It was September 15, 1963--four days before the freshmen were officially to become freshmen--that the class of 1967 undertook its first collective venture. Trunks still lay open in the bare rugless living rooms, and strange smells of mothballs, home-baked cookies and detergent mixed ungracefully with the fragrance of Indian Summer in the Yard. Outside Stoughton, under the quickly darkening sky, twenty-five of the new arrivals plotted with furtive relish their first attack on the 'Cliffie: a Panty Raid.

The mere idea would now mortify the fifty or so who eventually joined the group, but the results on that occasion were doubly humiliating. The freshmen soon lost their way, and wandered vainly down dark side-streets, wondering how any girl could ever be worth so long a trip. Their ranks thinned, and their enthusiasm diminished at every turn--until finally in desperation they arrived at a large brick building that had all the trappings of a women's dormitory: gardens, flower-potted windows, matching curtains, etc.

It turned out, however, to be the Continental Hotel, and their urgent entreaties to the windows brought forth only the doorman, who told them with bewildered politeness to get the hell off the property.

The failure was ominous. For, in addition to being the class' first collective venture, it also proved one of the last. With a few minor exceptions, the class of 1967 did not gather again in any joint activity until Commencement. The Harvard experience did not encourage any sort of class identity or consciousness. As freshmen moved out to the Houses, they drew friends and ideas from the classes above them; and they passed many of these to the classes that followed.

Being "Serious"

In a more significant, perhaps symbolic sense, that still-born raid on Radcliffe reflected the premature end of a certain frivolous irresponsibility. The class of '67 soon learned that the business of being a student was serious stuff and that to be taken seriously (a major criteria for all action), students would have to allow commitment, and involvement.

One very important form of commitment was to social and political action. This was one last class to enter Harvard while Kennedy was President and the first to feel the direct intrusion of the war in Vietnam on the University. Kennedy brought most of its members to political consciousness. As juniors in high school, they watched his long campaign to the White House, his urgent calls for an awakening after the long sleep of the fifties, his stirring inaugural and the first one-thousand days in office. Most of them felt the frustration of his failures in Congress on domestic legislation, as well as the bitter grief of his death. After 1964, the Vietnam war came to dominate almost all political activity and discussion, deepening that frustration with the established processes of government.

Like the classes which preceeded it, this one broadened the scope of student activism, involvement in the University community and national politics. Many members went south in the summer of 1964 to participate in sit-ins, pickets and other civil rights organizing in Mississippi. In one form or another, almost all were drawn into the Vietnam debate; increasingly, they signed petitions, or marched; and, increasingly, they turned against the war.

More Than a Minority

Activism spread beyond a small minority. On other campuses, the broad majority might still be silent, leading Clark Kerr to claim that a few noisy malcontents had exaggerated the dissatisfaction of this college generation. At Harvard, however, political and social activism--expressed in a variety of service in the slums as well as anti-war demonstrations in the Cambridge streets--became an important class-wide phenomenon. Though there were outstanding individuals, one of the things which impressed Dean Monro about his last senior class at Harvard was the "breadth of involvement."

More activities became politicized at Harvard than ever before. As a result of the war in Vietnam and civil rights, even theatre and literature acquired increasingly political meaning. Writers and Loeb-wonks joined the protests and signed the "We Won't Go" petition, as the draft threatened to puncture the protective walls of the University.

The differences in terms of activism between this class and the most recent preceeding ones were mainly in degree, not kind. The lack of any clear demarkation in these trends between classes meant that movements and causes spilled over from one year to another.

Powerlessness

And yet, certain important aspects of this activism, though born in other classes, have come to fruition in this one. What was most significant about the commitment and involvement in the class of '67 was not so much the range or depth of participation -- which, after all was a characteristic of activism throughout the sixties--but rather the sense of frustration and impotence which it produced.

The activists of '67 leave college with a far more profound sense of the limitations to political action, in many cases a feeling of dismay and disillusionment. Some of them have moved from dissatisfaction with one aspect of the system to a much, broader, radical critique. But even those who accept the present social machinery for decision-making have become keenly aware of the compromises and sacrifices which must be made for the sake of "effectiveness." Among both radicals and moderates, there is a greater appreciation of the strength of forces resisting change, the ambiguities of problems and the failure of pure morality to provide any politically relevant solutions.