“There was still an anti-corporate, anti-establishment bias in many members of our class,” Osirim says.
Radical Remnants
Overall, though, the number of hard-core activists on campus had fallen from about 400 at its peak in 1969 to less than 200 in the mid-1970s, according to University estimates—but students were active in the radical movements on campus say they never felt isolated.
“The politically active students didn’t feel that we were a fringe, and we weren’t treated like a fringe,” Fletcher recalls. “The broader body recognized that radicalism had a legitimacy at Harvard. There was interest in what was going on.”
Radical students did find an outlet in a cause familiar to Harvard students today: labor wages and workers’ rights.
On the West Coast, Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers led boycotts of grapes and lettuce to protest workers’ conditions and low pay—causes which groups at Harvard picked up on.
Harvard students picketed the Harvard Provision Co. because it sold several kinds of non-union wine, and sporadic demonstrations broke out.
Chavez himself came to Boston in 1973, leading a protest march along the Freedom Trail in Boston, in support of his UFW boycott of A&P supermarkets.
On campus, black students protested to support the fledgling African-American studies department and the W.E.B. Dubois Institute—both of which faced administrative assaults during the Class of 1976’s time at Harvard.
“It did a raise a lot of consciousness. Many people who were involved went on to be involved in the national fight for social justice,” Fletcher says.
As the years passed, though, perhaps the biggest change occurred as students graduated and entered the workplace, Fletcher says.
“Those who came in the late 60s tried very hard to make a connection between their politics at Harvard and their occupations,” Fletcher explains. Many politically active students in the classes before him went on to become doctors or lawyers. As the ’70s progressed, however, Fletcher says more students began to adopt an “I’m going after the money” attitude and went into financial careers.
“Even for those that were politically active there was a complete disconnect between their work at Harvard and what they did after school,” Fletcher says.
Indeed, while some members of the Class remain active in the same causes as they at Harvard—Fletcher works for the AFL-CIO—for many members of the Class of 1976, their politics have been an evolving process.
Saffran, once head of the DSOC, is now running for City Council in northeast Queens, N.Y.—as a conservative Republican.
—Staff writer Garrett M. Graff can be reached at ggraff@fas.harvard.edu.