In the 1960s, while many scholars dismissed Mao's initiatives as ideological and destructive, others sympathized with his concern for equality, opposition to bureaucratism and corruption, and individual selfishness. They saw Maoism as a populist insistence on mass participation, mass criticism and the right to rebel, and a determination to wipe out a new ruling class. By the 1980s, however, Harvard University sociologist Andrew Walder wrote that the “public opinion in the field had changed markedly”. Most in the field now “seem convinced that that the Cultural Revolution was a human disaster, even a historical crime, something on the order of Hitler’s holocaust and Stalin’s great terror.” Walder argued that the failures of the Cultural Revolution did not come from poor implementation, bureaucratic sabotage, disloyalty, or lingering class antagonisms. If things turned out differently from what Mao expected, Walder concluded, this was “probably due to the fact that Mao did not know what he wanted, or that he did know what he was doing, or both... the outcomes are what one should have expected, given the Maoist doctrine and aims.”