Thirty years ago this spring, Harvard members of Students for a Democratic Society seized and occupied University Hall, the home to the administrative offices of the college. Storming the building, they forcibly ejected Harvard deans and demanded that the university abolish its ROTC programs. A battery of tear gas-toting policemen was finally needed to reestablish order.

Today’s Harvard is a much more peaceful place. The burning questions of the Sixties have been settled, and students can concern themselves, by and large, with more mundane matters. We give about as much thought to fomenting campus revolution as the radicals of our parents’ generation might have given to declaring celibacy and joining the priesthood.

Nonetheless, the current generation of Harvard students has not entirely broken with the past. The legacy of the 1960s lives on not in the restless passion for social upheaval, but rather in the emptiness that remains once traditions have been destroyed an ...

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