"Lined up on Massachusetts Avenue, grinning obscenely down over Harvard Yard, there is a row of intellectual brothels. Every year they are patronized by two thirds of the student body; every year they flout with greater insolence the decency and respectability of this College.... They are making a mockery of a Harvard education, a lie of a Harvard diploma."

Before that, on March 26, Faculty members proposed a wide-ranging plan to break down "overspecialization"--the first step toward the Gen Ed program.

On March 29, the Masters voted to try extending House privileges, such as use of the dining halls, to some of the people who couldn't get into the Houses.

On March 30, a committee of eight distinguished Faculty members proposed steps to standardize the tenure procedure and make it shorter.

On April 17, a student committee recommended that college-wide minor sports and junior varsity teams be eliminated to encourage House athletics.

On May 18, the University cracked down on the tutoring services.

On May 23, President Conant accepted the Committee of Eight's tenure recommendations.

Conant had stimulated more of this activity than any other single individual had. But none of it was entirely his show. He had set up the tenure committee under pressure, after the controversial dismissal of two faculty members and, even after accepting the committee's recommendations, he was violently criticized for the way he and the Dean of the Faculty had put them into effect.

It was no single individual, then. It may have been the Mid-West, or the New Deal, or something else altogether. Whatever it was, it had pushed Harvard to the beginning of an identity crisis. Some of the subtle pressures Harvard had always exerted were clearly being challenged from within.

The freshmen were among the challengers. Two months after he swallowed the four-incher, Lothrop Withington and ten others, including Endicott Peabody II, complained that the Houses were rejecting the leaders of the freshman class and accepting mediocre upperclassmen. They were going to fight for a strict merit system.

It was late in the year, too late to accomplish anything. But the Class of '42 had let it be known that it was picking up the cause.

Opposition to War

By the time the men of '42 were sophomores and war had broken out in Europe, a number of campus organizations opposing American intervention were at their height. The sophomores could join these organizations--or the smaller interventionist groups (in 1939)--but, for the most part, they did not lead them. It was the juniors who had formed the groups, who took the brunt of the arguing and the organizing, who brought Mike Quill of the Transport Workers Union to speak (as the Harvard Student Union, an anti-interventionist group, did in early 1940), or who decided Quill leaned too far to the left and set up a rally featuring Norman Thomas (as a rival group did the same day).

Then, as the German threat grew, as Britain became more and more vulnerable, as war spread to the Far East, it was mainly members of the Class of '41 who had to make public declaration of consciences. Just as their unanimity had welded the organizations together, so their divisions (over such issues as aid to Britain) destroyed them.

Had the groups lasted another year, members of the Class of '42, as juniors, might have assumed leadership. But, even though the anti-interventionists drew 600 people to Sanders Theatre as late as April, 1941, the signs of imminent war were unmistakable and demoralizing.