"The world has changed," muses Rev. Peter J. Gomes, Plummer professor of Christian morals, as he leans back in his brown leather armchair, in his office in Memorial Church. "And I've changed with it."

Gomes has been a minister of Memorial Church since 1970, and from the pulpit he has seen the University pass through an often chaotic two decades. All the while, he says, the University has remained, as the last lines of "Fair Harvard" would have it, "calm, rising through change and through storm."

Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III says Gomes's sense of history and tradition makes him a steadying influence in the University. "I think he's one of the most constant things at Harvard," Epps says.

"When I came back as an officer in 1970, right after the troubles of 1969, the University was in a terrible state; people were not talking to other people, the faculty was fractured and divided, students were broken down into warring political factions," Gomes continues. "Harvard Square had become a war zone with buildings with steel grates and metal bars keeping people from trashing them."

In an effort to reconcile these various groups, then-President Derek C. Bok appointed a faculty commission, chaired by Gomes. The initial goal of the Gomes Commission, as it came to be called, was to discuss the establishment of a Third World center. The committee decided against that initial plan in favor of a more encompassing organization, and thus established the Harvard Foundation.

"Its purpose was to affirm and enhance, identify and encourage the varieties of cultural and ethic experiences at Harvard, not making everybody conform to one norm, but also not encouraging a separatist mentality, which is what a Third World center tends to do," says Gomes. "We felt that the richness Harvard was beginning to experience through its diversity of students should not be accidental but intentional."

The Harvard Foundation, a multi-cultural organization, has now become a model for other universities across the country, says Gomes. But in the beginning the enterprise was rather risky, he says, because nobody had done it here or anywhere else.

"I got a lot of political flak," says Gomes. "The faculty resisted initially because they thought they were making concessions to a student political movement; the students resisted initially because it wasn't what they had asked for, so we steered a course between those rocks."

Gomes says he has seen many changes in attitudes among constituents of the University. And he believes there is still continuing activity in many directions.

"I don't believe people are less interested in the world or less concerned, and I have never accepted the wrath that my generation has placed on yours, that is that your people are indifferent and don't have any moral scruples," Gomes says. "It's a '30-something' anxiety about growing old."

Gomes has seen the views of many causes shift. And he is relieved to see what he deems an increasing intolerance for the "last permissable prejudice": homophobia.

"In one sense, it's hard to tell because the subject was never discussed 20 years ago, it simply didn't exist in people's consciousness, it was snickering in back rooms and gossip and innuen-does and sly remarks, but no sort of open discussion," he remarks. "I think that has changed much for the better."

Gomes feels that that faculty, staff and students whose homosexuality is "a fact of life, not just a lifestyle or an abstraction," should be able to identify their sexual orientation publicly, and thus feel more empowered to address their concerns. "People should not be intimidated into a deadly silence," says Gomes. "I want people to be able to address it."

Until recently, Gomes says, he had attempted to separate his private life from his public duties as a member of the Harvard faculty and as the minister of Memorial Church. But with the release of Peninsula's 56-page attack on homosexuality, he says, he felt moved to defend both himself and the church.

"It was more the fact that I had made a distinction in my life between a public person with many duties and having a very private life, and I'd decided to maintain my private life. Even now, in spite of all this, I do not relish discussing my sexuality in the newspapers," says Gomes. "There's a big badge on me now that says 'homosexual,' and I'm not ashamed of that, but I'm a great deal more than that."