In late February, 50 students from the Progressive Student Labor Movement surrounded Mass. Hall to present a letter of protest about sweatshop labor to University President Neil L. Rudenstine.

Their reception wasn't exactly high drama. Rudenstine wasn't responsive. He wasn't angry. He just wasn't there--and the door to Mass. Hall was locked.

This was in accordance with a University policy never to leave a door unbarred when a student protest is taking place. Harvard learned this lesson the hard way; 30 years ago this spring, anti-war protestors took over University Hall and held it for a day before they were expelled in a violent assault by state and local police.

That move backfired as the bloody bust won the radical protestors sympathy on campus. Ever since that incident, etched in the minds of administrators, the doors have been locked at the first hint of trouble.

Not all the repercussions of the '60s at Harvard--the wave of student protests and campus unrest that culminated at University Hall on April 9, 1969--are so tangible as Mass. Hall's locked doors or the post-1960s riot-proof dorms like Canaday Hall.

The takeover and the bust changed the way students and Faculty feel about each other, some campus observers say. A formerly collegial atmosphere was shattered by radicalism, creating an environment of distrust that only time has cooled.

But student activists have perhaps felt the impact of the '60s heaviest of all.

This year, as Harvard and the nation have witnessed a resurgence of campus activism, comparisons with earlier protestors have intensified. To some, the 1960s are the example today's student activists should strive to follow, but to others, they are an irrelevant and unfair standard, a 30-year-old albatross around the necks of today's student activists.

The Curse It Has Cast

For student activists like the PSLM members who surrounded Mass. Hall in February, the shadow of the '60s is an unavoidable fact of life.

The last school year has seen a re-emergence of student activism at Harvard and around the country. Sweatshop labor, a "living wage" for university employees, and graduate student labor has all inspired demonstrations.

After a protest outside a Faculty meeting on March 9 this year, Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., chair of the Afro-American studies department DuBois professor of the humanities, said "this reminds me of the late '60s. This is great."

A recent article in The Nation about the resurgent student movement began by noting that a meeting of campus organizers at Stanford bore "no resemblance to the old and gritty auto workers' summer camp at Port Huron, Michigan, where SDS was formed in 1962."

And comparisons like this one are part of why the example of the '60s can be a burden for today's activists.

"It's a legacy that is hard to live with at times," says Living Wage campaign member Daniel R. Morgan '99. "It's overpowering. You're constantly reminded of the fact of the takeover."

Social historian Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University and author of A People's History of the United States, says the contrast is unfortunate, but inevitable.