It's not surprising that many of us who stay here are puzzled about those who leave, or that our puzzlement is compounded by the likelihood that, in addition to students who "vote with their feet" by taking time off or withdrawing from Harvard, there are increasing numbers of strong, intelligent young people who "vote" by never applying here to begin with. It kinda makes you wonder about the rest of us.

I graduated Yale College in 1969 and am a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Education. Along the way I took a few years off to be a youthworker (as a Conscientious Objector), hop freights, write for the Phoenix, learn carpentry at an industrial school, work with radical political groups, and generally ponder the state of the country and of my soul. Returning to Harvard in 1974, I thought I noticed a drop in temperature which wasn't "just me." If it would be presumptuous to preach or speak for others, perhaps I can at least share some impressions to see if they resonate at all. They boil down to the claim that we are being fatefully socialized here into a way of knowing and naming the world which renders whole populations invisible and entire regions in ourselves inaccessible, and which saddles us with gloomy characterizations of human nature that keep faith with no one and aren't half so realistic as their proponents insist.

When so many talented, well-intentioned people are chronically lonely and confused--or stridently busy and heartless about it--there have to be reasons. There have to be reasons for the scarcity of teachers who are fearless, comradely, and fun-loving, or for the fact that so many of us move through a day unattuned to friendship, unwilling or unable to take time with one another in unspoken things.

We know that the pace has quickened here, but not through love; desperate students wander into the Bureau of Study Counsel in sufficient numbers for the Director to report to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences a "defeat of their yearning for a sense of purpose." The wonderful things we have been told about ourselves don't really satisfy, and I guess James Baldwin, speaking with the wisdom of the oppressed, had us best in hand:

...each of us has a profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know...that mirrors can only lie...It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. (The Fire Next Time.)

It does sound familiar, and it is precisely in this that, turn and turn again, we find so little help at Harvard. I would count it a cop-out to say that the place wasn't set up for that kind of help; we have to reject the emotional parsimony of a liberal institutional mentality which confuses demands for a sensually just and loving community with cries for a nursemaid. Instead I think we would have to conclude that there are connections between that old bogeyman, the concentration of wealth and corporate power, and the everyday fragmentation of identities, failure of relationships, and encroachment of new and subtle patterns of domination and decadence in our lives--patterns against which the protest movements of the 'sixties cried out, and against which a "counter-culture" of re-affirmation and resistance was attempted.

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To argue that way, I must open old wounds, for the 1969 strike here turned precisely upon those connections, and the current CRR controversy shows that we badly need our own history. In 1969 a curious amalgam of demands for emotional sustenance and social justice boggled liberal minds with the "outrageous" contention that there is an interdependence between the two:

Strike for the Eight Demands Strike to seize control of your life Strike to return the Paine Hall Scholarships Strike because there's no poetry in your lectures Strike because your roommate was clubbed Strike to abolish ROTC Strike because classes are a bore Strike to smash the corporations Strike because they are trying to squeeze the life out of you.

(African Research Group, How Harvard Rules.)

"Moving on in their 'analysis'," said President Pusey of the rebels, "they see our universities as having been taken over by the business and military establishments...[and as] devoted to 'the present and future domination of the people of the world.' Obviously, they live in a world of fantasy." He got the political part of the radicals' critique right, on the whole, though by 1975, with Walt Rostow trapped on celluloid repeating his war apologies before audiences watching "Hearts and Minds" while hundreds waited for helicopters on the roof of our embassy in Saigon, one could be forgiven for wondering whether the "world of fantasy" won't soon be Pusey's own.

But neither he nor the majority of the faculty really understood the enotional part of the critique. Among some professors there was a great wagging of jowls about the "barbarians'" disregard for scientific inquiry and decency, but the strikers retorted that these worthy considerations had long ago become nostrums having little to do with the rhythm and structure of anyone's life at Harvard, to say nothing of life--and death--in our cities or in Vietnam, and that in any case it was not the professors' blood which Buildings and Grounds was cleaning off the steps of University Hall.

One need not glorify the protestors, or apologize for their own brutality to argue, as I do, that they had stumbled upon a fault-line in Harvard's humanism. Every encounter here became colored by the fact that the privileged structural realities of a "Harvard education" contradict its teachings. Donald Fleming was more candid than many of his colleagues when he wondered aloud how students could ever have expected that exciting things would transpire during their appointments with professors (Crimson, Spring, 1975). For the sad fact is that, while teaching and learning in a humane community ought to be an encounter of whole persons, this place serves powers whose consolidation is inimical to their nurture. Erik Erikson, who was also on the faculty, expressed well what the authors of the strike slogans felt was happening at the university, and what I believe is still happeneing to us:

...masses of young people feel attuned to technological promises of indefinite progress; and these promises, if sustained by schooling, imply a new world-image and identity for many, who can combine the techniques of mastery and domination with their identity development...

Each new consolidation also makes for institutionalized inequalities and built-in contradictions that become glaringly obvious to outsiders--those who lack appropriate gifts and opportunities, or have a surplus of not-quite appropriate talents.