Coming Apart1997

On the afternoon of April 9, 1969, Roger Rosenblatt, then a young English instructor at Harvard, stepped out of his classroom building. There, across the Yard, he saw students hanging out of the windows of the main administrative building, waving revolutionary flags and chanting. The student uprisings that were rocking the country had finally come to America's most prestigious university. In short order, the demonstrators forcibly ejected deans from their offices. Less than twenty-four hours later - in an act unprecedented in Harvard's history - the University president invited local police to storm the Yard, and in riot gear, they attacked the students with tear gas and truncheons. In the turbulent weeks that followed, Rosenblatt soon found himself at the center of the chaos. As the Senior Tutor in an undergraduate House, he sat up night after night counseling angry, frightened students. As a member of the faculty committee formed to investigate the takeover and determine punishments, he saw just how fragile the bonds were that held the University together. For himself, Rosenblatt gained a very special Harvard education. Drawing on the recollections of faculty - Archibald Cox, Derek Bok, John Kenneth Galbraith, John Dunlop, James Q. Wilson, and Martin Peretz - and of students - Al Gore, Michael Kinsley, James Fallows, Frank Rich, Christopher Durang, and Mark Helprin - Rosenblatt has written an eloquent, often ironic, sometimes funny memoir that can be read as modern history and as a moral tale about a time when people persuaded themselves that they could fix things by taking them apart.