Larry Jackson in n + 1:
EARLY IN THE MORNING on April 10, 1969, four hundred police stormed into University Hall, Harvard’s main administration building. In under twenty minutes they forced out three hundred students using billy clubs and mace, dragging many occupants out by their hair. Nearly two hundred were arrested, and forty-one were seriously injured.
The previous day, three hundred members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had occupied the building and issued demands. Three of them dealt with the SDS campaign to end the campus Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program, which, they claimed, made the university an accessory to genocide in Vietnam. The other three addressed rising rents and planned evictions in Harvard-owned housing in Cambridge and Roxbury.
After “the bust,” as it came to be known on campus, thousands of students—radical and moderate alike—voted to boycott classes in protest. Harvard went on strike.
Philosopher Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard, who died on June 19at age 91, published his first book, Must We Mean What We Say?, during the strike.
More here.