Thirty years later, the events of April 1969 still stir strong emotions. In some ways they are, as Rudenstine and Knowles found out, still angry.

A Radical Moderate

Richard E. Hyland is now a law professor at Rutgers University. In 1969, he created order out of the chaos students had created inside University Hall. Soon after the students had ejected the administration, Hyland spurred the creation of administrative units among the protestors--food, sanitation and political action committees were soon formed. They were loyal to their pledge of "democracy" and voted to not use violence in the case of a bust and to not use marijuana.

The next morning their resolve was tested when state and local police forcibly removed the students--"beating the shit" out of them in the process, he recalls.

His interaction with authority while at Harvard--both in University Hall and the classroom--inspired Hyland to enter academia himself.

"Harvard was universally regarded as a terrible teaching University," Hyland says now. "My students will have a teacher who they will remember. I want them to remember these classes 40 years later."

He says now he feels the actions of the building's occupiers--ostensibly about Harvard's involvement in America's war effort in Vietnam through its support of the Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC)--were a worthwhile protest against a University out of touch with its students.

"I knew an awful lot of Harvard Faculty. I didn't run into anybody who was a role model for his students," Hyland says. "That was the Harvard we destroyed, and it was worth destroying."

Angry on the other side

List Professor of Jewish Studies Jon D. Levenson was among the minority of students who sided with the more conservative approach of the Faculty and administration.

Levenson felt that the SDS robbed him of his right to an education. He says the students delighted in more than the high-minded purpose of the their protest--they loved the excitement.

"It's a different view of things from the way it's usually presented," he says. "Lots of radicals deeply enjoyed the confrontations, it gave them a thrill in shutting down the University."

Levenson says that though the bust was perhaps more violent than necessary, he also understood the administration's reaction.

"At the time they seemed very lenient to me," Levenson says. "Relative to the number of people involved, there seem to be very few who were punished."

Levenson, now employed by the administration he supported in 1969, has if anything only hardened his views towards student protestors in the 30 years since the bust.

"I myself have not really changed my position," he says. "I suppose at that point, I was anti the anti-war movement. They were self-indulgent, simple-minded, acting out neurotic stuff in their lives."

"It lowered my estimate of the moral courage of most people in academia," Levenson said. "It left me with a sense of fragility in academic life in times of political discord."