But the giddy moment of multi-cultural promise passed all too quickly. Only three weeks later, an elaborate, College-sponsored program specifically for Harvard titled AWARE--Actively Working Against Racism and Ethnocentrism--flopped because of student disinterest, non-attendance. Billed as a means to work out mounting racial tensions on campus and targeted largely at the white community, the week of activities was supposed to help resolve "racism among the well-intentioned."

It turned out, apparently, that too few of us even cared to think about how to live together.

This apathy, this self-delusion or self-denial formed the grounds for masters and the College dean to propose in November the greatest change in residential housing assignment since the early 1970s. Alarmed by stereotypes of the houses no longer represented the educational microcosm of the University's diversity, officials moved to introduce partially random assignment of rising sophomores.

Students fought the change by claiming the right to choose, and won in the short term because masters themselves disagreed over how much social engineering was necessary to ensure "diversity," and because the masters' plan was to be unequally applied to all the houses. But when the dean of the College reversed the decision in March, he announced his resolve to forge a consensus on a better plan to enforce diversity this fall. As well he should. Not wanting to live together is not the answer to the problem of pluralism.

PERHAPS the watershed event of the year--the event which showed students' ability to govern themselves--was that which unfolded at year's end, eventually before headlines nationwide. When the Undergraduate Council voted on April 24 to ask for the return of Reserve Officers Training Corps to Harvard (ROTC), it believed it was performing a service to the 90-odd undergraduate ROTC participants forced to commute to MIT for the program.

But when the student body rallied to the cause of gays and lesbians in protest of the military's discrimination, the contest of values took on broader terms. ROTC advocates realized this when they adapted the campaign slogan, "Tolerance for everyone." But that was only a superficial acknowledgment of the underlying principle.

The council eventually overturned its decision after a contentious week that electrified the campus. It made its decision on the basis of its charter and University policy, which prohibit campus groups from discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. But underlying the council's discussion was in part the principle of education free from military influence, and in part the insistence on equality based on a historical legacy left over from a Civil Rights era a quarter century past.

At the end of a period tagged a decade of greed, which followed a "me generation" and a so-called age of permissiveness, the return of concern is encouraging. And, 25 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and 20 years after such politics culminated in students taking over University Hall, the tumult was refreshing.