Throughout the 1960s, college campuses were the center of liberal activism. In 1969, Harvard undergraduates stormed University Hall to protest the Vietnam War and to demand the school dissociate itself from the Pentagon and weapons research.

But a new Harvard appears to be shaping up in the 1990s as moderate--or even conservative--on social and political issues. A 1991 rally protesting the Persian Gulf War, for example, only drew about 50 students.

In the past four years, conservative student groups have multiplied. With this proliferation has been a marked shift to the far Right and a more active stance and strategy.

Harvard's new conservative movement does not trace its roots to the old Establishment-type conservatism which characterized the campus in the early part of the century, say some conservative student group members.

Instead, the new conservative movement focuses on a basic family-oriented, Judaeo-Christian-based doctrine which is meaningful at all strata of society, they say.

"Our movement is grounded in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln," says Matthew J. McDonald '92, co-founder of the Peninsula. "But it emanates from the sort of street-corner conservatism, that you'll find in families, say, of South Boston who have never read these guys."

Founded two years ago, organizations such conservative monthly journal Peninsula and the Association Against Learning in the Absence of Religion and Morality (AALARM) have forced Harvard conservatism to more extreme levels.

The extremism and high-profile strategy of Peninsula and AALARM has drawn national attention, stealing the political staging ground from the liberal student groups.

And since their inception in 1989, the two groups have forged a symbiotic relationship, spearheading the new conservative movement at Harvard.

AALARM is the "active wing," according to cofounder Kenneth D. DeGiorgio '92, sponsoring vigorous campaigns like the "family values" protest last year, when AALARM marked Bisexual, Gay and Lesbian Awareness Day by postering over pink triangles with its own "traditional" blue squares.

AALARM also campaigned last year to reduce the University Health Services' funding of abortions. Some of AALARM's members have participated in Operation Rescue, a national anti-abortion campaign which attempts to physically prevent women from using family planning clinics.

Peninsula, however, adopts a more intellectual approach, claiming to use "rational discourse" to support similar stances to AALARM's.

Though pegged by moderates as anti-political correctness neoconservatives, leaders of both groups insist that they draw their rhetoric from across a wide spectrum of conservative thought and defy labeling.

AALARM claims allegiance to the traditional values of the old Right, according to its new president Robert K. Wasinger '94.

But the 50-member group espouses much of the religious social dogma--particularly an abhorrence of homosexuality--now associated with the New Right movement of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.