AN UNFAMILIAR visitor would say this has been A Typical New England Autumn At Harvard College except, perhaps, for the good weather. The leaves have turned yellow, brown, and red. The football team has been winning without the the aid of aerodynamics. And nobody has studied much of anything.

But to a more experienced observer things would seem different. This is no longer the Harvard of John Finley, John Kennedy, or even Barney Frank. It is not just the so many pairs of striped pants, or of locks freaky hair, and round and metal rimmed glasses. Most striking is the air of restlessness among the natives. Cries for action are heard from all corners. The HUC and HPC are chaired by impatient activists with alarming ideas. As one surprised administration official put it, "students have not been taking 'no' for an answer."

I.

Although most of the new activism has been directed toward particular campus issues, a growing impatience with the Vietnam War is its raison d'etre. Strong student commitment against the war effort has spiraled, increasing by more than one-third in the last year. In fact, student criticism and military escalation seem to be increasing in a dialectic manner.

The turning point for the "activising" of many students arrives when they begin to feel a personal stake in halting the war. For a very few, the mere existence of the war is enough to make them feel like Right being frustrated by Wrong.

For most of the anti-war students, however, political idealism has not been enough to induce personal involvement. But the U.S. Congress has hammered out an issue which may yet create an activist student majority. It is the draft.

This lever works on all students, hawk, or dove, and inevitably raises the war to a personal life and death matter. In a few months every senior will have to decide whether or not he is willing to die in Vietnam. Still the lines are forming for graduate fellowships and nobody seems to be very much alarmed. In a short time they will be, and the resulting shift in perspective will be greater at Harvard than anywhere else.

When a student becomes personally involved with the war, he experiences a type of frustration which is unusual for the affluent. To them the war is wrong and it seems like nothing can be done about it. The distinct possibility of being sent to Vietnam to die brings home the feeling of powerlessness and awareness of the student's inability to control his own fate.

On the issue of the war, the critical student sees the decision makers as isolated from the rest of society. They reason, in this way: in 1964 Johnson thought it politically expedient to run on a peace slate, so he waited until two months into 1965 before bombing the enemy. The critic sees a distortion of the traditional view of democracy in America. He wonders about the lack of bottom-to-top communication.

Such feelings of frustration and ineffectiveness are usually reserved, it seems, for the oppressed segments of society. A person born into a situation of thick frustration and little expectation for change is immobilized. But when somebody who has always had it pretty good--who has had a relatively easy time getting his wishes fulfilled--experiences this inability to control what happens to his own life, it is often a radicalizing experience.

For years, radicals have been trying to mobilize society around the needs of the dispossessed. At first, there was pure community organizing, and then the civil rights movement. Now radicals in the anti-war movement have attempted to organize the student elite around issues such as the ideals of democracy and the atrocities of war. At best, they have succeeded in arousing an intellectual understanding.

RARELY DOES an intellectual understanding generate mass movements. But President Johnson, as a de facto member, has come to the aid of the movement. The unique character of his war and the new draft policies are bringing gut reactions from disillusioned and newly-cynical students.

The enormously increased activism on campus is being brought about by this new group of middle-of-the-road radicals attempting to influence seriously American society. These radicals are concentrating on local college issues, instead of broader national questions, for two reasons. First, there are distinct similarities between the student-administration relationship and the student's connection to the U.S. government concerning the Vietnam War.

In both situations, the student feels a strong sense of powerlessness in the decision-making process. Ten years ago students did not question the government's right to conscript in the interests of national security. Nor did they question the Administration's authority to regulate parietals. Today, more sophisticated students are insisting that their own opinions on such issues have to be recognized. The sanctity of authority has been tarnished and the priming device has been students' experience with the Vietnam War. Of course disillusionment with authority doesn't necessarily lead to activism. But given the examples of anti-war protest in the nation at large, and the more particular protest on campuses like Berkeley, the critical student's great frustration has found vent in active protest on campus issues.

The second reasons for focusing on local issues is that it provides the best chance for successful student activism. Success is what will prevent the new activist from becoming a pure radical. For if it is possible to effect basic change in the University, the society can't be all that bad. Success would provide some hope and some rationale for staying within society, and working for change through the established channels.