Colorful banners hung off of Mass. Hall. Student protesters yelled out the occupied building’s windows. First-year residents in the Yard complained about the noise as the occupation continued. The Faculty caucused as the Yard gradually turned from brown to green. Rumors of a strike by University workers over low wages swirled around campus.

The year was 1972, though, not 2001.

And as members of the Class of 1976 wandered around Harvard as pre-frosh in the spring of 1972, many thought they would be attending a radical and active campus—as witnessed by the campus protests over University investment in Africa and over graduate student protests over pay.

In fact, the activism by members of the black community convinced a reluctant pre-frosh William G. Fletcher, Jr. ’76 to attend.

“I was very inspired by [the protests]. It was good to see that there were students who were active,” says Fletcher, who explains that he had been a “radical” ever since reading Malcolm X’s autobiography at 14.

However, the protests in the spring of 1972 perhaps misrepresented a College whose days of dramatic radical social protests were numbered.

The 1,137 members of the Class of 1976 who matriculated in the fall of 1972 found a campus tired of a decade of social protest and upheaval, and a student body increasingly willing to work with, not against, the administration.

Members of the Class of 1976—born in the early 1950s, raised during the turbulent ’60s—found a world still coming to grips with itself.

“The students in the ’70s were interested in looks and material possessions less and social causes more,” Aliza Karney Guren ’76 recalled. “We were raised with Women’s lib, Civil Rights and Vietnam.”

By 1972, however, the protesters found that they had won many of their former causes: the U.S. was withdrawing its troops from Vietnam, the drinking age had been lowered to 18, and—more locally—Harvard and Radcliffe had ended their rigid male-female admissions ratios and, starting with the Class of 1976, both male and female first-years lived in the Yard.

“The de-escalation of the war had the biggest impact in making the campus less politically active,” Dennis J. Saffran ’76 says.

The End of Vietnam

Perhaps the largest change, class members say, was that their high school class, the Class of 1972, was the first not to face a draft upon graduation.

Although a final lottery for the draft was conducted in February 1972, no new draft calls were made in 1972 or 1973.