Twenty five years ago, 300 students stormed University Hall and demanded that the University sever all ties to the Reserved Officers' Training Corps (ROTC).

The students opposed the Vietnam War and lashed out at ROTC, the "alliance between the University and the warmakers" that was a manifestation of the war on campus. They forced their demands on an unsympathetic administration and brought their concerns to an attentive, national press.

Today, the ROTC debate has refocused on the military's ban on gays and its band-aid solution for its discrimination, the "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

And despite the change in the ROTC debate, several campus leaders of 1969 say they see parallels between student objections to ROTC then and now.

"Harvard students don't like the military. We are intellectuals and they are different castes, in a way," says Richard E. Hyland '69, now a law professor at Rutgers University. "One felt that there was something wrong with having the military at a place like Harvard in the first place. Probably a certain part of that is still there today."

Students today, however, do not rally around the issue with the vehemence of their counterparts 25 years ago.

To the students in 1969, the attack on University Hall was not just a protest against ROTC, or a stab at University Hall. It embodied the anger of a generation--anger at the 1968 deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy '48, anger at a conformist society and anger at the images of slaughter in Vietnam splashed all over the evening news.

The Year of Protest

"It wasn't just ROTC as ROTC. It was the whole bloody thing," remembers Associate Dean of Freshmen W.C. Burriss Young '55, who held the same post in 1969. "It was a war where we were being butchered. It had everything bad. Everything that was wrong locked up in the Yard."

It all came together," Young adds. "Lots of people were angry and frustrated and frightened and torn by self-doubt and it was a terrible time."

A series of protests led up to the dramatic takeover of University Hall. In University Hall in 1968, students trapped a recruiter for the Dow Chemical Corporation, the manufacturer of Napalm. It was Harvard's first-ever sit-in in an administration building,

Ten months later at Paine Hall, students crashed a Faculty meeting that was to consider Harvard's curricular ROTC ties. At the time, ROTC students attended military science classes taught by military-appointed professors on campus. The protest forced the Faculty meeting to be canceled.

The Faculty voted in February 1969 to rescind ROTC's academic status and make it an extracurricular activity.

Weeks later, students felt the administration was not responding to the Faculty's recommendation and began to consider further action.

The night before the protest, one