Reunions are not by chance Nostalgia needs its antidote, a brief re-creation of those moments of the hard, gem-like flame. So I may finally feel at home in Harvard Square, more, at least, than I ever did back then I am certain to find the same films at the Brattle, the same books in the Coop, and much the same music streaming from the windows in the Yard on those warm, sunny mornings of early summer. What will surprise are the students, how young they will be. Time has passed, and there will come in a rush the sense of time lost, the memories of the last adventure of youth, the all-nighters. Mazola parties, touch football along the Charles. Certainly, University Hall still stands in the center of Harvard Yard, and upon seeing the solid construction of Ivy-draped stone masonry we held for 16 hours. I know I will shudder and then remember the Harvard Strike of 1969. And then it will be time to face those very different people we were 15 years ago.

What astonishes me about the Harvard Strike--which stands here as an example of the radical student movement of the 1960s--when I think of it a decade and a half later, is the peculiar disproportion between means and ends, between what we then called our "militancy" and the unprepossessing, almost trivial nature of our demands. We shut down Harvard University, but our initial demands--the abolition of ROTC and a halt to evictions in Harvard-owned housing ("Smash ROTC, No Expansion!" Remember?)--touched only peripheral, almost tangential concerns of Harvard as a university. Today they seem virtually irrelevant. ROTC was not crucial to the war effort and most of us realized that; Officer Candidate School could easily have trained all the officers the Army needed. And frankly, I can no longer reconstruct the reasoning for allowing 182 run-down flats to stand in the way of a modern hospital. If the tenants are offered decent alternative housing, why not build the hospital?

The nation's best scholars seemed to have learned nothing from the millions of volumes in Widener Library.

Yet now that I look back on them, our demands seem to have been no mistake. Not only did we never doubt them; they represented precisely what we wanted, and not just at Harvard. ROTC became a target of nationwide protest, and students struck against university expansion from People's Park to Morningside Heights. We were willing to risk expulsion, police beatings and jail in order to obtain precisely these two concessions from Harvard University. On one level, it is clear why. ROTC and expansion were the closest embodiments at Harvard of what we believed were the crimes of the nation. Harvard was there in evident unholy union with the military; whites were removing Blacks from their homes. There was nothing more to be sought and nothing more to be said.

Yet if that were all, there would also be nothing more to be written. But there is more there is the conclusion, reached without discussion, that Harvard should be destroyed for its sins. As we picketed in front of Burr Hall on the sunny spring morning after the Bust, an aged member of the Harvard Corporation, a dark hat shielding his face from the heavy sun, stormed and raged at us, demanded that we consider what we were doing asked whether we wanted to destroy Harvard University. No reason occurred to me why Harvard should not be destroyed. Harvard's only use was as a forum for our protest I, at least, did not need to ask whether Harvard should expand, because I had found nothing at Harvard worth saving. The War, racial discrimination, police brutality and the violation of University autonomy may explain the actions of many of those who struck after the Bust, but for me, at least, something very different was involved, something that seems when I call it up today, like self destruction.

The question is how so many of us came to regard the University as evil why students literally around the world at Berkeley. Columbia and Harvard, in Paris, Berlin and Italy, felt such bitterness at their universities that they were willing to immolate them in protest.

The familiar explanations cannot explain this intensity. The draft was not really a threat to wealthy college students, and the tightening job market would have hardly inspired such revolutionary fervor.

Though wrong, both of these explanations the draft and the economy show how easy it is to pass, as in the night by the meaning of one own experience, how natural it is to explain the daily world in terms of individual interest. In the 1960s however, we were following not our inclinations, but rather what we saw as our duty. In those brief years of privilege, for one of the few moments it seems to have been possible in this century, we were free. Our protest was not one of the hungering masses, caught in imminent destruction, but rather an expression of our submission to a moral law. The fact that such words may hardly be written today, only a few years later, and will certainly not easily be understood, is an indication of all that has changed since.

The place to begin is the fact that ours was a college student's protest, and not, as I remember claiming at the time, the action of a vanguard of the urban proletariat and Third World peasants. We were born in the most powerful country on earth in its history and grew up entirely within the post-War economic boom. Life came so smoothly, so almost without incident, that almost no memories remain, no signposts to draw the boundaries. In the 1960s we came of age in the nation's best, or at least its elite, colleges. Most of us never knew economic difficulty. I remember wandering around Cambridge for days without spending a dollar, except on books and movies. I had no money, but I also needed none tuition, room, and board were paid. I never bought clothes, never had cleaning bills, never ate out except at a sandwich shop called Elsie's, and traveled exclusively by thumb and backpack.

In other words, many of us lived in a world quite different from the world of daily preoccupation, of the business day, civil society. To some extent, everyone's existence is structured by the competing demands of two different worlds. In civil society we largely follow our inelinations. We seek our selfish best interest, try to make the best deals possible, move forward in our careers, invest correctly, take care of our own. In political society, on the other hand, we discuss the issues and then vote for the candidate who will do the most for the nation as a whole. Some live in political society daily as they build critical judgments reading the newspapers some are political citizens only every two or four years in the election booth and some do not have enough political education or moral uphousing ever to take part.

Almost no one of course, spends his life in political society. No once except, perhaps, the President of the United States, the Justices of the Supreme Court and one generation attending college at the end of the 1960s. Many of us had no cares about? Indeed no touch with, civil society, and could live our entire day as political citizens. We had enough education to ask what would be best of the world and enough time to dedicate ourselves entirely to the quest for the answer.

My own brief it occurs to me now, remained remorsessly conceived in all of this. It astounds the me to realize that there was a time, only a decade ago, when there was something more important than one's individual future, when life could be dedicated something beyond itself. I did not have a term for it then, but I now know that I measured my life by the concept of duty. I did not know how I would use my future, but I knew that I would prefer none at all if it meant a life of mere personal success. In the end my use of the term "ruling class was not a political or economic category but rather interpression of moral disdain. It signified a very different group of people, different not in education, culture, or individual interest but rather in then conception of political society. They were the economically powerful who acted in political matters to their own personal ends. With them one could have no discussion.

With rare exceptions, there was also no hope for discussion with the Harvard Faculty. Most of those who taught at Harvard had other cares, were engaged in the treaty business of college academics. Having been called to Harvard in an earlier age, by quick circumstance, after a decade or more of painstaking specialization, they were even less prepared for the challenge of the time than were we. They were not ignorant professors, but they were unable to demonstrate how a life might be dedicated both to books and action, learning and justice. The nation's best scholars seemed to have learned nothing from the millions of volumes in Widener Library, and only the Lord knew what solace they found in their footnotes.

Their lack of inspiration and wisdom helped form our willingness to destroy their university, for it began to appear to us that scholarship itself yields ignorance. Without discussion and as if without choice, I, at least, broke with my scientific calling. There was no reason to the reading, no purpose to the concentration requirements, no joy in a well-written blue book or even a good grade. The rejection came all the more easily in the obnoxious prep-school atmosphere of Harvard in those days, from the sherries, proctors and parietal halls to the ceat and tie dinners and the joyless Anglo-Saxon outline.

It seemed there was nothing to do but begin again, elsewhere, in a far different latitude. And so began the Sisyphean strivings, the apotheosis of praxis to the source of all knowledge. What I was trying to uproot and destroy was a part of myself, the very talent that had brought me to Harvard in the first place. I buried my hopes for a career with the great books, and those buried hopes became a throbbing pain.