But many, including Molly Nolan--who participated in the student protest and was arrested while occupying one of the buildings--continue to disagree with Pusey. She says, "The lesson we should have learned from Columbia '68 was not to send in police [because] it was a particularly brutal event--especially to those outside the building on campus protesting the police."

Nolan, who is now a history professor at New York University, says the takeover was "about conditions at Columbia and the community, and about the school's connections with the military."

But even if Harvard's protest was spurred by the example of Columbia's upheaval of the previous year, the history of student activism that culminated in the large-scale protests of the end of the decade had its roots earlier in the '60s.

Berkeley, for example, traced its protests back to 1963. The administration there had been faced with "almost eight years of dealing with unbroken confrontation," by the time of the massive anti-Vietnam war protests in 1970, says Skotnes.

And, in 1969, the Berkeley fight was over People's Park--a university-owned lot which had been taken over by the community and which the administration wanted to take back for use as a parking lot.

People's Park "became one of the legendary struggles" of the late 1960s, Skotnes says, adding that the debacle resulting in "major street fighting and riots unified campus and community radicals" and led to further demonstrations on a number of other issues.

In the subsequent fight to abolish the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) on campus, Skotnes says "there were very frequent demonstrations that got more and more confrontational. The demonstrations were striking because there was participation by young kids and the confrontation would start, and then all hell would break loose."

But he says, "By April, 1970, the demonstrations became more and more crazy, and there was a powerful sense of apocalypse at Berkeley."

"It was a very, very frightening time," Skotnes says of the the spring of 1970 when there was a student strike at Berkeley. "It was a direct result of Nixon's invading Cambodia and the Kent State [conflict]," where four students were shot and killed by the National Guard during an anti-war demonstration.

"We were dealing with the escalating use of tactics all over the country," Skotnes says. And while the U.S.'s involvement abroad prompted conflict at some campuses, issues closer to home also resulted in confrontations between students and universities.

For example, Black students' demands for Afro-American studies courses and a more relevant curriculum came to a head in 1969 at a number of campuses, including Cornell and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. And at Harvard, too, the Black student groups joined the fray, temporarily aligning themselves with SDS anti-war activists after the University Hall takeover.

"Nineteen-sixty-nine was the year Black students called for Black studies," says Teresa Meade, who was an undergraduate at Wisconsin in 1969 and is now a historian at Union College.

"The issue at a lot of places was Black studies," Grele says. At Cornell, he says, "Black students took over the student union and made Time magazine."

"What was remarkable is that the president and students compromised and there was no violence," Grele says. But, he adds, Cornell's president "got a lot of heat for not coming in and busting heads."

"You saw Black students with guns in the media, but not the 3000 white students in support of them," says Murray, who was a Cornell undergraduate in spring, 1969, when Cornell's Black students took over the student union. But Murray adds that even at the mass demonstrations, "we never got any heavy busts at Cornell because we were well-sheltered by the liberal faculty."