You Say You Want a Revolution?

When Pusey said in 1953 that he hoped the University would start a revolution in students' minds, he did not know what he was in for.

"Formal education has first to make young people see that the values they have absorbed almost automatically from their culture are not necessarily the highest values," Pusey told a reporter at the start of his presidency. "Young people must become dissatisfied with the culture they accept and this is why it is necessary first to start revolutions in their minds and spirits."

The revolution that came on April 9, 1969, was not what Pusey was expecting. Militant students stormed University Hall, ejected the deans and occupied the building for 17 hours before Pusey called in the police to kick them out. Four hundred police officers stormed the building in a raid that was criticized as excessive and bloody. The student body went on strike in protest.

Pusey left Harvard a little over a year after the tumult, citing a need for a new president from a younger generation to begin the "fresh chapter" that was starting in the University's history. He would not have reached the mandatory retirement age, until which many had expected him to serve, for another three years.

Looking back on the strike, Pusey is unapologetic.

"I take a full responsibility," he says of the decision to call the police on the protesters. "The students just talked about the brutality of that thing. But the cops were well behaved for the most part. Students jumped out of the windows. That wasn't the cops fault."

Anne Pusey interrupts her husband and says that she always thought that he was not sympathetic enough to students who opposed the Vietnam War. Pusey disagrees, saying even in hindsight the undergraduate who resigned from the University to join the army was the "undergraduate of real quality."