Entering Harvard in the wake of turbulent protests, the Class of 1974 found a quiet campus, with full coeducation taking its first tentative steps, final clubs reestablishing their presence on the social scene and students maintaining easygoing attitudes.
The University Hall takeover of 1969 had shaken Harvard at its foundations. Students who had raided the administration building to protest Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) recruiting for the Vietnam War had been physically removed--some violently--by police, who were ordered to the scene by then-President Nathan M. Pusey '28.
In the aftermath of the event, which divided students, Faculty and administrators, the campus suddenly became quiet.
Though the class found a campus weary of turmoil and conflict, there were still major issues to be solved, and students often became involved.
Tom Parry '74 left Harvard in the middle of his first year. He served in the Marine Corps Band for two years, and then spent 10 months traveling.
He returned to Harvard rejuvenated and ready to take advantage of everything Harvard had to offer.
But the campus he came back to had changed dramatically.
"The place was real quiet in terms of politics," he says. "It was as if the air had been taken out of the balloon."
Harvard had changed dramatically from the constant war between students and administration that had engulfed the College in the late 1960s.
"The kind of crazy atmosphere was gone," he says.
A Woman's Place
In 1971, the women's college down the street intensified its integration with Harvard, by beginning co-ed housing.
"We had mixed feelings about it," says Michelle Green '74. "[Radcliffe] never had its own identity. It never had its own faculty...There were other places for all- female schools, like Wellesley and Barnard. We were not one of them."
For Green, Radcliffe's purpose was protective, and while she didn't think she needed Radcliffe's support in college, she realized its importance years later.
"I was so focused on academics and classes that I never needed the institution to protect me in that way," she says.
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