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The troopers charged. In less than a minute, the students were pushed and shoved, punched and clubbed, and driven from the steps. Then, after unlimbering sledgehammers, chain cutters and a 4-ft.-long iron battering ram, the troopers forced their way into the building. Screams of anger and pain were heard inside. The troopers began removing the protesters, dragging some away by their long hair and butting others with billy clubs. By 5:30 a.m., a mere 25 minutes after they made the initial charge, the police had cleared the building. In all, 184 persons were arrested on charges of criminal trespass; 45 were injured seriously enough to be treated at hospitals. Four more were hospitalized: a Harvard student, a policeman and two women outsiders, one with a broken back and the other with a broken ankle.
The radicals' seizure of University Hall and their implacable demands were deliberate attempts to disrupt the good order of the university; the tactics succeeded beyond the fondest dreams of their perpetrators. Even moderate students who agreed with Pusey about the demands of the radicals were shocked that he had called in the police at all. At midday Thursday, 1,500 students assembled in Memorial Church for a heated four-hour discussion. Calling for Pusey's resignation if he refused to accept their demands, the moderates passed a resolution that students, faculty and administrators besides the president be given voting seats on the Harvard Corporation and that all those arrested be granted amnesty by the administration and the courts. They backed up their demands by calling for a three-day strike. Class attendance next day was down 75%.
Beards as at Berkeley
The largest and most important body of professors in the university—the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—preferred compromise. Dean Franklin Ford insisted to his scholars that there had been "no real alternative" to police action. "Some now insist that storm troopers entered University Hall," he said. "This is true, but they entered it at noon Wednesday, not dawn Thursday." In other words, he was saying, the storm troopers were the radical students, not the cops. Ford also emphasized that continued rifling of university files could have compromised virtually the entire faculty. Almost lightly, he noted that one of the stolen documents already published by Old Mole revealed a secret 1967 trip to North Viet Nam by Presidential Adviser Henry A. Kissinger, then a Harvard professor.
The academics also listened carefully to five students. Then the faculty resolved, 395 to 13, that all criminal charges against the Harvard intruders be dropped (the administration immediately agreed to do so) and that a committee be elected to study changes in the governing of the university. The resolution, reflecting faculty anger at not having been consulted on the police action, emphatically did not endorse President Pusey's decision, although it denounced the student seizure of University Hall. Under the circumstances, it was not only a sharp rebuke to Pusey, but it also opened up the whole question of who should rule the university. The answer implicit in the faculty resolution: the faculty.