But, gradually, the game began to turn around, in subtle ways and before we recognized that a transformation had begun.

Writing in the current Ramparts, Andrew Kopkind notes I.F. Stone's perception that the outrageous performance of Jerry Rubin, decked out in "Paul Revere drag," before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1966 was a turning point.

"Stone saw that theatrical caper break the 'choreographed' confrontations of Committeemen and Communists that punctuated his own haunted Fifties," Kopkind writes. "By refusing to dance the part of fearful, trembling witness, Rubin and his troupe helped destroy an all-too-hallowed set piece."

The Harvard Strike was another such theatrical caper. And it helped, in its small way, to liberate American institutions from their choreographed roles as pawns of a military order run amok.

To The New York Times editorial writers, the Harvard occupiers were "lawless students" who sought "not to reform but to destroy." The rifling of administrators' files was especially condemned.

But two years later, The Times, breaking with its policy of selfcensorship that had served the nation so badly at the Bay of Pigs and in the early years of Vietnam escalation, tore a page from the style books of the Old Mole and the Crimson and published its own set of stolen documents. The Pentagon Papers set off a chain of overreaction in the White House that eventually destroyed Richard Nixon and his clique, as surely as Pusey's overreaction destroyed him.

Not that the fallout of Watergate, or the American military's defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese and world opinion, has erased the problems of racism, sexism, imperialism and poverty. The problems have only grown. We always knew that not one small clique, but a tremendously powerful and intricate network of favoritism and corruption, feeding upon the failure of the people's ideology to condemn all forms of human domination, lies at the heart of the problem; and that network is unshaken.

But the possibility of challenging its hegemony is greater than ever. The media, though still pathetically timid, are more aggressive than in the past. One gang of law-and-order fascists has been thoroughly discredited. Alternative institutions are flourishing. The right of individuals to their own life styles is increasingly unquestioned.

Remember: When I came to Harvard in 1967 there were no coed dorms; there was a coat-and-tie requirement at all meals; there was no black studies program, in any form; there was no University commitment to relocate tenants it uprooted; there was no organization for gay students; marijuana was still kept hidden; and ROTC was ensconced in Shannon Hall.

All that's changed now--in most cases, not as a direct result of the radicals' actions, but because a University and a society under siege were compelled to give a little ground here and there.

In 1969 such an equilibrium would have been hard to foresee. My friends and I are in traditional job tracks, for the most part, though a surprising number are quietly organizing here and there. The harder edges of our radicalism have softened, but what remains has gained respectability (not what we wanted at the time). Harvard is a more pleasant place for the children of the upper-middle-class to pass a few years in, but the Corporation's rule remains unchallenged.

Couldn't that have been accomplished without such chaos and discord? Probably. But Harvard is an educational institution, after all, and for many of us the disorder and brutality of that month in April taught us more than any number of lectures. Seeing Harvard "turned on its ears" was quite a remarkable lesson in power, and democracy, and terror.

So when the fundraisers start after my class in earnest in a few years, for the sake of my Alma Mater I hope they have the good sense to stress that part of the Harvard experience, and not some idiotic pieties about Junior Common Room fellowship or lectures I skipped in some supposedly hallowed course.

If they mention the goddamned Pusey Library they won't get a red cent, but if the pitch relies on memories of eleven thousand people in Harvard Stadium roaring their approval of the resolution, "This body repudiates the right of the Corporation to close down our University," then they'll have me. Tears will well up in my eyes, I'll reach for my checkbook, and "Fair Harvard" will echo in my mind