As far as Harvard's expansion is concerned, we did not have much success. The affiliated hospital complex--now called the Peter Bent Brigham and Women's Hospital--has been built. My class agent reports that the University's coffers are full and the alumni ready to pledge. Especially when compared to some of the other victims of the 1960s--the destitute University of California, the scattered remnants of the dissected Sorbonne, the catatonic spray-painted Italian universities--Harvard has indeed prospered. The alumni magazines and donation solicitations bear witness-among others, buildings such as a new library, underground it is true, with our arch-foe as eponym; the Harvard President who, as John Finley once remarked, thought he was a Greek and turned out to be a Roman.

It may seem that we had more success with the War. The War is over. But did anything we do in and around University Hall in the Spring of 1969 contribute to that end? As a result of the Strike, the Harvard Faculty did eliminate the ROTC program. But did that help end the War in Vietnam?

There was certainly no direct effect. The abolition of ROTC at Harvard did not materially hinder the war effort. ROTC was abolished at many universities yet there were still, a year after the Strike, enough officers to lead the ground troops into Cambodia. Nor did our protests put the war-makers in imminent peril. When the War finally stopped, those in control were faced not by a militant alliance of the forces of dissent, but rather by students and Panthers in considerable disarray.

The anti-war movement as a whole, of course, certainly made its contribution. Daniel Ellsberg claims that the March on Washington in November 1969 prevented Nixon from dropping the Bomb on Hanoi. Our building occupations, however, had nothing to do with the mobilization. Some have surmised that militant protest expanded the spectrum of reaction to the War, and made of conservatives liberals and of liberals anti-imperalists. Others claim that we sparked the massive insubordination on the battlefield that forced the withdrawal of American ground troops.

The fact is that we do not know. We did change the minds of much of America, including some of its leaders. But anti-imperialism was certainly more firmly anchored in American consciousness by argument than by acts of bravado. As far as the insubordination is concerned--which, at the time, seemed more like race war--the example came from Malcolm X and the Panthers rather than from college students. In the end, we simply do not know why Nixon and Kissinger decided to end the War. But when that history is written, I suspect that our building occupations will find their place in a footnote.

We did not transform Harvard, we ignored politics, our militant action probably had little effect on the War in Vietnam, and we did not even enjoy ourselves very much. Is there anything that can still be said today for our part in the 1960s?

Politically we certainly asked the wrong questions. A better world does not lie at the end of the road that begins at the administration building door out of which one carries a Dean over one's shoulder. Yet intellectually, autobiographically, we may have asked precisely the right questions. We asked about the role of revolution in politics, the role of force in history. We asked about the importance of action, of the individual in social change. These question, it turns out, are very productive. A serious response requires recourse to intellectual traditions which, though wholly ignored at Harvard are the source of much of contemporary European thought.

It is easy to summarize what we were taught at Harvard. The individual free, in the sense that he makes his own truth, can follow his whims, of whatever does not harm his fellows. For away is the world, it does not change and he cannot change it. He develops his personal vision, creates works that reflect it, and analyzes the individual visions of others.

There are, however, other traditions, individuals are born and substained into society, where freedom is not chiefly frolic, but rather the author, ship of the laws by which one is bound. The individual is not beyond the world but in it. It changes and he can help change it. History is considered in its dynamic, theory seen in practice, philosophy and art as activity, intervention. Intellectual creativity is not only vision but responsibility, not merely social but also intellectual responsibility.

Some of the generation of the 1960s, having lived with struggle and contradiction, through war and in prison, may work through their experiences with what they have learned by responding to these questions. What may be most interesting about our part of the 1960s is not how we changed the world, but how the world changed us. Historians will settle the accounts, but we may not have to wait until then. Perhaps in another 20 years, by our first reunion in the new millennium, we already will know those creations of the generation of the 1960s by which the future will remember us all. And then, of course, we will want to speak again of the meaning of the Harvard Strike of 1969.

Richard Hyland was a member of the 1969 Harvard Strike Committee. He is now a lawyer working for a Washington law firm. The author wishes to thank William Logan and Jay Mark Iwry for their suggestions and encouragement.