Keeping a Sense of Commitment

Among the seven graduates that TIME profiled in its cover story on the class of '68 18 years ago were Vernon Ford of Northwestern, Liz Stevens of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and David Shapiro of Columbia. To see how they have maintained their sense of social commitment while coping with the pressures of family and career at mid-life, TIME Correspondents Elizabeth Taylor and Cathy Booth sought out the three Baby Boomers. Their report:

Rebuilding a Neighborhood

Vernon Ford went to Northwestern in 1964 to study and play basketball and became a black-power militant. Today Ford, 39, is living in the west-side Chicago neighborhood where he grew up. A nattily dressed real estate developer, he has a big house and two cars, one of them a BMW. But he has also kept the vow he made in college: to use his education as a lever to help other black people.

Taking an M.A. in sociology from Northwestern in 1970, Ford went west to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, because "I needed more credentials and equipment." After nearly three years of providing legal aid to welfare clients back in Chicago, he quit, frustrated by the low pay and disillusioned with the possibilities for creating change through the federal courts. He decided to go into real estate instead.

In 1976 he bought a run-down building that had been occupied by squatters and fixed it up. Soon he was buying and renovating other undervalued houses as well. His neighbors were suspicious at first that he aimed to gentrify the neighborhood by selling to well-to-do whites, but in fact his customers have all been black families. "The real restriction of being black middle class," Ford says, "is that nobody has a place for you." By providing affordable housing, Ford has, in a literal way, given them a place. "We came from a protest generation," he says. "We didn't know how to get mortgages. What I thought we could do collectively, I did by myself."

Kitchen Table Activism

Liz Stevens, 38, owns a roomy turn-of-the-century house in Providence that Ozzie and Harriet could have lived in. The only telltale sign of Stevens' activism is a 1979 Volkswagen Rabbit parked outside and plastered with bumper stickers like I'M PRO CHOICE . . . AND I VOTE. "I kid my friends that putting a bumper sticker on a car is the big political act of the '80s," Stevens laughs. She has maintained her sense of humor and the sense of commitment that led her, as a senior at fashionable all-women Wheaton, to tutor poor black children in a Boston ghetto.

After graduation she bounced around: doing social work in Harlem, baking bread in Vermont, learning Spanish in Barcelona, teaching at a progressive school. Finally, at 27, Stevens found her niche as a historian. She is still working on a Ph.D. dissertation, a biographical study of a 19th century abolitionist and women's rights advocate, Elizabeth Buffum Chace. Together with her husband, a medical school administrator who will enter Yale Divinity School this fall, Stevens plugs away at causes, taking her three-year-old son to demonstrate against aid for the Nicaraguan contras, agitating for child- care services at Brown University. She wishes she had more money, not to buy a new stereo (she still has her college-days KLH), but because "I'd like to write $500 checks to Women for a Non-Nuclear Future or Planned Parenthood." Having children (two weeks ago she gave birth to a girl) has helped her keep the faith. "Being a mother has really fueled my feeling that you can change lives for the better. I have to believe that. You have to be an optimist. How could you live otherwise?"

Infiltrating Through Art

As a long-haired and mustachioed student radical in 1968, David Shapiro was photographed by LIFE after he and other protesters had occupied the office of Columbia University President Grayson Kirk. Shapiro was sitting in Kirk's chair, contemptuously smoking one of Kirk's cigars. Now 39, Shapiro is a % tenured professor at William Paterson College in New Jersey, and has published 15 books of poetry and art criticism. But the image of arrogant radicalism still dogs him. "All of my work has shrunk and dwindled because of it," he frets.

Although as a student Shapiro had referred to Columbia as a "prison," he continued to live in cheap university-owned digs in Morningside Heights until he was evicted last year to make room for Columbia faculty. Unable to afford another Manhattan apartment, Shapiro and his wife Lindsay Stamm, 38, moved to a spacious but sparsely decorated apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Split tennis balls have been stuck on the corners of the dining table so their 16-month-old son will not bang his head on the sharp edges as he toddles by.

Shapiro still protests through his poetry. "A lot of what one does as a poet is infiltrating," he says. "Poetry is an insidious private language, yielding an alternative to the public language of TIME magazine and TV. My art is intervention. My method is doubt." He has written of nuclear war ("the nations destroyed simultaneously like fireflies") and collaborated on a play about the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island called Harrisburg Mon Amour. Still, he laments that "the system is wildly stronger than my tiny interventions. My poetry is just snowflakes. It's hard to numb the hand of the American empire.

"Poetry doesn't get you money or any power, but as a poet I've expected nothing," he says, shrugging. "I made the choice. Of course, even poets worry about a good education for their children. But my mother always said, 'Never love things.' All I want now is to write poetry and raise my child."