Alan G. Quasha '72, a squash and tennis player, says that his involvement in sports and with a final club probably prevented him from studying as hard as he could have, but he still got away with it.

"I think they were lenient in those days," he said. "I turned in some trash that did alright."

The classics major nevertheless graduated magna cum laude and went on to Harvard Law School.

Quasha says that students often turned to extracurricular activities to relieve the political tension on campus during the time.

"My friends and I decided that having a good time was one way to deal with [the tension]," he says.

Quasha remembers the final-club punching process as a series of "cocktail and dinner parties where you'd have a good time."

Although final club were derided as "not the thing to do" by many interview subjects, Quasha says that membership in the Fly allowed him to meet "people from all walks of Harvard."

Other student organizations also provided an outlet for their political frustrations.

Ruth Glushien Wedgwood '72, who is now a professor of law at Yale University, says that during her undergraduate years, she was an editor of The Crimson and a indefatigable proponent for women's equality.

However, Wedgwood says that some of the organizations became more than just an extracurricular activity.

"If you were Crimson President, your grades were shot to hell," Wedgwood said. "It was not an extracurricular activity; it was a life."

Chang says that religion was his answer to making some sense of his undergraduate years.

"I was in the Harvard Glee Club and in the Harvard University Choir, and if you were in the choir, you ended up [having] to go to church every day," says the second-generation Chinese-Indonesian American. "I wasn't a particularly religious person before, but I ended up singing a lot and praying a lot.

Overcoming Obstacles

But some students, such as Bonnie Bell Boswell '72, say they felt that they could not fit into the flurry of undergraduate activities and events.