The role in the takeover played by this individual (who declined to be indentified by name and will be called "John Doe") was in one way unique: Doe was the only student of the thirty-five to enter Mass Hall after the start of the occupation. A tutor at the time, he recalls receiving a 7 a.m. phone call in his Claverly room from George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology, informing him that black students had just taken over Mass Hall, and asking him if he knew any details of the protest action. The graduate student, who belonged to H-R Afro, told Wald he'd go down to Mass Hall to check out the report and call him back. When the tutor reached Mass Hall, a small group of protesters were already huddled outside and some of the occupying students yelled for him to join them inside. He somehow avoided the observation of the police stationed in the area until he was halfway through a Mass Hall window. Immediately after he entered the building, police moved in and barricaded the hall against further entry.

This takeover participant agrees that since the early seventies, the University has started to admit relatively more black applicants from professional, upper class families. Doe is a native of Georgia who grew up in an epoch when he says segregation was still a legal institution and lynchings an occasional horror; he believes that Harvard students--black and white--no longer realize that black students come from a "different type of political reality," regardless of their economic and financial backgrounds. Doe laments the changing attitudes of black students at the University. He recalls going to a reception for black freshmen this September where he closed his eyes and, he says, "I could have sworn I was with a bunch of upper class white students." Doe says he has little faith in the University's ability to develop a socially responsible position as an investor. "How can the University clean up its act if America can't clean up its act?" he asks.

Five years after his role in the takeover of the University's administrative center, Doe says he feels "schizophrenic" in his attitude toward his Harvard past. "I have my moments when I think this whole thing is an appeasement and that the only thing that I'm doing is helping a group of minority students develop bourgeois values to perpetuate an evil. And on the other hand, I think I see people that I know, in fact, would never have had a chance to have any type of professional aspirations unless we helped them," Doe says.

Harvard-Radcliffe admissions officers disagreed this week with the assertion of the takeover participants that the University has in recent years adopted policies to screen out applicants, either white or minority group members, who show a potential for radical student activism. Their reasons for disagreeing vary, however. Dwight Miller, an admissions officer since 1967, said this week that individual admissions officers may have altered their attitudes toward what types of students to admit during the late '60s and early '70s, but that such changes were "internally" motivated--personal reactions to events the admissions officers witnessed in their admissions and other activities at the University. The University administration never issued any directives to the admissions offices requesting a screening of applicants for possible activism, Miller said.

L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of admissions, also denied that the University ever issued any directives and added that he believes such an admissions screening policy would be detrimental to the University, that the "value of having aware and committed students at the College far outweighs" the occasional costs. Jewett added that, on the basis of past studies by the admissions office, it would be impossible to screen out potential protesters, even if the University wanted to do so.

After the 1969 University Hall takeover, admissions officials went back and studied the admissions records of the leaders of the student strike, Jewett says. According to Jewett, they found at the time that trying to correlate admissions applications with involvements in the strike was "a futile effort." Jewett adds he does not believe there has been a significant change in the composition of family backgrounds of black students admitted to the College.

Senior admissions officer David Evans, who was assistant director of admissions during the 1972 Mass Hall incident, says a study he did at that time of the economic backgrounds of the occupying students showed that most were not among the poorer black students at Harvard. He says that 25 of the 31 undergraduates involved were receiving financial aid, while about 70 per cent of all blacks at the College were also on aid at the time. The median family income of the financial aid students who occupied Mass Hall was $17,000, as opposed to $11,000 for all black students then on financial aid.

Evans says that, contrary to the suggestions of many at the time of the takeover, "this was not a case of students who were unable to handle the social pressures at Harvard because they came from low socio-economic backgrounds. These were students from the middle-and upper-middle classes, as radicals usually are."

Five years later, the Mass Hall occupiers who protested Harvard ownership of Gulf Oil stock feel pessimistic about the prospects for more socially responsible University investing. They doubt that a more activist Harvard student group will arise in the near future. But it is clear that they do not believe that widespread student commitment to social concerns at Harvard is dead and gone. As Scott Minerbrook suggests, "Students at Harvard try to go to sleep periodically. But there are cycles every two or three student generations. Right now, Harvard is trying to present itself as a benign institution. But the student activity will start again."