For students who came expecting to find the Revolution still in full-swing—with the street corners and sidewalk cafes alive with the radical New Left—the actual apathy on campus was saddening.

“If anything disappointed me, it was that students were much less politically active,” Saffran says. “We viewed 1969 as the good ole days.”

The politics had not changed, though, just the level of action. Saffran, who served as the head of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), says his organization was considered by many to be one of the more conservative political groups on campus.

When he arrived on campus, the College Democrats were as “far-right” as any of the organizations.

“It was mind-boggling that anyone would be dealing with the established political parties,” he explains.

But as the ’70s passed—Watergate came and went, Saigon was abandoned and Nixon resigned—college students became more and more willing to work within the institutions that their predecessors had fought and protested so vigorously.

“We became more focused on the electoral process and less on the ‘Overthrow,’” Osirim says.

The Institute of Politics (IOP), then only about six years old, led the way for many students to get involved in more formal ways.

In 1975, the IOP began its internship program, allowing students to spend the summer working on Capitol Hill or the White House. By its second year, during the summer of ’76, more than 220 students participated in the program, eight of which were sponsored financially by the IOP.

Guren was one of several IOP Associates who, in January 1973, helped inaugurate the orientation program for newly elected congressmen—many of whom were elected on a platform of cleaning government up after the Watergate scandals.

Even the established political parties began to make a comeback on campus. The Harvard Republican Club (HRC) saw the largest growth in its history during the early ’70s, as the group grew from 35 members to over 400 members. Both the HRC and the College Democrats recruited busloads of students to dispatch across New England in the fall of 1972 and in 1974 for get-out-the-vote efforts during the November elections.

Similarly, black student groups organized in ’72 and ’74 to send students down to southern states to campaign for black candidates.

“The support for candidates of color was particularly strong,” Osirim says.

However, student support for working within institutions to exact change stretched only so far.

At several Commencements in the early 1970s, students from the Business School were booed by College students when they stood to receive their diplomas.