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Protests Turn Inward, Shift To College

Courtesy OF Harvard yearbook

On a warm morning in the spring of 1977, the “Eggshell Alliance” mustered just after 8 a.m. at the Mather and Dunster House dining halls.

Chanting “we want it hot,” about 50 demonstrators blew whistles and clashed cymbals as they marched toward University Hall and the old Union dining hall in protest of the decision by then-Dean of the College John B. Fox ’59 to omit Mather and Dunster from a group of Houses that would begin serving hot breakfast in 1978.

“Sometimes it’s hard for Fox, sitting in that little office, to know what 6,000 people want,” proclaimed Mather House Council Chair Charles L. Diana ’78 at the time. “I think the message is clear after the demonstrations.”

With the substitution of hot meals for the Vietnam War, the spirit of protest refused to die at Harvard just as Fox refused to budge on hot breakfasts.

Yet times were changing, and members of the Class of 1977 continued a march away from the radical idealism that characterized the late ’60s and early ’70s.

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“In ’69-’70, the place was blowing up,” says John P. Reardon ’60, who worked in the admissions office before being named director of athletics in 1977. “By ’77-’78, life was getting pretty normal.”

By 1977, though, the transition away from activism was still far from complete. Protests continued, but without the same international importance that they carried in the early ’70s, when the Class of 1977 was entering college. Late ’70s protests often voiced dissent over issues of local rather than international importance.

At the same time, students began to spend less time furthering social change and more time worrying about life’s more practical concerns, such as graduate schools and careers.

College in Transition

The Harvard undergraduates of 1977 thus saw a campus torn between the old and the new, undergoing a sometimes rough transition from idealism to social conservatism.

First-years, for example, first broke the seven-year boycott on the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities in 1977, which was established as a student-faculty disciplinary body after the 1969 takeover of University Hall.

First-years once again agreed to serve on the committee after students in the past had complained about issues like the committee’s denial of legal council to students and its admittance of hearsay evidence.

For first-years entering Harvard in 1977, working with College authorities rather than against them seemed appealing.

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