hardly thought about ROTC, or the military, at all.

“It was just a different world from our world,” said Nicholas B. Lemann ’76, then the president of The Crimson. “It wasn’t something we thought or talked about.”

“We were all happy that we weren’t going to get drafted,” said William Pollak ’78.

That indifference, Pollak said, extended to Harvard’s quiet re-engagement with the program.

“I think the feeling was that there are people on campus that actually want to do ROTC, and if they can go to MIT to do that, well, that’s fine with us,” he said. “As long as we don’t have to.”

‘Some of Us Among Them’

Student indifference may have eased the program’s soft comeback, but it took two undergraduates to force the question.

DePriest had lobbied Bok since his sophomore year, once “marching” into the president’s office, according to an interview he later gave the Bay State Banner. After he won his scholarship at basic training, Bok approved the MIT arrangement.

The Pentagon was softening, too. In the fall of 1975, the Defense Department lifted a ban that had barred its funded graduate students from enrolling at schools that had expelled ROTC — a restriction resembling one the department imposed this February.

The arrangement stayed quiet until members of the Committee for Administration of Educational Policy reported that letting DePriest and Peck cross-register would violate the 1969 legislation. The faculty first shot down a proposal to permit it, agreeing only to weigh a clarification of the old rules.

By May, as seniors in the Class of 1976 prepared to leave Harvard, a motion from Francis M. Pipkin, an associate dean of the Faculty, brought the question to a vote. The courses would not appear on a Harvard transcript, a stipulation that won over even some faculty who had backed the 1969 ban.

Still, the vote pitted administrators like Pipkin and Bok against a wary faculty.

“I think the administration was just too afraid to do anything against the faculty,” Peck said.

John Womack Jr. ’59, a faculty member at the time, said that in the wake of Vietnam, Harvard having “anything to do with ROTC” struck him and his colleagues as immoral. He moved to table the motion and was overruled.

Pipkin argued that Harvard students could be a positive influence on the military, that it was better to have “some of us amongst them” than to keep the University isolated.

The reasoning struck Womack as “totally stupid and pompous.” He was more sympathetic to the argument that students needed the scholarships to afford Harvard. His disillusionment has not faded.

“The U.S. military is a bad force in the world,” he said. “That’s my view.”

On May 5, a large majority of the faculty voted to let students cross-register for non-credit ROTC courses at MIT. Students remained divided, Womack said, but mostly quiet.

‘The Right To Do This’

To the faculty, the question felt existential. To the students fighting to become cadets, it was financial.

When Peck was admitted at 18, his father, a Harvard graduate, handed him an ROTC scholarship application.

“Partly it was my father said, ‘I’m not paying tuition,’” Peck said. “‘If you want to go to college, this is how you’re going to have to do it.’”

His family’s finances, along with his own interest in a military career, pushed him to apply. He chose the Army scholarship over the Air Force for its flexibility, hoping to become a Judge Advocate General after law school.

At Harvard, he met open hostility, at times fearing students would throw “apples and tomatoes” at him as he crossed the Yard in uniform. Peck said then-Dean of Harvard College Charles P. Whitlock offered to “transfer you to any school in the country, just get off our hands.”

Peck refused.

“My father went here, my grandfather went here,” he said. “Wasn’t even going to consider going to another school.”

After the vote passed at the end of his freshman year, Peck cross-enrolled and recovered three years of his scholarship. He pinned a Harvard patch to the lapel of his uniform. By graduation, he said, about four other students had joined the program since the ban lifted.

The experience still left a bad taste.

“I was a little turned off by Harvard,” he said.

Even so, Peck counts the faculty’s decision among his proudest accomplishments at the College, and one that helped clear the way for ROTC’s gradual acceptance.

“People said, ‘Oh, did you fight in the war or whatever?’ I said I did better than that,” he said.

“At least I can say I did accomplish something very important.”

—Staff writer Theresa F. Bartelme can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at theresabartelme.15. Follow her on X @theresabartelme.