When Harvard students stormed University Hall, boycotted classes and demanded campus reforms in the spring of 1969, they weren't in the vanguard of the student protest movement.

Instead, the student radicals at Harvard joined an already well-established network of campus movements across the country that had taken on the military-industrial-university establishment with a fervor that eventually found its way to Cambridge.

The Harvard student strike was anything but an isolated event, as it coincided with violent protests at Cornell, San Francisco State, Berkeley, Wisconsin, Michigan and many other universities.

The issues were unique to the particular colleges, but across-the-board they reflected a growing sense of discontent with traditional education and its social implications. Black studies, draft resistance, anti-war protest and community relations dominated the activists' demands, as students joined with progressive faculty and community organizations to challenge the power of the university.

"Nineteen-sixty-nine was a wild year," as students on campuses nationwide poured out of the classrooms and into the streets to protest, says Ronald J. Grele, who is the director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University and recently helped to compile a book on the 1960s student movement.

"Harvard was one of the major strikes in the spring of '69," Grele says, adding that the campus "had one of the largest SDS [contigents] in the country." SDS--Students for a Democratic Society--was a national progressive student organization which helped to spur campus demonstrations nationwide at the height of its membership in the late '60s.

Harvard's SDS chapter of 800 members was active since the mid-'60s, and although sharply divided, it mounted what many former students say was a particularly democratic demonstration. "Unlike Columbia, we did not have leaders or official spokesmen--the media had a hard time figuring out who was quotable," says Jon Weiner, who was a graduate student and SDS member during the strike. "There were meetings of 1000 people every night and different chairpersons every time," Weiner adds.

"The strike was a very clear example of SDS participatory democracy," he says.

The SDS national network contributed to the widespread effect of the 1968 and 1969 student protests. Activist leaders watched events on other campuses, learning new tactics and drawing strength from the others' efforts.

"There was an enormous snowballing effect of campuses following after other campuses," says Andor Skotnes, an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley during 1969 and now a historian at Columbia University.

And Jim Murray, an SDS organizer at Cornell University during the 1969 protests, says that "in 1968, when Columbia happened, people followed that very closely."

At Columbia, nearly 1000 students occupied five administration buildings while several thousand massed outside, virtually shutting down the university. That affair, and the student protests in Mexico and France the year before, may have provided the immediate impetus for Harvard's strike.

"In certain respects, Columbia was the first of a series of protests around campuses; it became the great fear of what could happen," says Molly Nolan, who was a graduate student at Columbia University during the building takeover there.

In fact, Nathan M. Pusey '28, the Harvard president during the 1969 takeover, has said that he sent police into Harvard Yard during the conflict in order to avoid a situation similar to the one at Columbia the previous year. Pusey also says he brought in Law School Professor Archibald Cox '34 to deal with the student demonstrations because he had headed an investigation into the Columbia protest.

In a recent interview, Pusey said, "We had the example of what had gone on down at Columbia as something to give us a little advice about it. The decision from my point of view was very simple. I said, 'Either we get the police and throw these people out right now, or this is going to drag on for weeks and months and it's just not going to stop.'"