Crimson: But if you do ask them, they argue that they do not support big business and what they want is more emphasis on individual rights.

Anderson: Who are they trying to kid? If you're an individual at Harvard who has the chance to go to business school and develop yourself and your own potential given yourself and what's been handed to you, then yes. American liberty is exactly the kind of liberty you want to be defending. I think the difference between the Right and the Left here and elsewhere is that the Left at least feels the compulsion to care about people who aren't in a unique situation, namely that of being a well-off student at an Ivy League university.

Raskin: How can they say they're for individual rights when they oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, when they oppose the right of abortion, when they oppose affirmative action, when they oppose any progressive measure that has tried to further the cause of individuals in our society, specifically those individuals who have traditionally been excluded from those institutions which conservatives back.

Crimson: How would you describe the origins of you political orientation?

Anderson: If anything has radicalized me, it's been watching my father try to use his position in the FBI to do something good. He works on civil rights cases and he works on brutality cases, and he's got the best intentions in the world If there's one truth to radical doctrine, it's that most evil in the world is institutionally caused and in some sense inevitable without that institution. There's no way I can see myself wallowing in the kind of impotence I see my father in, trying to make the best out of an inherently bad situation. There's also something about being at Harvard University that's an inherent radicalizing force. South Africa, more than anything else has convinced me that big institutions like Harvard are incapable of changing things themselves. They have to be forced into it from the outside.

Raskin: (whose father quit a national security post in the Kennedy Administration in opposition to the Vietnam War and remains a prominent leftist writer and researcher.) I grew up in a very radicalized family I think that had a profound affect on me, but like Mike. I found myself increasingly radicalized by being at Harvard and understanding the institutional sources of oppression and injustice....It's been a learning experience in that morality is really put second on the just, or third or fourth, by the Corporation.

Crimson: You express some optimism about the Left here, what do you see for the future?

Raskin: The first development then is that the Left is really becoming cohesive, people are putting aside minor ideological or partisan quibbles and realizing that we have a common task now. The second is that there is much more receptivity to radical ideas now.

Anderson: I would disagree about there being unity among the student Left right here and now. We are still very fragmented. I think. To a large extent, I think the student Left exists only among the people who are committed for some particular, individual reason and not because of any collective groundswell. I think that when the Left makes its resurgence, it will be in response to a number of specific events: the reinstatement of the draft, escalated American involvement in Central American, or a specific freakish issue popping up, like student loans.

Crimson: What of the problem of those in the middle who say that both sides are sounding off without knowing what to really do about anything?

Anderson: I've got no illusions about what people think of me when I'm tabling on Central America. What they'll think of me is someone who's making noise after all, what's the point. They might be sympathetic in principle, but the last thing they've got time for is to come to a meeting or to table themselves. I'm not worried about that because I think that most of us in the movement as it is now see ourselves as waiting for that time a few years from now when people can't afford to go to the libraries, when people can't afford to go to the libraries, when people have to start thinking in a very immediate way about [what] politics is going to mean for them....

At Harvard people will look through their Harvard brochure or the Harvard Gazette and see Archie Epps or Derek Bok and think of themselves as at a liberal institution--that we're at an effectively enlightened place. If there are problems with America, these are problems that exist out in the sticks that the Eastern establishment will be able to deal with. It's a very sort of complacent, moderate-to-liberal feeling that everything is all right if I only get to law school and study under Archibald Cox....When SASC [Southern Africa Solidarity Committee] gets its literature thrown out in the middle of the night by Epps' assistant and then he comes back and claims that it was all a mistake, that is as patent a lie as there could possibly be. People in SASC, people reading The Indy and The Crimson get a glimmering of the realities beneath the facade. Part of what radicalism is about is breaking the illusions that Harvard creates and creates very well.

Crimson: Do people have a responsibility to act, one way or the other?

Anderson: I'd say yes and no. Yes, I think people should be doing what we're doing. What we're doing is right. What we're doing creates a better world for human beings than what the Right's doing or even what the present system's doing. On the other hand, I don't expect someone whose only desire is to get into medical school right now to wake up right now and go to a SASC meeting.... They'll come around when the pressure mounts.

Raskin: People have a responsibility to do what they can where they can. For example, for the students who are going to medical school, there is an undergraduate group forming now of students opposed to the arms race, the medical consequences of the arms race. They've put time and energy into reversing militarism and reversing the arms race. it's not so much that we want people to be doing what we're doing specifically, it's that people in their different departments in their different areas work to advance progressive goals.