"They sang radical songs, received wet pieces of linen and instructions for their use against tear gas, and the phone numbers of lawyers who had agreed to defend those arrested.

"At 4:58 a student rushed in and screamed, 'Cops are coming.' A moment later, the shining blue helmets of the Massachusetts State Police could be seen through the windows."

--The moment of confrontation as described in a Crimson extra of Thursday, April 10, 1969.

A surging mob, clothed in the nondescript chic of their politics and their youth. Posters of red fists, clinched in defiance. A carnival of long hair and bell bottoms juxtaposed against the strict lines and austere faces of the oil paintings in the Faculty room.

And then a hazy, pre-dawn light. The blue helmets of the police, the singing of the students. One set of invaders met another.

The images of April 9 and 10, 1969.

When several hundred students, led by members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), did what had never been done at Harvard and took over University Hall.

When Harvard did what had never been done at Harvard and called the police in to arrest its students.

"The buildings [of Harvard] will remain, but the soul will be gone," said then-Dean of the Faculty Franklin L. Ford, as the students ejected him and the other deans from their University Hall offices in protest over Harvard's continued ties with the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and its expansion in the city.

The images of that confrontation are frozen, immobile. They are the demarcation line between Harvard then and now. Twenty years later, the story seems unbelievable. It is inconceivable that it could have happened here.

And yet, the divisions of that time, the debates and the collective anguish of students and police locked in combat over a Harvard building are still here. It is only that we see the results every day without remembering what it was that happened.

There was blood on the sidewalk in the Yard. There were press conferences, endless faculty meetings. "The New College" convened outside; the old college caucused indoors. Black students marched, SDS marched, moderate students marched.

And there were changes. ROTC was voted off campus by the faculty, an Afro-American Studies Department was voted in. Dean Ford, sidelined by a stroke one week after the takeover, eventually resigned his position. So did Dean of the College Fred Glimp '50.

Two years later, President Nathan M. Pusey '28 stepped down, and Law School Dean Derek C. Bok, who won praise during the student uproar for his moderate stance, assumed the University's top post.

The list of pre- and post-strike changes is endless. Some major, some minor.