Recognizing that the vast expanse of tax-free buildings the University was using for educational purposes could be put to far more profitable uses, Vellucci proposed a variety of "creative" measures to combat Harvard. Among the less well-received proposals of 1968 was Vellucci's plan to bulldoze Harvard Yard to make way for a bus depot.

Harvard's rapid expansion in the 1960s did not help matters. As more students and academics moved into the city, landlords began to divide up apartments and raise rents, often driving out the city's working class tenants.

In January, 1968, a faculty committee headed by Professor of Government James Q. Wilson found that the University community was rapidly displacing local residents, and recommended that Harvard commit itself to creating new housing and recruiting workers from nearby city neighborhoods. The report also called for the creation of a new vice president for external affairs to handle the University's dealings with the city.

"If [Harvard] should be passive and let events take their course, it will implicitly choose a certain type of environment--one, perhaps, in which all Cambridge slowly becomes like Harvard and MIT, until we find that we are no longer an urban university, but one which has allowed there to grow up around itself a kind of inner-city suburb with a single kind of life style, carried on by professors, students, psychiatrists, and the executives of electronics and consulting firms," the Wilson report read.

But University administrators paid little attention to the findings of the Wilson report. In March, 1969, Wilson said that despite his expectations, the report had been "greeted with unusual critical silence."

A month later, the situation had changed. The SDS demands at University Hall--and the subsequent, slightly different platform approved by a meeting of 6000 in Harvard stadium later that week--signaled that students and the city could unite. Harvard could no longer simply ignore its role in the city.

"Before that, we used to say that Harvard students thought "the community was a subway stop somewhere beyond Park St.," says Wesley E. Profit '69, a former president of Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA). "I think it meant that people had to be on guard, that this link between the students and the community had been forged, and you didn't want it to happen again."

"The sense of unity wasn't just ideological," says State Sen. Michael J. Barrett '70 (D-Cambridge). "It was not simply people of a leftist stripe. When armed forces took over a community, there was just as much outrage from the working class community as from the students."

But even though student and community activists often worked for common goals in 1969, they represented a wide range of viewpoints and ideas.

"It was kind of a smorgasbord politics," recalls Charles E. Allen, Jr. '70, who worked in city housing projects for PBHA. "There were very few people who had any kind of coherent world view."

Many city residents were strongly opposed to the student movements, particularly the climate of violence that they brought to Cambridge.

"It had a terrible impact on the city," says City Councillor Walter J. Sullivan, who was mayor at the time. "It was in turmoil and we didn't have too many men to handle the situation."

The day after police--some of them from Cambridge--arrested, and in some cases, beat the students who had taken over University Hall, Sullivan received threats on his life. While no attempt was ever made to kill him, he says he took the threats seriously enough that he and his family left town immediately.

Sullivan says the climate of violence was primarily the result of activist groups from outside the city. Radical fringes of SDS, such as the Weathermen, converged on Cambridge in the late 1960s, as wave after wave of protest and revolt hit the universities.

Community activists like Graham began to openly challenge Harvard. In 1970 Graham staged an open attack on the University's most sacred tradition--the annual Commencement Exercises. With the aid of students, several community activists walked on stage and demanded to meet with President Nathan M. Pusey '28 and the Harvard Corporation.