All of these matters had created great ferment and new tensions within the University community. The fact remains that none of these tensions led to any fundamental breach of civility on the part of most students or to any serious break with the commonly accepted rules of University life. The strength of the Harvard community had by no means been dissipated. None of this directly caused the forcible seizure of University Hall on April 9, even though those who initiated that seizure were counting heavily on the widespread discontents.

In order to explain the seizure of University Hall, we must turn our attention to that group of students within the SDS which had developed a very definite image of the world. This image contained certain well defined components. To these students Harvard University is an integral part of a thoroughly repressive social system. Not only does it service this system with all its experts and elite cadres, but its ruling elements are themselves part of an imperialist ruling class bent on exploiting the entire world. The revolutionary students see themselves as representing the true interests of the popular masses who do not as yet have any true understanding of their own class interests. They remain the victims of a "false consciousness" created by the mass media of capitalist monopoly. The first task of students, however, is to radicalize their own fellow students and thus increase the ranks of the vanguard. The use of militant action against the established University authorities serves to discredit that authority and to radicalize the students.

The small group of students who decided, on April 9, to seize University Hall and to throw out the Deans may have had such aims, and may have wanted to exploit the discontent created by the ROTC issue. Among the "six demands" on behalf of which they seized the building, two referred to ROTC and called for its abolition, thus entering into conflict with the Faculty; one demand dealt with the loss of some scholarship money for students placed on probation afttr Paine Hall; three of the demands referred to Harvard's expansion, an issue that had previously raised more concern in Cambridge than on campus.

The students who joined the small, first wave, immediately or later in the day, were moved by very different motives. Some came out of sympathy for the demands, or out of conviction that the ordinary channels were clogged. Others came to bear witness against the Vietnam war, or its symbol on campus, ROTC. Others came out of general dissatisfaction with Harvard education or procedures. Others came out of a desire for solidarity with the occupiers, or for an exhilarating experience. Thus the group in the building was far from homogenous. The numbers in the building did not exceed 200 to 300, and there was little evidence of widespread student support outside.

There were obvious perils for the University in merely waiting for the occupation to end. The ejection of the Deans--an act of force unprecedented at Harvard--the importance of the building, the presence in it of confidential files of the Faculty and the students, the risk of an invasion of the Yard by outsiders--supporters of the occupiers or self-appointed vigilantes--the danger of more building seizures, the need to show the nation that Harvard would not tolerate disruption, the risk that (as at Columbia) any delay might bring forth student or Faculty sympathy for the disrupters, these were strong arguments for early action.

However, in weighing risks and alternatives at the Council of Deans, the President and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences seem to have underestimated the costs of the costs of the course of action they selected. Waiting or calling the police at once were not the only alternatives. A third one was available, but it was too easily discarded, or perhaps even ruled out by the narrowness of the process of decision and consultation and by the overriding determination to act without delay. The President could have chosen to present a course of action to the Faculty and the students with the goal of rallying a broad consensus behind him. Such a course could still have been firm and swift, but it would have been aimed as much at mobilizing the loyalty of, and at preventing a further schism in the community, as at putting an early end to the occupation. This was, after, all neither a problem of the legal authority to make a decision in such an instance (this authority was clearly the President's) nor was it a mere problem of management. It was a matter of judgment and wisdom. The way in which the decision was reached and carried out resulted form, revealed and reenforced the elements of distrust, the problems of faulty communication, and the deficiencies of the decision-making process which had gradually become apparent in previous months. It is true that the crisis was overcome. But it has left deep traces, divisions have been exacerbated despite the remarkable display of a general determination to save and reform the University. Moreover, as long as the deeper causes of the crisis have not been coherently dealt with, these is still a danger of major new explosions