The disruption of the Teach-in proved practically indefensible: most students who disrupted had followed an ad hoe strategy compounded of impotence and blind rage, and they did little organizing before or after the event. The ball landed in the Administration's court, and Harvard fielded it well. The Faculty Council issued a statement, and the Deans blitzed the Houses with mini-teachings on free speech and the liberal university.
The propaganda barrage was effective: administrators sensed a weakness in the radical position and struck for the jugular. Many of the cries of pain and outrage from University circles were sincere, but they were also overstated in an attempt to isolate the radicals from the main current of student thought. One dean went so far as to call the disruption "the most serious thing which has happened in my thing which has happened in my thirty years at Harvard-and that includes the occupation of University Hall."
The student body proved more receptive than ever before to University counterattack: before long, most of the disrupters were spending their dinner hours defending the action to students who asked how anyone could excuse such a vicious attack on free speech at Harvard. Three years of explanation that the University was not neutral, that it was inextricably tied to the war-making apparatus of the monster society it lived in, that it could not honestly pose as the defender of liberal values-all seemed wiped out. More students than ever seemed willing to believe that Harvard could be a sanctuary, a safe liberal harbor, unaffected by the storms of the dirty world outside.
AND WHILE it counterattacked with ideas, Harvard also brought to bear the repressive mechanisms it had boned so well: the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities and the eagle-eyed tutors and cameramen who served it.
The CRR had been a target for two major demonstrations the preceding spring: most students peered beyond the pseudo-legal trappings it had sprouted and recognized it for what it was: a court of star chamber, an Administration witchhunt in which the Committee had all the rights and the defendants all the responsibilities.
But the CRR had served Harvard well in the past: in the spring of 1970 it had expelled some students, and had contributed greatly to breaking the back of Harvard's student movement. In the fall, however, no students had stepped forward to take their places on the panel: those Houses charged with selecting students to replace the retiring members had simply failed to do so. Any ballot for CRR membership also allowed students to vote against sending any representative at all, and the majority chose this option.
The Faculty then unveiled a new plan which, in the words of the CRR's chairman, was "designed to produce students" to sit in judgment on their fellows: each House would simply select by lot a fifteen-member panel, and from this group the four student members of the CRR would be randomly selected. The system would have worked had even one House agreed to select such a panel. But, embarrassingly enough, every single one-every Radcliffe and Harvard House and the Freshman class-defeated the proposal in referenda, and declined to participate.
For a moment it seemed that a real victory had been won. Whether because they objected to the CRR itself or because they found its shoddy procedures unacceptable, the students of Harvard and Radcliffe had told the Administration that they wanted no part of the CRR. But it soon became apparent that the referenda had been as meaningful as the Presidential election in South Vietnam: the Administration was not interested in how students felt about the CRR. In times of need-as after the disruption of the "Counter Teach-in" -it would use it, students or no. The CRR functioned smoothly without undergraduates through the spring, ultimately convicting nine of the 22 students charged with disrupting the Teach-in, and suspending four from school.
AND students realized that Harvard's film crews and photographers would be watching them from now on: no one could act on impulse any longer, for everyone was aware that one still photograph might bring him before the tribunal, charged with being a menace to Harvard and the academic community.
Most students found that they inhabited a much smaller world this spring than the one they had moved through the year before. The most intense perception of the nationwide strike had been the panic feeling after Kent State that we were all the enemy to the people who ran this country: Vietnamese peasants, black people, white students-all one free-fire zone to be eliminated when they made trouble. The shots fired at Kent and Jackson had hit all of us, and we had felt that we must move now or face total defeat.
Our world last year had included Phnom Penh and My Lai, Jackson State and Chicago, Berkeley and Kent State. We felt that what happened to Fred Hampton, David Dellinger, and Allison Krause was part of our lives, and that we could not be the same because of it. But the long summer and the Yale game and the silent winter and the CRR had changed all that by April, and it now seemed more prudent to think of the victims as them to keep our noses clean and wait for it all to pass. We were so tired after last spring-what more could the world want from us? And the killing escalated in Asia while we studied in Lamont, or saw plays at the Loeb, or munched knockwursts at Elsie's, and stopped talking about what was bothering us and turned inward.
This year passed like an uneasydream-the bombing of the CFIA, the occupation of 888 Memorial Drive, the disruption of the Teach-In-until the Spring Offensive. Mayday and the JFK Building sit-in came, and some went and took risks and were arrested or clubbed for trying to stop a monstrous war. But most didn't, and most found it hard to understand those who had, because a new fear had crept into all of us, a panic quite unlike the panic of last May, and a lot of us were worrying about it all the time.
THE world outside, we had learned, was a cold and ugly place, where black people or students or troublemakers could be murdered, or whole Asian populations destroyed, and no one could stop it. And the revolution was not coming soon, and those who lived for it seemed destined for death or jail or the empty lonely life of the old leftist, his battles lost and forgotten, his brothers and sisters scattered filling his days with memories.
And around us was Harvard, its self-assurance as great as ever, its institutions as splendid: and we looked at its gleaming buildings and its immaculate potentates and felt that perhaps we cannot trust ourselves at all until we have learned from these men and these buildings how to think and to feel, that we are very small and our desires infantile and unattainable-that what we think we want is an illusion, that our desire to change is folly.
And we looked for ways out: law school, med school, careers, or identities, and mostly of us thought at one time or another:
Maybe I, all alone, without help from anyone, must be all right, must fit in, must carve out a little niche where I won't be bothered in a world which can grant me nothing of what I really desire. Maybe I must adjust my desires to what the world will grant, and be what has been, and thus hope it will always be, because vicious and unpleasant though it may be, it is real and requires no faith, no struggle, to achieve it; and it will accept me in my smallness and not blame my failures but reward me for them and ask only passive allegiance and silence while it does its work,
I don't know-maybe that's right; maybe that's growing up. But I hope not. Sitting by the river and drinking beer this spring has been very nice-perhaps as pleasant as any spring I've spent here, even if I had to work very hard. But at night in the Yard I see the gleaming buildings and the great pool of silence which surrounds them-us, the students, on our lawful occasions, drinking, making love, reading books, playing basketball, writing letters-and I am afraid and alone as never before.