ing in the mid 60s. Most demonstrations revolved around either U.S.

military involvements or
common social problems.1 Some featured violence between the students and police, however, the
general consensus was that violence could never breach the presumed tranquility of the nation’s
most prestige academic institution, Harvard. “It couldn’t happen here” was a common phrase
used to re-assert this belief.2 Student unrest was first clearly seen in 1966, when anti-Vietnam
demonstrations against U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara broke out while he was on
campus giving a speech. There were a multitude of protests in the next three years including
draft card burnings, sit-ins, and rallies. By the 1968-69 school year, tensions were reaching SDS a
breaking point.3 No less than 300 universities across the country experienced student
demonstrations in the spring of 1969 and Harvard was no exception.4 Taking inspiration from a
emocratic Society ().5 Their main reasons for occupation were to protest the US involvement in the
Vietnam War and to end Harvard’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program. (Other
agendas that were being represented by the strike included demands for a full curriculum in
African American Studies, a reduction in the rent prices of Harvard owned housing, and to put
an end to the destruction of low-income housing for school expansion.)6 The violent University
response was condemned by most and

1
Lawrence E. Eichel, The Harvard Strike (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970). 109.
2
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Jennifer Stetzer, Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004). 271.
3
Rosenblatt, Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969. 24.
4
Ulrich and Stetzer, Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History. 271.
5
Adam B. Ulam, The Fall of the American University (London: Alcove Press, 1972). 167-68.
6
Harvard University Archives, HUA 969.100.2 (3)