In the summer of 1960, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had 29 members, a grant of $10,000 from Detroit's United Automobile Workers Union and an earnest commitment to social change.

Nine years, 610 members and 19 chapters later, the group's Harvard-Radcliffe chapter would stage a protest that would define a political era at the University.

The great success of the group ended violently when a March 6, 1970 explosion killed members of its final permutation, the Weather Underground, who were assembling pipe bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse.

Between its birth and demise, however, its impact shaped a generation. It organized actions ranging from inner-city employment programs to massive peace marches, garnering praise, criticism and national media coverage along the way.

All this was generated by an organization composed mostly of students from prestigious, Northern liberal-arts colleges. What they had in common was a desire to change the world.

"It was something about the generation that grew up in the '60s in the midst of extraordinary affluence, that led us to expect something from the world that generations before us hadn't expected: a level of personal fulfillment and freedom, and the therapeutic gratification that society didn't make easy to maintain," says Alan Brinkley, professor of history at Columbia University and a former Harvard faculty member.

"A lot of the protests were not just against social injustice, but a fight against the obstacles to personal fulfillment," Brinkley says.

The Port Huron Statement, the group's 1962 manifesto written after a conference in Port Huron, Mich., addressed issues ranging from nuclear weapons stockpiling to the two party system. For SDS, all of these issues indicated that American society was fundamentally flawed.

The statement also contained a commitment to the principles of participatory democracy, the hallmark of SDS's early actions and later the source of many of its troubles.

The essence of participatory democracy, early leaders argued, was that all individuals had a fundamental right to help determine the course of their own lives.

"Men have unrealized potential forself-cultivation, self-direction,self-understanding and creativity," SDS memberTom Hayden wrote in the Port Huron statement. "Itis this potential that we regard as crucial and towhich we appeal."

For Hayden, now a state senator fromCalifornia, and for the others, self-determinationwas prized commodity. Students at some America'smost privileged institutions of higher learningwere complaining in growing numbers that theirUniversities were insentive to their concerns andinterested only in creating another generation ofwealthy alumni.

"The University," Todd Gitlin '63 said in aninterview for Kirkpatrick Sale's book SDS,"begins to feel like a cage."

Harvard was doing little to alleviate thisfeeling. Many administrators worked under thedoctrine of in loco parentis, attempting tofunctions as parents and regulate every aspect ofstudents' lives.

Early '60s

In the beginning of the decade, theadministrators' traditional outlook kept studentsfrom publicy protesting university policies.