Henry Rosovsky, former dean of the Faculty, Corporation member and architect of the Core Curriculum, said it best.

"You will be here for four years. I will be here for the rest of my life. Harvard will be here forever," he reportedly told a group of student protesters sometime in the 1980s.

He was probably right.

The Harvard of the 1980s, as Rosovsky so aptly described it, was an institution that placed a premium on its own existence. And as the '80s fade into the '90s, the changes in this world view are not readily apparent.

The University entered the decade as the wealthiest and arguably most prestigious research institution in the country. And it leaves the decade as the wealthiest and arguably most prestigious research institution in the country.

President Derek C. Bok still runs things from his Mass. Hall vantage point, and first-year students still live in the Yard. The much-vaunted house system and Core Curriculum are still in place, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences still has but a handful of women and minority professors.

In fact, the litany of stasis is a long one.

No divestment from South Africa. No changes in Harvard's often-criticized governance system. Few, if any, differences in undergraduate education.

The '80s were a time of retrenchment for the University, as many a frustrated student activist has noted. The big changes--the "non-merger merger" with Radcliffe, the creation of the Core Curriculum, the opening of the Kennedy School of Government--had all been made by the time 1980 rolled around.

And the big issues--the University's holdings in South Africa, its closed circle of governance, its lack of a diverse faculty--just never disappeared.

It is perhaps fitting that the biggest event of the decade was the ostentatious party Harvard threw for itself on the occasion of its 350th birthday in 1986. Prince Charles and luminaries of all stripes were on hand for the week-long festivities in September, as were angry protesters, who disrupted a black-tie dinner for big donors to call attention to Harvard's investments in South Africa.

With its fireworks and endless symposia, its big-name politicians and celebrity academics, the 350th was Harvard at its best and worst. Quite simply, it was Harvard at its most Harvard.

But if official Harvard celebrated its immortality in the '80s, the Harvard of students, faculty and staff was not without changes. The degree of change was measured in increments, rather than sweeping policy reforms. But it was different, nonetheless.

Three years after Alan M. Brinkley was denied tenure, the History Department tenured a professor from inside its own ranks for the first time in two decades--one. The once-uniformly white male Harvard Corporation named a woman to its ranks--one. Harvard named a woman--one--to the position of a University vice president.

The University's 3400 clerical and technical workers won the right to a union after 17 years of organizing, defeating the Harvard administration's often-intense campaign against them. Harvard severed ties with the nine all-male final clubs when they refused to admit women in 1984. University investments in South Africa have shrunk dramatically, even if Harvard has never made the moral statement of total divestment for which so many student and alumni activists have lobbied.