Campus in a Cruel Month

Harvard in the spring is usually a beguiling vision of academe as it ought to be. Blossoms and youthful aspirations flower under the warming sun; the beauty of old buildings and young people complement each other in striking harmony. This year is different. TIME'S Boston Bureau Chief, Gavin Scott, offers this description of the concerned, uncertain and defiant mood of the Cambridge campus a week after the occupation of University Hall.

HARVARD Yard was a mosaic of confused activity as the university moved into its second week of crisis. The throb of rock bands echoed from the old walls, sometimes drowning out the rhythmic chants of black militants, often punctuated by the harsh rasp of bullhorns blaring out strike messages. The walled yard had the air of an ancient red brick city under siege. White sheets emblazoned with STRIKE in bold red letters hung from the windows of freshman dormitories and classroom buildings. Strike posters and copies of the antiadministration underground paper Old Mole were stapled to the venerable elm trees and pasted to the great door and massive columns of Memorial Church.

Spotted here and there were improvised tables on sawhorses, manned by enthusiastic undergraduates and burdened with pamphlets and revolutionary literature. Students, many with the red strike symbol of a clenched fist silk-screened on their shirts, stood around in groups, arguing the issues, advancing theories as to the outcome. The trampled turf of the yard was littered with many of the 750,000 broadsides mimeographed by S.D.S. As one cynical grad student put it, "Getting the grass to grow again is more important than any of their demands."

Lesson for the Day. Observance of the strike varied widely. Some classes were half empty; others were nearly at capacity. In front of Sever Hall, 75 pickets patrolled with signs reading "U.S. Out of Viet Nam" and "The Corporation is the enemy of the Vietnamese and American People. Don't Scab." To avoid violating the picket lines, some professors moved their classes outdoors. In one physics lab, someone had chalked on the blackboard: "No classes today --no ruling class tomorrow." The instructor told the five students present that the phrase constituted the day's lesson.

The atmosphere at S.D.S. headquarters on the top floor of Emerson Hall was a little like that at one of Fidel Castro's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution in Havana. Emerson buzzed with frenetic activity, the intense conversations punctuated by the thunk, thunk, thunk of two hard-working-mimeograph machines. On the wall hung a great poster portrait of Lenin, and stairways were decorated with slogans and placards. One sign read: "A revolution without joy is hardly worth the trouble." Members of "political brigades" churned frantically up and down the stairs, hurrying to and from endless "rap sessions" with students in dining halls and junior common rooms.

Not even rain could dampen the fires of militancy. On Wednesday, 50 members of Harvard's Afro and Afro-American Society marched around University Hall, shouting under the drizzle, "Hey, hey, we're all on strike. Four times. Strike, strike, strike, strike!" Some walking barefoot, they called up to students in the dormitories to join them. Filtering through the stalled traffic of Harvard Square, the marchers wound up in front of President Pusey's house on Quincy Street. There they observed a shouted exhortation to "have a moment of meditation for the outgoing president and fellows."

A Deflating Balloon. There were lighter moments. Harvard Yard was twice the scene of a "Music and Light Show." Students projected cool blue and green images on a sheet hung in the archway of Sever Hall, to serve as backdrops for the sounds of two rock groups. Some students danced on the sidewalks. There was a whiff of pot in the air. A poster announced: "Truth is music is love and all of us together."

As the week ended with the student vote to suspend the strike, tension suddenly deflated like air rushing from a balloon. Students applauded in relief when the Harvard stadium meeting was adjourned. As the crowd moved to the exits, a few undergraduates started tossing a football around. Others quietly fashioned paper planes from Old Mole. With a track meet scheduled for the next morning, someone asked students over a loudspeaker to stay off the field lest they tear up the cinders--and they did. As they trooped back across the Charles to the houses, there was the appealing prospect of a weekend of rest to remedy onrushing exhaustion. Psychologist Jerome Bruner evoked the mood. "None of us is blameless and none of us has the whole good," he said. "We're much more conscious of things we believed were peripheral but are not peripheral. People have taken possession of themselves. It is a time to be inventive."

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