Before this year, the University had simply seen no evil and heard no evil. But this year it opened its eyes and ears and did something-or perhaps just put on a show of doing something. Why it did is hard to say.

As anyone who reads the mass media or listens to popular radio stations knows full well, this was the year when drugs come out into the open and made the Big Time.

Of course people were using drugs (mainly marijuana and LSD) before, but never before could you drop by a record store and find racks of psychedelic records, by groups like the Mothers of Invention and the Grateful Dead. Never before could you go down to The Boston Tea Party (get the name) and see the show and watch it happen in the corner. And more than that, never before could you eat at the Freshman Union and hear them talking grass right there in the open.

This was the year when drugs hit the Big Time at Harvard too, when people began to acknowledge that there was an upsurge in the use of drugs on campus, especially in the Freshman Class. And this was the year when Dean Monro broke the University's customary silence on the matter.

Monro's Letter

In a letter addressed to the "Gentlemen of 1970." Monro in his foot-stamping style said. "If a student is stupid enough to misuse his time here fooling around will illegal and dangerous drugs, our view is that he should leave the college ...."

He explained later that the Administrative Board, which disciplines drug abusers, didn't really mean it was going to kick students out of school for simply using marijuana. The punishment would probably be academic probation, he said. Still, it was clear that the University was not fooling around. And even though the crack-down that druggies had been worried about all Spring never happened (as it did at Yale, Princeton, and Cornell, for instance), the Administration seemed to loom larger as still another menace both to casual joint smokers and to full-time acidheads.

Policy Change

Before this year, the University had simply seen no evil and heard no evil. But this year it opened its eyes and ears and did something--or perhaps just put on a show of doing something. Why it did is hard to say.

Quite a few observers thought that the Monro Doctrine (as the Record American christened it) and the five-page medical report from the University Health Services that accompanied it were the result of outside pressure on the University to do something about drug abuse in the Yard. The press and maybe the alumni, they said, are forcing Monro to take a stand against drugs once and for all, and Monro must respond to get Harvard off the hook. Or, just as likely, they said, the cops and the feds are planning a big raid on the University, and Monro wants to clean the place up to spare Harvard the bad publicity that would result from the bust.

No Outside Threat

But that kind of fear does not usually motivate Harvard administrators. And even if it could, there was really no threat. Cambridge police chief Daniel J. Brennan told the City Council that drug traffic in the Square is no worse than it is anywhere else in the City, and that his one-man narcotics squad was sufficient to take care of the problem. The Council voted him a few extra men for the drug squad, anyway, but the Cambridge police's attitude did not appear belligerent toward the University at all. The area's one agent from the Federal Narcotics Bureau never warned Monro about controlling drug traffic at Harvard either.

Still, somewhere in the back of Monro's head there was probably the idea that what happened at those other Ivy colleges might happen here. At Princeton the dean, informed by the authorities to clean his own house or they would do it for him, called the known drug users there to his office and told them to "throw the stuff in the river" or there would be trouble. Some did, but seven were arrested, and the New York Daily News had a field day.

Inside Pressure

Certainly, Monro was being pressured to state clearly and publicly the University's position on drugs. But the pressure was coming from the inside, not from the outside. F. Skiddy von Stade Jr. '38, dean of freshmen, wanted something done. So did some Masters on the Administrative Board. Monro's attitude had been that a letter might cut off communication between the College and the drug users. But there was not much communication anyway.