Harvard was a political place in the 1970s, and there were few students who were as political as Stephen P. Rosen '74.

But Rosen, now Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs, wasn't the anti-establishment activist that most college students of the era were.

"I started out right-wing, and I stayed right-wing," he says.

Rosen remembers his undergraduate years as filled with contentious arguments with friends and heated political debates at almost every opportunity. While he originally planned to become a physics concentrator, Rosen was quickly drawn to Harvard's Department of Government.

As a member of the conservative groups Young Americans for Freedom and Students for a Just Peace, Rosen helped plan a pro-war teach-in in March 1971, to which the South Vietnamese ambassador was invited. The teach-in was disrupted when several hundred protesters filled the seats of Sanders Theatre, chanting and holding anti-war banners.

With the support of the groups, the University pressed charges against some of the demonstrators.

"We held that our freedom of speech had been violated," Rosen explains.

And that wasn't the only occasion when Rosen was unafraid to stand by his unpopular political views.

On another occasion, Rosen and several other students formed a human chain around the Center for International Affairs on Divinity Avenue to defend the center against students who were marching on the building to protest its involvement with the war.

"They didn't expect anyone to be there on a Saturday morning, but we were there in a ring around the building," Rosen says. "We just yelled at each other for a while and then went home."

"Thank God they didn't beat us up," he adds.

But defending his political stance was becoming routine for Rosen. When he moved off-campus to a "pretty grungy" house near Central Square his senior year, the most alarming part was not the leaky roof or the dead rat above the ceiling boards.

"We lived upstairs from a bunch of Hell's Angels, and I subscribed to the National Review," Rosen says. "When it was first delivered to the house, we heard them say 'Those fascists upstairs reading their fascist magazines, we're gonna go and stomp them.'"

Kenan Professor of Goverment Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53, who has been both a teacher and a colleague of Rosen, commends Rosen's ability to stay away from the mainstream of political thought in his scholarly work.

"He is a man with controversial views who manages not to be controversial," Mansfield says. "He studies politics as it really is...in different countries as they oppose each other."