Education: Campus in a Cruel Month

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Not even rain could dampen the fires of militancy. On Wednesday, 50 members of Harvard's Afro and Afro-American Society marched around University Hall, shouting under the drizzle, "Hey, hey, we're all on strike. Four times. Strike, strike, strike, strike!" Some walking barefoot, they called up to students in the dormitories to join them. Filtering through the stalled traffic of Harvard Square, the marchers wound up in front of President Pusey's house on Quincy Street. There they observed a shouted exhortation to "have a moment of meditation for the outgoing president and fellows."

A Deflating Balloon. There were lighter moments. Harvard Yard was twice the scene of a "Music and Light Show." Students projected cool blue and green images on a sheet hung in the archway of Sever Hall, to serve as backdrops for the sounds of two rock groups. Some students danced on the sidewalks. There was a whiff of pot in the air. A poster announced: "Truth is music is love and all of us together."

As the week ended with the student vote to suspend the strike, tension suddenly deflated like air rushing from a balloon. Students applauded in relief when the Harvard stadium meeting was adjourned. As the crowd moved to the exits, a few undergraduates started tossing a football around. Others quietly fashioned paper planes from Old Mole. With a track meet scheduled for the next morning, someone asked students over a loudspeaker to stay off the field lest they tear up the cinders—and they did. As they trooped back across the Charles to the houses, there was the appealing prospect of a weekend of rest to remedy onrushing exhaustion. Psychologist Jerome Bruner evoked the mood. "None of us is blameless and none of us has the whole good," he said. "We're much more conscious of things we believed were peripheral but are not peripheral. People have taken possession of themselves. It is a time to be inventive."