The furor of the 1960s remains an enigma to many of our generation. Surely the 1950s were a somewhat stricter era, but not overly so. Indeed, Dwight Eisenhower himself first railed against the ìmilitary-industrial complexî at the close of his administration. New Deal programs became permanent. Peyton Place and ìDeath of a Salesmanî ruffled the national feathers. The civil rights movement was making great strides, beginning with Brown v. Board and culminating in the 1964 and 1965 Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Perhaps most foreign to us, however, is the terror of being dragged off to Vietnam. Our generation has been fortunate enough to have missed a major conflict, at least thus far. Yet Vietnam was  fought primarily by the sons of those very policemen who broke up the University Hall invasion. And history has indubitably shown that the Communist menace was very, very real.

If we consider Harvard as a bellwether, the invasion of University Hall on 
April 9 marks a turning point in the history of the American university. Since the inception of the university in the High Middle Ages, truth, reason, and tradition have always been the mainstays of a collegiate schooling. From Aquinas to Einstein these concepts have served as guides to enlightenment. The concept of truth acknowledges the existence of universal laws, universally applicable, and reason is the idea that these truths are discoverable by certain coherent arguments.  Tradition, often the most maligned of the three, is the consciousness that we cannot and should not divorce ourselves from our intellectual tradition. We are far more perceptive if we stand on the shoulders of giants than if we try to reinvent the wheel.

Since 1969, Harvard has developed certain increasingly radical aspects. 
Radicalism is the conviction that ìthe systemî (the very term is radical coinage) or the institution is so corrupt as to be unsalvageable.  Liberal, on the other hand, wish to reform within the system. Consider the intellectual climate here at Harvard. Last November, the Kennedy School of Government hosted a forum on ìThe Future of American Progressivism,î featuring Government Professor Michael Sandel and Afro-American Studies Professor Cornel West. Dr. West dominated the discussion, emphasizing through various lines of argument that the foundations of Western learning and the United States in particular are too corrupt to survive. For instance, he claimed that the ìwhite churchesî are so riddled with the stain of segregation that they cannot have a meaningful role in his vision of social change.  He added that the concept of the corporation (of which Harvard University is the countryís oldest) is an integral part of worldwide oppression and therefore irredeemable.

The legacy of 1960s radicalism can be seen further in the oft-quoted case of the Expository Writing requirement.  Expos, to most students, is an unpleasant class. The teaching is mediocre at best and the selection of subjects is almost completely of radical  origin.   Consider  some  of  the  Expos assignments meted out this fall: the deconstruction of ìKing Learî through feminist eyes, the role of women laborers in First World War British factories, the post-colonial experience, and so on. Professor Harvey Mansfield was right to highlight Expos, in his fall semester speech to the faculty, as a leading source of politically-correct indoctrination. 

Consider further the continued presence of radicals (and several avowed Marxists) in the faculty. Only in the rarefied atmosphere of Harvard or like institutions can such irrational and confounded  individuals thwart history and reality.  Marxismís only achievements are the unprecedented oppression and systematic murder of hundreds of millions of people, yet radicalism persists as a viable intellectual position at Harvard. 

Perhaps what is most galling about this ideology is its lack of seriousness.  Most people who claim to be radicals, both now and in 1969, were and are nothing of the sort. Most have now settled into quiet white-collar lives not too different from their parentsí. Few protestors for class warfare actually know anything about the lives of blue-collar  workers. In his book on the University Hall takeover Coming Apart, Roger Rosenblatt recounts how a  group of radicals visited a construction site in Cambridge in 1969, wearing what they thought was the proletarian uniform: shiny new work boots, jeans, and flannel shirts. The workers, prototypes of the men who actually served in Vietnam in Harvard studentsí steads, guffawed at the studentsí presumption. And the blue-collar policemen  were only too pleased to get their licks in against the kids who took over University Hall.

Radicalism is no joke or romantic fling. It is damaging in theory and, if applied, murderous. Many radicals in the United States supported the Khmer Rouge in their rebellion against the Lon Nol government in Phnom Penh during the Cambodian civil war. As fashionable as Che Guevara or the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge were exotic and certainly anti-establishment. Yet when the guerrillas did finally conquer Phnom Penh in April of 1975, the logical conclusion of radicalism became jarringly apparent. Declaring the Year Zero, the Communists evacuated Phnom Penh and dispatched over a million people to ìre-education campsîmore appropriately termed ìThe Killing Fields.î Before the relatively merciful Vietnamese invaded in 1979, over a million Cambodians had been murdered by starvation, by torture, etc, including everyone with spectacles.

St. Augustine admonishes us to ask ourselves everyday if we truly believe what we say we believe. In light of the effects of radicalism in recent history, add this: Do we understand the implications of what we claim to believe? To the radicals of 1969: Do you truly propose that we abandon this American experiment in freedom?  Do you honestly disrespect those men who served and so tragically died in Vietnam? And today: Do you really wish to abandon the fruition of thousands of years of Mesopotamian, Semitic, Mediterranean, and European thought? Do you really pine for the disappearance of those who do the dirty work of defending our ungrateful land? Or ensure our material prosperity?

Perhaps then we might assume   some humility and awe before   reality.  If we take one notion away from Harvard, it should be a reverence for the truth above all.