HARVARD, Columbia, Berkeley,Chicago . . . The lengthening roster of university campuses that have been roiled by student dissent reads like the latest assignment sheet for TIME news bureaus. Correspondents from San Francisco to Boston were busy interviewing university presidents, faculty and students as they gathered material for this week's cover story on the Harvard eruption and the crisis of U.S. universities in general.

As the week ended, the Boston contingent was busiest of all. "When the Harvard story broke," reported Bureau Chief Gavin Scott, "I was on assignment in London. Getting home was a mishap on the way to disaster." The engine on Scott's VC 10 cut out, and the pilot had to jettison fuel for 25 minutes before returning to Heathrow airport to trade planes. "After that," says Scott, "my Volkswagen expired ignominiously on the Massachusetts Turnpike, and I showed up for work in the cab of a tow truck."

Once on the scene, Harvardman ('59) Scott was doubly disturbed. "No alumnus," he says, "can be indifferent to obscene chants in Memorial Church or the sight of Harvard Yard looking like a battlefield of the Crimean War. The polarization of the generations is galling, tragic and destructive. Harvard somehow never does things by halves."

Boston Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand (Loyola University '63) was turned away from the occupied Harvard administration building and told that only Harvard men were welcome. Hillenbrand did not argue. He merely changed his tie and suit for a tweed sports coat, a blue sweater and slacks -- what he calls his "graduate school uniform" -- and walked back inside the building as though he belonged. He stayed until midnight, went home to begin his file before returning to watch the police move in.

When Hillenbrand left, Correspondent Frank Merrick (Princeton '64) took over the job. A veteran of the demonstrations at Brandeis three months earlier, Merrick expected a quieter morning of argument among the more moderate students. He was considerably surprised. "Those Harvard men were damned angry," he says. "After three hours they were still furious about what they considered a betrayal by President Pusey and the deans."

There was so much activity on so many campuses that handling the voluminous files called for a team effort by the New York staff. Contributing Editors Judson Gooding, Marshall Burchard and Frederic Golden collaborated with Editors John Elson and Robert Shnayerson on the cover story and "sidebars." They were assisted by Researchers Jane Semmel, Erika Sanchez, Patricia Gordon and Patricia Beckert. For Gooding, the assignment had a sense of familiarity. As San Francisco bureau chief in 1967, he covered the Oakland antidraft demonstrations; last year he was in Paris reporting on "les jours de mai."

The Cover: Statue of John Harvard. Photo collage done with electrostatic copier and gouache by Louis Glanzman.

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