Everyone straggled into the Yard because someone had set off all the fire alarms in the first-years dorms, says Rowland W. Chang '72.

According to Ward, the idea of Harvard's insularity was forever shattered by the ensuing police brutality as middle-and upper-class students from privileged backgrounds who never realized this could happen to them received what graduates describe as a "wake-up call."

"It was as if the front pages had landed on our steps," says Daniel R. Noyes '72, now executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco.

The event, however, was the political baptism for class members and acted as the catalyst for a strike each subsequent year.

Three Strikes

Bonnie E. Blustein '72, a former SDS member who still remains a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) activist and a self-described active Communist, says that her class was known as the "three strikes and you're out" class because of the suspensions some students incurred as a result of their involvement in multiple campus strikes.

In 1969, students protested the presence of Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) participants on campus and Harvard Medical School's planned expansion into Roxbury.

"They wanted to evict four families in Allston-Brighton who had been there for a long time," Blustein says.

The following spring, students protested the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of students at Jackson State and Kent State universities, she says.

Blustein says SDS led a march of between 500 and 700 people from the Yard to the ROTC building to burn it down.

"We were chanting 'On strike, shut it down,' [and] as we approached the building, it turned into, 'On strike, burn it down,'" she says. "I was fully expecting this and we get there and everyone was waiting."

However, nothing happened because protesters had forgotten to bring along the requisite lighter fluid and matches.

"Only at Harvard would we have a theoretical plan to burn the building and [have] no one bring lighter fluid and a match," Blustein says.

However, Ward is one student who says he is glad they did not have a light.

As the only senior who was an Army ROTC graduate, Ward says that he was the frequent target of insults and hatred during his undergraduate years.

"My academic adviser, who was also my proctor in my freshman dorm, cursed me out when he found out I was in ROTC," Ward says. "People literally accused me of baby-burning when I walked in my uniform across campus."