Coming Apart

A retrospective on his years at Harvard, American writer and editor Roger Rosenblatt’s memoir, Coming Apart (1997), mostly concerns an especially contentious moment in the history of Harvard’s student body. In the spring of 1969, a group of 135 Harvard students, many of whom identified with a student organization called Students for a Democratic Society, seized control of Harvard’s main administrative office. The protest was in response to Harvard’s complicity in America’s involvement in Vietnam. Rosenblatt terms the ensuing chaos at Harvard “the Harvard wars,” analyzing why, in his view, the protests emerged. He includes in his analysis the opinions of students who were at Harvard during the “wars,” including Al Gore, Martin Peretz, James Fallows, and James Atlas.

Rosenblatt begins his memoir by placing himself and Harvard College in the context of the first protest, which culminated in the campus takeover on April 9, 1969. At the time, Rosenblatt was a fledgling English instructor, having recently graduated from Harvard’s Ph.D. program in English. He was the only member of his graduating class to be given a teaching job at Harvard College, due in part to his gregariousness as well as his scholarly excellence. He quickly became popular among undergraduate students and was spoken of highly by his English Department colleagues. The Harvard administration, taking notice of his respected position, nominated him to serve as master of the dormitory Dunster House.



Up until 1969, Rosenblatt recalls that Harvard had enjoyed relative peace during America’s involvement in Vietnam. During the Christmas season of 1968, other top college campuses, including Berkeley and Columbia, were shaken by protests and violent demonstrations; Harvard, however, had seemed to evade the wave of chaos. Rosenblatt retells the main events of April 9. The protests started with a riot on the campus quad, then escalated to the student takeover of University Hall. All 135 students flooded into the building, remaining there until that night. In the ensuing police bust, orchestrated by 400 police, the occupiers were removed from the building and arrested. The police used excessive force against the protestors, as well as a number of bystanders who had not engaged in the protest. The bust was not the end of the protest: in the following weeks and months, Harvard experienced a student strike lasting three days, an endless series of administrative meetings, and a number of public debates about the necessity of taking disciplinary measures against the protestors.

Rosenblatt contends that the so-called Harvard wars were, briefly, the undoing of the university’s structure and public sentiment. Rosenblatt places the blame ultimately on political “extremists” whose drastic actions sowed disorder while failing to remedy their actual grievances. He also blames the university’s poor response to the protest; it chose to authorize a police force that greatly outnumbered the protestors to use their own discretion to retake the building. As a result, the police treated the protestors like criminals, using excessive force. Even the majority of students who did not engage in the protest condemned the university. Finally, Rosenblatt rebukes the university’s faculty, who were so “morally careless” that they did not defend any accusations that the university was complicit in the Vietnam War.

Rosenblatt’s memoir has been read as a treatise for the politics of the Republican right for its anti-protest rhetoric. His rejection of the notion that protest and revolt are necessary for political change, and his defense of the institution over the individual, are positions that have been contentious throughout history. Nonetheless, Coming Apart represents an interesting argument about the limits of freedom of speech as it overlaps with organized political protest.