That is how I explain to myself today, in a far different time, what remains in memory of having lived the ecstatic yet hopeless frenzy of the 1960s. To the normal trauma of adolescence--the pain of being stood up, of breaking up, of being alone--was added the rejection of self and future. I remember trying, for the first time, to live with personal failure. I could not get papers finished before the extensions expired or even begin the reading before the final exam. Others were elected to Phi Beta Kappa, awarded scholarships, admitted to graduate school. I did not understand how they did it. I never suspected, of course, that these were social problems. It was a frightening new experience in which I no longer recognized myself. Drugs were only an aid in the conscious cremation of talent and possibility. Many of us, I think, lived in the light of a flame passed from matchstick to matchstick.

It was this self-hatred that yielded the program for the destruction of the University. Though the mediation was not merely an excuse--Harvard and ROTC. Harvard and classified research. Harvard as landlord, Harvard as strike breaker--we found no reason to doubt the logic of the syllogism: Smash Capitalism, Harvard is Capitalism, Smash Harvard.

I think I now can explain what, at the time, was a real mystery: why was Karl Marx not taught at Harvard? At the time I suspected that Capital contained a shameful truth, and that Harvard professors refused to teach it because they recognized that. How much, I now realize, I overrated them. Of course they had not read Capital either. The shameful truth was that they could not. And that is why Capital was not taught at Harvard.

An intelligent reading of it requires an education very different from the one obtained by the average member of the Harvard Faculty. It requires not analytical philosophy but Hegel, not marginal utility theory but Smith and Ricardo, not quantifiable political science but reflections about revolution. It also requires a serious interest in labor, from the way most people spend their lives to the history, and especially the mistakes, of the labor movement. Since many of these subjects are now taught, it is difficult today to recall accurately how narrow was the gamut run at Harvard between behavioust psychology and studies in the new criticism.

We were philosophers of sorts. One can be a philosopher in writing, but one can also be a philosopher in action. That means not only that the praxis is the conversion into action of a certain theory--Philosophers have interpreted the world, etc.--but also that one's actions can be read theoretically. We were, in a certain sense, vulgar empiricists. We were insensitive to anything we could not see, and we never made distinctions where we found none in empirical reality.

The hatred many of us felt for Harvard led us to reject entirely the idea of the University, of scholarship, of study. Yet at the same time, there were books that we wanted desperately to read, and which I, at least, could not understand alone. I remember trying to acquire on my own a certain philosophical culture, and how frantic and depressed I became at my failure. What we needed and wanted, in the end, was not less University but more. Our most serious failing was not to have recognized that, and not to have used our momentum to try to improve the University. The exception was our third demand, the establishment of the Black Studies Department. After 15 years and some struggle it has become an institution. It was the only immediate success of the Harvard Strike.

I still find it difficult to describe precisely what was wrong at Harvard. It was not merely the lack of experts in certain fields, nor the feeling of stolid complacency, nor even the absence of interest in teaching and discussion. The real problem seems to me how to have been that many members of the Harvard Faculty simply were not intellectuals; they lacked tradition and avoided risk. Intellectual creativity is not an individual matter. It seems to involve, above all, the mastery of classical intellectual traditions, the examination of the changing world from that perspective, and the courage to take the risk to explain what one sees. Many Harvard professors, however, especially in the humanities and social sciences, did not stand on anyone's shoulders, but instead, like tubs, sat on their own bottoms. The ideas they produced in dialogue with their typewriters were well behind where the tradition had arrived.

At the same time, to be fair. I do not see how we could have had much success. Had we sought to broaden Harvard, we might have succeeded at most in institutionalizing a trivial and pedantic approach to the fields of knowledge that mattered most to us. There were few experts in those fields at the time and I doubt whether Harvard would have recognized a Benjamin or an Adorno had one applied. In the end, there was no way for us to have followed our vision at Harvard or for Harvard to have followed us in our quest.

Our second mistake was to prefer a clear conscience to any meaningful conception of politics. The anti-war movement was gestated in miniscule groups of moral protest, like the Boston Resistance, with a quasi-religious fervor for martyrdom. For many of us, it was simply enough to be right. So to the extent we were moved to action, we were interested not in convincing or compromise, but rather only in the direct expression of our political beliefs. The passion for directness was a kind of style. We dressed in our politics, and we wanted all who met us to confront them. "Some people talk about the weather," my favorite poster at the time announced, and below silhouettes of Marx, Engels and Lenin, proudly proclaimed: "Not us." We therefore did little to create a convincing program, and we left to the liberal organizers of the mass demonstrations the tedious labor of welding alliances. We attended those demonstrations only under the condition that we could hitch on a Bobby Seale Brigade and spar with the police.

Most importantly, we refused to reflect on an alternative for ordinary university students. Our message to them was to choose sides, to give up their reactionary fantasies of moving with the ruling class and to dedicate themselves full-time to the revolution. When we had the ear of hundreds of thousands of students across America and around the world, we convinced them that there was no way to combine a profession, a career and a family with a contribution to political change. They believed us and made an uneasy peace with the system. Sooner than we, they realized that they would have to earn their way after graduation, and they returned to their books, their exams, and graduate school. We left them, at most, with a bad conscience, but without a clue about what to do with their lives and knowledge.

Our third error was not to have tried to democratize Harvard University. The arrogance of Harvard's Administration was matched only by our own narrowmindedness about what we disdainfully labeled Student Power. We recognized that institutions die when no movement supports them, but we did not realize that movements that produce no institutions disappear.

Of course we had our reasons. We knew that we were, and would remain, a minority. But more importantly, we assumed that capitalism's power came, as we used to say, from the barrel of the gun: the Vietnamese, the Panthers, and the protestors in University Hall seemed to prove that. The fact that the vast majority of American voters, by secret ballot in free and general elections, vote for the capitalist system every time they are given the chance seemed to us some kind of trick.

As a result, there are few democratic institutions at Harvard. Though there now are some student-faculty committees concerned with problems of undergraduate life, students still have no voice in questions of curriculum development and faculty search. The student government, which was finally formed two years ago, unfortunately will find no support in our words and deeds.

It may seem that I have missed the point. We protested to stop the War and Harvard's expansion, not to reform Harvard as a University. Perhaps the movement may best be judged by its own goals.

We recognized that institutions die when no movement supports them, but we did not realize that movements that produce no institutions disappears.