It seemed so majestic, this Harvard College, its ancient ivy draping dignity around us--yes, we were children, raw, terrified, ebullient--as we arrived prepared to devour the world.

We did not know on that muggy, homesick, thrilling day in the fall of 1967 that in a year the blood of classmates--some beaten unconscious by state police (remember their baby blue helmets?)--would stain the steps of University Hall. We had not yet smelled the acrid burn of tear gas wafting down Mt. Auburn Street or cowered in a room in Adams House as angry cops pointed up at our windows with guns that I still picture (in hazy, confused memory) as pointed and shiny, gleaming like bayonets.

It seemed so serene, this Radcliffe College, so safe and cozy, with milk and cookies every Saturday night for the girls who did not have dates and plenty of rules (remember parietals?) protecting the chastity of girls who did. We did not know that strange dislocated freshwo/man year--when boys were allowed in our rooms only on Sunday afternoons (with the door open)--that in a year our roommate's boyfriend would be a permanent guest, that in two years the dorms would be co-ed.

One year we had curfews and were disciplined if we signed in late; the next year we had naked co-ed swimming in the Adams House pool. (Remember the administration's objection to co-ed living? Not morality but amenities: The Radcliffe dorms simply were not nice enough for Harvard men. And the 'Cliffe was so far--how could those boys walk?--I guess we'd better authorize a bus.)

It seemed so noble, this great university that welcomed us (us!) into the community of educated men (men!); we never doubted (yes, we were children) that our university was good. We did not know that soon we would doubt it; that we would recoil in horror from what we came to see as Harvard's complicity--Robert McNamara, Samuel Huntington, Henry Kissinger '50--in what we came to see as an immoral war. Remember the war?

"The shame I feel at belonging to the same species as the men who thought up our little adventure is bad enough," my friend David Hollander '71, now a retired attorney and gay activist, wrote 25 years ago in The Crimson, "but to think that I actually enrolled in a school that trains such beasts."

We entered college, the Harvard/Radcliffe class of 1971, so ready, or not, prepared, or not...but it did not matter, ready or not, the change had already begun.

"A lot of us went in with one set of expectations and came out with another," says Deborah Johnson '71, my Adams House roommate and lifelong friend. "I got there believing that I was getting a good education in order to be a good wife--I really believed that. By junior year, it was all blasted away."

The fripperies--parietals, coats and ties in the Freshman Union, Jolly-Ups (remember Jolly-Ups?)--simply faded away, pathetic relics. The war, fighting the war--fighting against the war--engulfed us. We were fighting to change the world. We held sit-ins and mill-ins and teach-ins, marched in protest to Boston Common and past the White House, went on strike, boy-cotted finals, spoke frequently of revolution...and yes, I do remember, we were young.

Look, I don't know what to tell you. I think that maybe my view of that time is hopelessly warped. I know that people went to class, played frisbee on the Radcliffe Quad and fell in love, but I remember running through Harvard Yard, barefoot because my sandals fell off and I was too scared to stop, fleeing the cops swinging night-sticks, crying, fleeing the blood.

They pulled a kid out of a wheelchair and beat him, I remember that.

I know that people wrote honors theses, ate roast beef specials at Elsie's, joined the football team (I think we had one), but I remember the eight demands ("Smash ROTC, no expansion.").

Harvard changed my life, I guess, but not in the way I--or Harvard--had imagined. And maybe it wasn't Harvard anyway; maybe it was just the time.

Or both: the ordinary Harvard arrogance combined with the special arrogance of the time until we really believed--or I believed--not just that the world had to change but that we had to change it.

It's kind of embarrassing to be writing this, 25 years later. Our college years and our protests seem both real and unreal, surreal (Oh yes, we did take lots and lots of drugs. Remember drugs?). So many of our chants and speeches--I've been poring through torn, yellowing Crimsons--seem just as naive and self-important as the grown-ups always said.

But our opposition to the war was real. The bombs and napalm were real. College students protesting, just like us, were shot to death at Kent State and Jackson State. The draft was real. (Remember the lottery, the chilling numbers, the saved and the damned? I wonder if there's a man in our class who doesn't remember his lottery number today.) The anger, the passion were real.