Epps went back into the building through a different door and was again forced out. A picture of the struggling young dean being pushed out of the building ran on the front page of the New York Times.

After going to the designated rendezvous location, the Harvard police station then located in Grays Hall, Epps went to Loeb House, the residence of University President Nathan M. Pusey '28, for a meeting. There the deans discussed how to respond to the situation.

"We had plainclothes people inside and we were getting reports," Epps says.

WHRB was also broadcasting from within the building. Administrators were upset to learn that the protestors had broken into the files stored in University Hall.

"The problem with them getting in the files was they were going to find out who in the Faculty was in the CIA, an embarrassing development," Epps says.

Pusey and other top administrators, who had favored a quick bust all along, were spurred on by these reports from University Hall.

"Pusey said he thought the only way out was to call the police and he asked if there were any objections," Epps says. "No one objected."

The Bust

Administrators called the state police and the police from seven surrounding towns to organize the raid. Epps says this had been planned in advance because of the preparations spurred by Cox.

Epps and then-Dean of the College Fred L. Glimp '50 also met with House masters at the Faculty Club to inform them of the administration's decision to send in police.

"Some masters felt that they had been stabbed in the back because we hadn't told them about calling the police," Epps says.

At 4:30 a.m. Epps headed down to the police station in Grays, where he had been told the mobilization would take place.

But when he arrived at the police station, Epps learned the mobilization was actually taking place elsewhere, so he was left to watch the goings-on from the steps of Widener Library.

Glimp read a warning to the protestors over a bullhorn at about 5 a.m., but the crowds gathered in the Yard made it possible to hear the announcement from inside the building, Epps says.

"The bullhorn announcement wasn't strong enough," Epps says. "That moment for me was emblematic of the limited capacity we had and the lack of actual preparation for the takeover."