Word: aprils
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That reality created anger and frustration that spilled over April 9, 1969, when some 300 radical students took over University Hall. Early the next morning, blood spilled too, as then-President Nathan M. Pusey '28 summoned hundreds of police to clear the building. Thousands of students struck for days in sympathy with the protesters. It was a week that etched memories, painful and exhilarating, in students' minds...
...April 1969, many honestly believed the revolution had come to Harvard. They saw the end of Western civilization, symbolized by 200 dogma-spouting students who took over a University building and rudely, physically, ejected a group of deans. But although the events of that tumultuous year did cause a revolution, it was not the one SDS had envisioned, or the conservative faculty had feared. Unnoticed at first, another and more lasting revolution took place: the Faculty asserted control and, for a few months, had more to say about running the University and shaping its future than even President Nathan Marsh...
...resisted and attempted to circumvent Faculty legislation calling for an end to ROTC's accreditation. Nor did the administration attend to other sources of friction from both students and Faculty members. Pusey--whom one former junior faculty member calls "single-handedly more responsible than any other person" for the April disturbances--avoided student contact assiduously. Nor was he more receptive to faculty members--most professors interviewed said they could remember having arode?, at the most, one visit to Pusey's office...
While the Fainsod Committee, out of the public eye, debated the issues of Faculty governing structure and student representation, students seized the initiative to make their voices heard. The events of April shattered the relatively calm, depoliticized security in which the committee worked. "The committee was set up too late for its purpose--if its purpose was to prevent an uprising. But the report was more liberal and humane because of what had happened. Some people had to have their eyes opened," Levin notes...
...lesson was learned. The tight little groups that controlled the University, without knowing much about it, learned the lesson of consultation," he asserts. Whether students of 1979 share his conviction is another matter. For it is clear that the Faculty, not the students, benefitted the most from the April uprising, not by Machiavellian planning, but simply through increased access to power. With the Faculty Council, a reorganized bureaucratic structure, a new president who maintains a considerably warmer rapport with Faculty members, and a greater voice in its own, and the University's affairs, the Faculty achieved a quiet revolution...