That we did not succeed is easily shown if we ask ourselves who benefited most from the strike. The answer is quite simple: the real victor in April, 1969 was Derek C. Bok, student hero and A student extraordinary.

Bok first impressed the powers-that-be by his cool handling of a miniature crisis at the Law School when the freneticism of the strike spilled over from Arts and Sciences. A group of first-year students held a "study-in" at the Law Library, refusing to leave at closing time to dramatize their demand for changes in the grading system.

In this hour of crisis, Bok, the school's dean, showed up to drink coffee and chat with the rebels. He assured them that he would consider their demands very carefully; they went home. The Law School escaped turmoil, and Bok became known as Harvard's coolest crisis handler.

Here is a key to Bok's style. The situation was not nearly as desperate as later accounts drew it; Bok was facing a group of rebels whose idea of protest was to sit at tables and read books when asked not to. And his responsiveness was largely illusory. After the incident, the Law Faculty passed a compromise plan which had been drawn up before the incident; a plan which instituted reform so mild as to be meaningless. Bok's glad-handing and oily sincerity at the "study-in" made no difference in the resolution of the issues in question. His presence was simply a device to reduce tension and pacify students; his gesture not only lacked substance, but showed contempt for substance.

For to Bok, the form is all. His only discernible goal as President is to avoid risk to his institution and minimize conflict which might threaten it by making cosmetic concessions which divide and pacify the constituencies he must manipulate. His change in Harvard's sex-ratio is an excellent example of this tyle of pacification. Bok has no desire to compromise Harvard's honored principle of male supremacy by making admission 1 to 1 or sex-blind. Demonstrations, petitions, letters, lawsuits--nothing will force him to admit that women deserve an equal place in the University. But neither will he make a profitless stand on the principle. Instead, he adjusts Harvard just enough to take the initiative away from those demanding change, makes the minimum effort necessary to blur the issue. Again, it is a politics of contempt, contempt for the policies instituted and for the constituencies at which they are aimed.

Contrast the slick maximizers who now glide through Massachusetts Hall with the zany Yankees--William Bentinck-Smith, J. Boyd Britton, F. Skiddy von Stade Jr.--with whom Pusey surrounded himself. For that matter, contrast Pusey himself with Bok. Nathan Pusey was a nasty old man obsessed with reactionary beliefs and values. Yet, for all that, he was more human than Bok. He had human loves and hates, and he was willing to fight to the death with any weapon he had to preserve his principles inviolate.

Two memories of Pusey stand out in my mind. After Harvard's upset victory over Yale in 1970, the Harvard band marched to Pusey's house and serenaded him with a medley of Harvard fight songs. The old man emerged from the house and accompanied the band on cymbals as it ripped through "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard." And in the spring of 1970, when he was asked what qualification he considered most important to his successor, he answered simply: "a belief in God."

Imagine the contempt and derision with which this was received in Langdell, Baker, Littauer, William James, and the Computer Center. With all the important skills necessary to manipulate a great university, the godstruck old fool had cited something as intangible as a belief. For it was not only Pusey's belief in God which was pitiful and funny: it was his belief in belief of any kind. Nothing more amuses the men who run this university--and their compatriots who run our society--than people with beliefs and no power.

And we who breifly shut Harvard down in 1969 were not only enemies to be checked; we were also jokes, pathetic Luddites trying to smash the fabric of the new American order without money or power or management skills. Our day, like Pusey's, had passed, and the future belonged to them, the smartest, most dynamic, most skillful group of technocrats the world had ever seen. Thus far, they are winning.

I will pass from this University in June, taking my memories of the strike and an academic transcript undistinguished by excellence or promise. I plan to talk to the C students of the nation, and I imagine I will be renewed by their common sense and their decency. Perhaps we can figure out some way to take our country away from the maximizers and technocrats and make it a free nation where everyone can live.

One of the slogans of the 1969 strike ended: Strike because they are trying to squeeze the life out of you. More and more I see that it is the A students, the Harvard men, who are squeezing the life out of me, and out of the American people and the cities and the countryside and, if they can, out of the trees and the grass and the sky. I plan to help stop them if I can.