“You’ve got to understand what Cambridge was like then. It was really decayed, basically like Pittsburgh,” he said, adding that Harvard Square was a haven in bleak, industrial Cambridge.

“We thought we had landed in paradise,” he said of arriving the Square . “There were four bookstores, five bookstores, nice haberdasheries, poets’ theatres, and plays and concerts galore. We were just not disposed to question the way things were.”

Strauss, who arrived at Harvard on scholarship in the fall of 1956 from his hometown in Providence, R.I., said that he was merely glad to have been admitted. But he attributes part of that disposition to the culture of the 1950s.

“You have no idea how different the ’50s were from the ’60s,” he said.

“And we’re all children of the ’60s now. The idea that undergraduates had any say in the way things turned out was unimaginable.”

Of the proposed changes to Harvard’s housing system—either the intended creation of three separate Yard houses, the planned purchase of the MTA yards, or the construction of the new facilities near the River—Strauss said that as far as he was concerned, “this was far above us.”

Charlton “Carl” S. Smith ’60 echoed that sentiment. He said that he first learned that the old MTA yards actually contained platforms and an abandoned subway terminal only after he had heard of the University’s plans to buy that land.

“We were content, you know? We’d been through the war, the economy had rebounded,” Smith said, adding that the only discussion he recalls among fellow undergraduates over the proposed housing changes had to do with the architecture of the new buildings. According to Smith, a former resident of Leverett House, the issue was that the new buildings like the Leverett Towers “were modern and square and very utilitarian and did not have the grace and charm the old buildings did.”

Ultimately, the University pursued neither its plan to divide incoming freshman among the Houses nor the construction of President Pusey’s “Tenth House” on the site of the Bennett Street yards, which it finally purchased in 1966 after more than a decade of negotiations with the city of Cambridge.

For many students at the time, however, the issue of housing changes left little impression 50 years later.

Unlike future students—who have gone so far as to storm University Hall in two later clashes over the administration’s policies—several other members of the class of 1960 all said that they were oblivious or indifferent to the University’s authority over the housing system, a significant feature of student life.

“We had troubles of our own,” Strauss said. “We had exams, majors, theses, and just the general day-to-day existence.”

Despite the central role House life may have played to the undergraduate experience, what the administration decided was “really none of our business,” he said.

In an age in which even the removal of hot breakfast has elicited a strong student response, the indifference both Strauss and Smith describe is emblematic of the silence that gave the Silent Generation its name.

—Staff writer James K. McAuley can be reached at mcauley@fas.harvard.edu.