SIXTIES STUDENTS McGill (1): Serve the People in a New Quebec

Preamble to Notes on McGill Student Activism 1964-70

McGill University in Montreal: ‘We will change McGill to serve the French Quebecois majority’

The 1960 student left at McGill University enjoyed the advantages and disadvantages of being at an institution that saw itself as an elite Ivy League type university (“Harvard North”) with international ties and reputation.  It also had the advantages and disadvantages of being at an English-language university that happened to be located in Montreal, Quebec, which was the prime locus of the most militant and popularly-supported left social and political movements in Canada of the 1960s and 1970s.

A major advantage of being at a university that consciously saw itself as training its best students to move into the ruling elite was that there was an extensive set of clubs, international conferences and trips, opportunities for volunteer service, and posts in student association executives at multiple levels designed to inculcate the knowledge-skills and practical experiences of leadership.  This trained left-leaning students as effectively as it did right-leaning ones.  An important disadvantage was that even the left-leaning students could and did fall in love with this.  They tended to try to lead from the top by putting left-wing content into the traditional elite structures of student government and its ‘civil service’.  Only rarely did they call general student body meetings or rallies or engage in mobilization tactics that depended on bottom-up participation and initiative.  The few (partial) exceptions to this rule, mostly actions associated with the leadership of political science graduate student and lecturer Stan Gray, were quickly isolated and successfully labelled as ‘too radical’.

Three seminal movements were on the rise in 1960s Montreal outside the McGill campus: a Quebec nationalist movement spearheaded by pro-independence groups that were both above-ground (e.g. le Rassemblement pour l’independence nationale, RIN) and underground ‘terrorist’ (notably the Front de liberation du Quebec, FLQ); a militant labour movement (especially the mostly public sector employee CSN, that got both militant and ‘social justice issue political’ after breaking from Catholic church control,  but also the AFL-CIO linked industrial worker FTQ and teacher organizations); and a francophone official student societies movement that broke away from the pan-Canadian student organization NFCUS (later CUS) in Fall 1964 and formed l’Union generale des etudiants du Quebec (UGEQ).  These movements provided the on-campus McGill student movement with the context of a society at their doorstep undergoing basic questioning and rapid social change.  Those movements could, and did, educate and inspire those McGill students who were open to becoming at least partly sympathetic to their aims.   The disadvantage was that not only the Board, administration and most faculty -- but also a large number of students -- saw those movements as threats to their prestige and status as members of an elite-producing university serving the interests of the English-Canadian minority in Quebec.

The student new left at McGill had to do battle with the same basic four-part opposing coalition that left-leaning activists faced everywhere else – the Board, the senior administration, the great majority of faculty and an organized bloc of ‘moderate’ students – not to mention most elites off campus.  The Board opposed the left because it was literally a subgroup of the overwhelmingly English-Canadian or American big business class that saw its job as maintaining a university of quality that would serve the interests of the economy and society that they dominated.  One difference from elsewhere was that the McGill Board was somewhat less aligned with the provincial government than Boards were in other provinces.  This was because even the thoroughly federalist and mainstream Liberal government of Lesage (1960-66) and the traditionally pro-business conservative Union Nationale government (1966-70) promoted francophone nationalist policies in education, the economy and elsewhere.  The McGill Board was overwhelmingly English and Canadian in every sense, in no way aligned with a growing distinct Quebecois and Quebec identity.  This may explain why the Board kept a relatively low profile.  They left it to senior administrators and senior faculty to lead in both defending the ‘autonomy’ of McGill as an English Canadian institution and in aggressively repressing even public speech by students that threatened to hurt the reputation of McGill as a ‘neutral’ institution with no positions on off-campus issues.

The senior administrators at McGill were like those elsewhere in two respects.  First, they exhibited a lingering attachment to the ‘traditionalist’ idea that administrators and faculty should exert parent-like (in loco parentis) authority over students in their extra-curricular activities – student councils, student clubs, student residences, student media.  Second, they had a vested interest in the rise of a more ‘modern’ mass ‘multiversity’, where an increasingly professionalized management stratum – albeit one where the top administrators would mostly be drawn from faculty ranks rather than management ranks in government or the private sector – would expand geometrically in size and decision-making authority.  Consequently, they saw their interests as highly aligned with those of both the Board and those faculty seeing a future as top administrators.  The difference with other universities was that the McGill administrators were arguably more pro-actively reactionary in both respects than pretty well anywhere else in Canada.  In addition to repressive actions in response to the slightest instance of student radicalism and a general refusal to concede even moderate internal democratization (or even ending of in loco parentis) reforms, University president Rocke Robertson and several deans made frequent off-campus speeches and statements to the media attacking both the new left and pro-francophone positions of the student left.

The third element of the anti-student left bloc – like everywhere else -- was most faculty, young and junior as well as older and senior.  Put simply, university faculty had, since the mid-1950s, been building their own ‘faculty power’ movement.  They wanted increased control over entry into, and promotion in rank within, their professional caste -- free of influence from the Board or administrators, but also free from any notion of being accountable in more than a euphemistic way to the public outside the university.   To achieve this, they were ready to accept ‘publish or perish’ in exchange for a system of tenure-track appointments and most internal decision-making posts and bodies being made up of and/or selected by mostly faculty.   The ‘faculty power’ changes were threatened by both the ‘student-faculty parity’ democratization and ‘critical university’ (make the university serve progressive social change in both teaching and research) demands of the new left student power movement.  What made McGill faculty a little bit different from elsewhere was that some of the leading opponents of the student new left were public intellectuals associated with early 1960s Liberalism and some were center-left social democratic intellectuals within the federalist New Democratic Party.  For these faculty, defending faculty power was more or less indistinguishable from defending the ‘autonomy’ of McGill from external francophone nationalist forces, albeit in the language of support for a bilingual, bicultural Quebec that remained a province of Canada, with perhaps a few special status powers to better protect the French language and culture. 

The fourth element of the anti student left bloc was the organized movement of ‘moderate’ students.  As elsewhere, many of the moderate leaders were drawn from the ranks of those already involved in the Liberal or Conservative parties and the mass base for the movement was the majority of students in Commerce, Law, Medicine and (to a somewhat lesser extent at McGill) Engineering.  The mass base of the student new left was – as elsewhere -- undergraduate or graduate studies students in Arts and Science, especially students in sociology, political science, history, English literature and fine arts but also (more passively) a few of the more theoretically-oriented students in math, physics, biology and other science disciplines.  Some of the new left leaders had started out in the social democratic NDP or in the pro ‘Quiet Revolution’ reform wing of the Quebec Liberal party.  A handful had parents who had been members of the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s and early 1950s.  As elsewhere, the difference in the situation of the mass bases for the student right and left was partly a difference in class identification.  In terms of both class of origin, but even more so in anticipated class future, the students in Commerce and the professional faculties saw themselves as upper or upper middle class.  The students in Arts and Science came from a wider set of backgrounds and vaguely understood that they would end up in a wider set of occupational statuses. What made the student right at McGill unique was that this class identification overlapped with a strong (English and Canadian not francophone and Quebecois) nationalist identification.  Many of them feared that a new Quebec, where French was the dominant language, and where governments applied affirmative action policies of various kinds to support upward mobility for francophones, would threaten their chances for success in business or the professions.

In sum, McGill in the mid to late 1960s enjoyed the conditions for the rise of a very strong student new left -- a highly conflictual and progressive social change external environment.  But it also had the conditions for a very constrained on-campus popular mobilization.  The McGill student left experienced difficulty mobilizing its potential base in from-below speech and votes in general student body meetings and in civil disobedience collective action.  This removed crucial demonstrations of mass support that could validate the non-marginality of the ideas and claims promoted by its leading activists.  The inability to sufficiently mobilize a gradually radicalizing liberal-left coalition in speech and action was largely because top administrators  could rely on mass support from a significant number of students threatened by the external environment to pro-actively repress left initiatives, typically in behind the scenes collaboration with a handful of anti-left student elites (not to mention faculty and the Board).

Having said that, the McGill student new left was one of the most advanced in 1960s Canada in many respects.  Liberal and left student elites, active within student council and its civil service of committees as well as in the McGill Daily student newspaper, developed sophisticated social and political analyses of issues.  These analyses ranged from how to change the teaching-learning environment in the classroom to how to understand the stakes of the movements of francophone Quebecois off-campus.  From the beginning, both liberal-left and ‘moderate’ students saw the central issue between them as the answer to the question “What communities and social groups outside the university should McGill seek to serve?”.  McGill was less advanced in practice than some other campuses on issues related to developing accountable and participatory democratic institutions and practices within the student body as well as on the level of university decision-making.  But it was more advanced than most in promoting the idea of creating a Critical University that went beyond building a little democratic utopia for middle class students confined to the campus.  

NOTE ON WHAT’S WHERE IN THE McGILL POSTS on LEFTACTIVIST.COM:

The analysis of major conflict events at McGill is divided into the six years from 1964-65 to 1969-70.  However, the posts are divided differently.  After this post the next two years of 1965-66 and 1966-67 are combined into one ‘period’. The two years of events are mostly described in the post titled Sixties Students McGill (2A3A): etc; the analysis of consciousness change in those two years is in the post titled Sixties Students McGill (2B3B): etc. 

Then the events of 1967-68 are divided into two posts, Sixties Students McGill (4A) and (4B). 

Finally the events of 1968-69 are divided into three posts, Sixties Students McGill (5A), (5B) and (5C).  There is no post for 1969-70.  What exists for that year is in handwritten form and will likely not be posted.

PERIOD ONE:  Summer-Fall 1964 to April 1965 – The Vietnam, Selma and Fees protests challenge In Loco Parentis.

MAJOR CONFLICT:  The first set of protest actions at McGill, in February and March of 1965, were also numerically the biggest.  In that narrow sense, the level of student mobilization went downhill from there.  The first action was very much that of a minority going against the tide.  The second set of actions were instances of establishment figures going with a progressive tide.  At least officially, they led what would otherwise have been treated as militant left actions on issues where a broad consensus across (many but not all) political lines existed.

In February 1965, the social democratic New Democratic Party, running on a relatively left-wing platform, won 38% of the votes for the Model Parliament and formed the first ever “democratic socialist” government at McGill with the support of the Young Communist League (5%).  The Liberal Party, who got 35%, had won every mock election in the previous ten years (650203p1).  It was an indication of a significant leftward trend in student opinion.  But Model Parliaments of course were pretend politics.  They were a training ground for those who intended to go on to conventional politics in mainstream parliamentary parties after graduation. 

On Friday February 11 1965, on the second day of the Model Parliament, something rather less conventional and mainstream happened.  NDP leader and mathematics grad student Bill Lenihan, supported by YCL leader David Dent and a majority of the NDP delegation, introduced an emergency motion calling upon the Model Parliament to suspend its meeting and to join in an off-campus protest against the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.  When the motion failed, Lenihan and the supporters of the motion walked out of the meeting anyway to join the protest (650212p1). 

Oh, horrors, the leftists had violated parliamentary procedure and snubbed the speaker!  If things had ended there, the event would have been nothing more than a tempest in a make-believe politics teapot.  Instead, it became a cause celebre that raised an issue that would remain central through the whole period from 1964-65 to 1969-70, in loco parentis.  More specifically it raised the issue of the right of McGill students to engage in non-violent protest actions or even radical public speech on or off campus – especially on issues about the wider society that, in administration eyes, might hurt the reputation of the university -- without the de facto permission of the university authorities.  Indeed, this right was never to be either recognized or respected.

After a flurry of letters to the editor in the McGill Daily, and two more off-campus anti-war marches, and an on-campus rally chaired by left-wing political science student Stan Gray, the Student Executive Council took two weekly meetings of debate before finally deciding to reject a motion to censure Lenihan and others for their actions (which might have led to significant academic sanctions by the Senate).  On February 24, in exchange for dropping the censure motion and a muted apology from Lenihan, the SEC voted that “in future all clubs and societies at McGill are to obtain permission from the Student’s Council to hold organized parades and similar functions off campus” and any ads in campus media promoting the event must list all sponsoring groups.  The Daily reported that Student Council president Saeed Mirza and other sponsors of the motion had argued that engaging in a political protest without permission “contravenes a Senate ruling forbidding ‘parades’ without prior Council approval”.  The article paraphrased engineering doctoral student Mirza as saying that “he hoped the policy will act as a deterrent to the staging of any off-campus demonstrations by McGill organizations purporting to represent the university” (650225p1).

((FOOTNOTE 1:

The Daily editorial comment on the Student Council motion on political demonstrations linked it to the upcoming Student Council executive election and called for candidates to take stands on this and other issues.  Yes, as in the past, voters would want to know their stands on local extracurricular club activity issues like “How should the new University Centre be run?  What groups should be allowed the use of its facilities?”.  But the Council motion raised bigger questions too that candidates ought to address.  “Is a demonstration, for example, a legitimate student activity?...  To what degree should the student [of today] take part in his [sic] political and sociological environment or should there be no involvement at all?...  [T]here is the further complication at McGill, for this university is the major English-speaking university in a French Province…  To what degree is Quebec’s struggle also McGill’s struggle?  Is our place with the Canadian Union of Students or with ‘l’Union Generale des Etudiants du Quebec?  Or is our place confined to the boundaries of the campus?”.  Those questions pretty much sum up what the McGill student left would be all about for the next five years. ))

The Council motion on demonstrations helped stimulate the formation of the first new left style student power type group at McGill, the Student Action Committee (SAC), made up mostly of left-wing NDPers and new left Marxists like Stan Gray, who was a prominent activist in the Canada-wide Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) (650316p3).  NDPer and SAC member Phil Resnick ran for Student Council executive on a pro-UGEQ, pro student syndicalism platform (and lost).  Stan Gray and others successfully petitioned for a March 4 1965 Open Meeting (an official general student body meeting with the contested authority to overrule Student Council) and got a motion passed to revoke the Council motion restricting the right to demonstrate.  However, as would be the case for almost all subsequent occasions where the student left managed to convene an official student body meeting, moderate students managed to use legal and procedural pretexts to prevent the motion from being binding (650305p1). 

But SAC persisted, and this time got a second March 8 student body meeting to vote overwhelmingly to rescind “the SEC ruling on off-campus demonstrations”.  Instead  off-campus parades were okay as long as the sponsors were identified so that they did “not purport to represent the majority will of the Students Society of McGill University”.  SEC president Mirza was instructed to get the administration to “modify the University Regulation number VII concerning parades to comply with the spirit of the previous motion” (650312p5).  

Ironically, it would be Mirza himself who would be front and centre at the next big off-campus political demonstration of 1500 students, in solidarity with African-American civil rights marchers in Selma Alabama, on Tuesday March 16 1965 (although the student left did most of the organizing in conjunction with Student Council progressives).  The McGill march followed a Student Union for Peace Action protest in front of the federal Houses of Parliament in Ottawa on Sunday March 14 and similar protests in major cities around the world.  The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), leading organizers of the Selma marches, had sent out people across North America to stimulate solidarity actions.  No less a representative than SNCC general secretary John Lewis had been scheduled to speak at McGill on March 16.  Lafayette Surney spoke in his place and James Foreman was received with enthusiastic ovations when he addressed a rally of 2000 organized by UGEQ, in French, a week later on March 23 (650528p1).

Thus two off-campus, and indeed international, events were key to the first major 1960s political protests at McGill – the bombing of North Vietnam and a police-tolerated murder of a white pro Selma march clergyman, followed by extreme police brutality against civil rights protesters, in Selma Alabama.  But events closer to home would also make a big contribution.  On Friday March 12, McGill president Rocke Robertson called student leaders to a special meeting where he announced that the Senate and Board had already approved a one hundred dollar tuition fee increase, effective September 1965.  Students had neither been informed nor consulted.  Newly elected SEC president Sharon Scholzberg, who had yet to formally take office, tried to persuade Robertson to avoid forcing Student Council to mobilize students against the university administration, by agreeing to form a joint administration-student committee to lobby the Quebec government for enough extra funding to ward off the fee increase.  Robertson refused, conceding only a joint committee to study other means of meeting McGill’s funding shortfall.  As a result, the Student Council was forced into holding an emergency Sunday March 14 meeting, which adopted a tentative plan of action to put pressure on the administration to rescind the fee increase (650316p1). 

On Thursday March 18, the Student Action Committee sponsored a rally calling upon students to attend a general student body Open Meeting held the next day, where motions would be adopted for a Day of Action on Monday March 22.  (The administration responded by issuing a ban on coverage of the [Student Council called ?] meeting by all radio, TV and even print media reporters of the Friday Open Meeting, justified by yet another hitherto unknown university regulation requiring 48 hours notice and administration permission.)  A special issue of the McGill Daily explaining the student case for “freezing the fees” would be distributed before and during the various actions on that day, with “Student Protest” atop page one and “Sign! March! Sit In!” at the bottom, both in bold red ink.  Another (post-exams) special issue of the Daily, on May 28, reported on the March 22 Day of Action and other protests.  The special issue doubled as a regular High School Supplement, distributed to high school students and to the general public. 

The Day of Action included an on-campus rally where 4,000 students heard Quebec Liberal government Education minister (and future separatist Parti Quebecois premier) Rene Levesque speak in favour of his government’s (never fulfilled) promise of free education at all higher education institutions in Quebec.  It was followed by a march of 2,500 to an off-campus rally, where McGill political science professor and federal NDP vice-president Charles Taylor was one of the speakers.  Students then marched back to campus where they held a “massive” sit-in outside the meeting of the McGill Board.  The Board was presented with petition signed by 5,300 students calling for an immediate fee freeze and eventual free education (650528p1).

CONTEXT: 

In November 1964, students from almost all francophone Quebec post-secondary institutions (universities, classical colleges, teacher colleges and technical institutes) attended the founding congress of UGEQ (641113p1).  It was created in the aftermath of the decision by Montreal (U de M) and Laval universities to leave the pan-Canadian NFCUS (later CUS) the year before.  Student societies from many campuses then decided to establish an independent Quebec federation appropriate to a separate people or nation.  Whether this nation should be within Canada or a separate country was already a question for the rising separatist movement outside the universities.  UGEQ and its member official student societies avoided taking a stand on the issue in 1964, and indeed would fail to ever take a stand, through to the demise of UGEQ in 1969. 

Nevertheless McGill students would have to take a stand of their own much sooner.  They would have to decide whether or not to be sympathetic and open to the new Quebec nationalism.  That meant deciding whether to join UGEQ and accept its conditions, namely leaving CUS and accepting that UGEQ was a unilingual French-language organization.  It also meant accepting UGEQ’s foundational philosophy of “student syndicalism”, which was based on the idea that students were “young intellectual workers”, with the right and responsibility to be active citizens in both their education and the wider society (641125p4).

Debate on UGEQ membership began right away at the December 3 1964 Open (i.e. student body plenary) meeting of the McGill student society.  Students were informed before the nonquorate meeting that the Student Council had decided to stay in CUS for one academic year, attend UGEQ meetings as observers and gather information upon which to make a decision in Fall 1965 (641201p1).  The issue of joining UGEQ was central in the Student Executive elections of March 5 1965 where Sharon Scholzberg, the candidate perceived to be the most pro-UGEQ, won (650308p1).  Her Student Council would hold and lose two referenda in late 1965 and early 1966.  A more conservative and anti-UGEQ student executive would be elected in March 1966, only to hold its own referendum in early 1967, where students voted to join UGEQ.  Hence, it took a while before McGill formally joined UGEQ, but in fact they were strongly informally connected to UGEQ, and to the new student syndicalist and Quebec nationalist politics within it, from December 1964 on.

The decision by the Mirza-led Student Council in February 1965, to adopt a motion requiring any student or student group to seek permission from the Student Council before engaging in any protest action, crystallized a glaring contradiction that persisted throughout the whole 1964-1970 period (650225p1).  The contradiction was between the self-concept of McGill students, left and right, that they were more independent from university administration control of student extra-curricular activity, i.e. from in loco parentis, than any other student society in Canada or even North America,  and the reality that they were one of the least independent whenever they did anything that the administration disliked.

((FOOTNOTE 2:

Moderate Student Society president Saeed Mirza wrote to incoming students in Fall 1964 that the McGill Student Executive Council was “a body which has a rare quality in student governments of being completely autonomous despite the fact that over $250,000 was spent by council last year on student affairs” ( 640914p5).  Daily editor Joy Fenston asserted that “this university enjoys a high academic rating around the world” and “the Students’ Society… is by far the most independent student governing body on this continent” (641022p4).  Left student activist Victor Rabinovitch wrote in early 1965 that the McGill student society was currently changing its constitution without requiring any approval from administration or faculty, proof that it was “one of the most autonomous and therefore freest student governments in North America… and the world” (650129p7). ))

The Mirza Council motion was in effect a self-censoring policy to enable the university administration to avoid having to overtly apply the authority claimed in Senate bylaws to require students to get the administration’s prior permission (650312p5).   The in loco parentis policy, the requirement to be subject to the approval of university authorities directly, or indirectly through self-censoring student structures, was applied repeatedly not only to public actions but also to public speech, e.g. in the student newspaper or campus radio.

The main reason for the self-deception was that McGill students were indeed allowed to be very independent, but only in a particular way.  They were allowed to become involved in the kinds of extra-curricular activity that the university approved of, namely activities that students at elite universities had traditionally been engaged in, that trained the most ambitious students to be future members of the ruling elite.  Approved activities included: Oxford-style debating, Hyde Park speech-making, student newspaper and magazine publishing, theatre and the arts, conferences on international and national affairs, campus clubs for the mainstream political parties, student courts staffed by (usually reliably conservative) law students, volunteer programs in the community for students in medicine, social work and other professional schools, student councils and their committees (that constituted de facto “civil services” engaged in the work of research, policy generation and policy implementation) in each faculty or school and campus-wide, and developing managerial experience by organizing large business operations like Winter Carnival,  operating a large student activities building and deciding upon and administering the large budget for funding the dozens of student clubs and associations.

In 1964-65, all of the clubs and activities just noted continued at a high level, but there was a discernible shift by students on both the left and right towards regarding all of these activities in a more “political” light.  There was a shift to seeing them as part of a quasi student syndicalist approach of engaging right now in the affairs of both the university and the wider society as full citizens, rather than as the training of a future elite. The successful campaign of Sharon Scholzberg, the first woman elected student body president and an active member of the Quebec Liberal party, likely articulated an emerging consensus, despite the left-right differences on accepting UGEQ’s conditions for membership and whether students should use protest tactics to promote change on and off campus. 

Scholzberg was careful to say that she was not a student syndicalist as UGEQ activists used the term.  “I don’t think McGill students are ready for this yet” but students should be able to “comment on the social and political questions of the day” through their student society and form “a pressure group”.  This might mean the odd protest march for free education but “marches do not necessarily increase the amount of consideration we are going to receive from the Province” and “a more serious approach” would be to “present a brief with facts, figures and statistics”.   And “on an issue such as Vietnam the President of the Students’ Society cannot very well go out speaking for the whole Students’ Society”. But student groups should be allowed to protest off campus on such issues without permission.  Scholzberg’s main opponent, Harold Crook, agreed broadly with this perspective.  “We have a responsibility to become engaged in the affairs of the community”.  The Daily could play a special role in researching and publishing articles on “municipal, provincial and national issues” such as “slums, prison reforms and political morals”.  “Like other interest groups we must become part of a union in this province [i.e. UGEQ] in order to exert an influence at the provincial level… if we can make ourselves part of this without compromising either the use of our language or ties with the students in the other nine provinces [i.e. continued membership in CUS]” (650303p5).

CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND ACTION

What radical(izing) students saw as the issues and interests at stake in the major conflicts:

Campus NDP leader Bill Lenihan, supported by all YCL (Communist) and the majority of NDP delegates, walked out of Model Parliament, after failing to win a vote to join an off-campus protest against the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.  It is likely that most of those walking out personally opposed the bombing on thought-out left-wing political grounds, but almost certainly they did not do so on the same political grounds.  Lenihan was a Marxist, the son of Communist Party of Canada members.  In 1966, he would be elected national president of the New Democratic Youth.  While the YCLers were Marxists, the other NDPers were mostly non-Marxist democratic socialists.  Their common stance was essentially a moral one.  The U.S. was bombing civilians and that was immoral, regardless of whether you sided with the United States or Communist-led Vietnamese NLF or neither.  The slogans of the march reflected that view of the issues and of the interests  at stake (650212p1).  It was all those opposed to the war crime of bombing civilians versus those who saw the bombing as an acceptable means to an end. 

Even more precisely, it was viewed as all those who believed that it was necessary to suspend business as usual, and to take a public stand of moral witness to an immoral act, in order to appeal to the consciences of others, versus those whose consciences were not (yet) aroused.  The walkout was a moral challenge directed mostly at other students, not at the U.S. or Canadian governments nor at the university, although it was that also.  The action indirectly fed into the debate that was going on simultaneously about what stance to take on UGEQ and its philosophy of student syndicalism, but it was not framed that way.   It was not a statement about what student associations or student clubs should do generally.  It was a statement about what all citizens, students or not, should do in the atypical case of a war crime, where the normal rules of student conduct were superceded by a moral imperative.

The McGill student society led Tuesday March 16 1965 demonstration in support of the civil rights marchers in Selma Alabama was framed in essentially the same way as the Model Parliament walkout.  Conservative student body president Saeed Mirza was opposed to the student society taking stands on social and political issues.  But he was ready and willing to have the Student Council organize the Selma march and to walk in the front ranks of that march (650528p1).  The civil rights protesters had already been subjected to extreme police brutality and to two murders.  They were about to try again to march from Selma to the Alabama state capital, starting on March 21.  There were marches around the world which aimed to express moral solidarity, in the hopes that it would persuade Alabama authorities to allow the Selma march to proceed without violence by segregationists or the police.

The Monday March 22 1965 student society organized freeze the fees rally, march and non-obstructive Board sit-in in support of a petition was not a moral witness action.  Left-leaning activists saw it as a practical step towards a student society that practiced student syndicalism.  They argued as much in the Daily and in the Open student body meeting of Friday March 19 that formally adopted the program of action for March 22 (650322p1, 650528p9).  Sharon Scholzberg and the other student council leaders saw things differently, and said so.  For them, it was a political action because it was a pressure tactic to persuade the provincial Liberal government to increase its funding, so that the McGill Board and administration would not have to raise its tuition fees.  The actions were certainly not an attempt to act like a student ‘syndicat’ or trade union that directly challenged the McGill administration (which Scholzberg’s Council would eventually be backed into doing with a fees boycott in the fall of 1965).  Scholzberg made it clear that the action was aimed at avoiding having to do that.  The actions were understood and presented by Council as acting on behalf of the entire university, including the university administration, not just students (650316p1, 650322p2). 

Having said that, if it talks like a duck and it walks like a duck, then it is a duck.  The fees actions were objectively student syndicalist actions, including actions of civil disobedience, on a political issue.  The petition and sit in were directed at the McGill Board, not the government.  The nearly full day of actions had the same practical effect as a one-day student strike and boycott of classes.  The McGill administration tried to prevent the action from winning mass student support by, among other things, banning all media from covering the March 19 Open meeting (650322p4).  Students on the political right were against the fees actions and argued against them in the Open meeting.  They likely had varying views on the merits of the Selma issue, but were against the student council organizing a march on any issue.  They definitely supported the US actions in Vietnam,  opposed the Model Parliament walkout and pushed hard over several Student Council meetings to have Lenihan and others punished.  Yet they failed to persuade very many students to oppose any one of the three actions.  For whatever reason, all three actions were successfully presented, by the informal liberal-left coalition of students that coalesced to promote them, as being cases where the ends justified the (exceptional) means.

What the strategy and tactics of the radical(izing) students were:

The Selma and Fees actions were channelled through the Student Council and the general meeting of the Student Society.  The strategy and tactics were those of a liberal-left alliance that remained within a top-down ‘support our leaders on student council in these causes that we all support’ framework.  The Lenihan led walkout to join an off-campus Vietnam protest was a leftist action in support of a goal that the large majority of students did not (yet) support, opposing the US war against Vietnam.  It won some support from non-left students after the fact when conservative students tried to punish Lenihan for exercizing his right to political free speech.

The strategic goal of the Lenihan walkout was not really related to building a new left student movement on campus.  The march itself was organized by off-campus groups.   The walkout was more immediately directed at those already within the broad left, especially those within Lenihan’s own parliamentary social democratic party (the NDP).  It challenged them to step outside the comfort zone of electoral politics (elect our party to do good things for you, not with you) and to engage in direct extra-parliamentary oppositional action, even if it might provoke a backlash and hurt the NDP electorally.  As a tactic, the walkout was a shaming action.  Joining an off-campus protest was a moral statement condemning immoral acts by the U.S. government.

Although the Lenihan action did not aim to build a new student left, or to connect up with the move among liberal and left students to accept the student syndicalist politics of UGEQ and join it, the move by the Mirza Student Council to censure Lenihan helped mobilize left students (including Lenihan) to do both.  Stan Gray and others organized a coalition of mostly ‘old’ left groups (YCL, NDP, Socialist Society plus new left SUPA) that quickly led to the formation of the first on campus new left activist group, the Student Action Committee (SAC) on explicitly pro-UGEQ and student syndicalist grounds.

((FOOTNOTE 3:

A statement from SAC in the Daily declared that its “purpose is to stimulate university students to action on important social and political issues”.  It forced the calling of the Open meeting that rescinded the pre-authorization of protests policy.  SAC “bases its stand on the principle of student syndicalism”.  It promotes “a programme on university issues” including “free education all levels, greater student participation in the administration of the university and the establishment of a liaison with UGEQ and ultimate application” to join (650316p3). ))

SAC aimed to achieve two immediate goals: first, to get McGill students to join follow-up off-campus Vietnam protests and to debate the issue in an on-campus rally (650217p1); second, to get Open student body meetings to vote to rescind the Student Council effort to punish Lenihan and to require pre-authorization for protests.  SAC also ran candidates in the March 1965 student elections on pro-UGEQ student syndicalist platforms (650226p1?).  They were very active more or less behind the scenes in the progressive coalition that organized the Selma and fees actions (650316p3).

The Selma march was a one-off, a rare moment when an impending threat of a tragedy (more murders and extreme police violence during the March 21-24 Selma to Montgomery march) attracted immediate sympathy across political lines.  The conservative McGill administration and students dared not, or simply did not want to, oppose a political demonstration with the strategic goal of shaming Alabama authorities into protecting the civil rights marchers.  The tactic was an off-campus march in downtown Montreal that won support from such a cross-section of people that it succeeded in being seen as the general public of Montreal opposing violence against the civil rights marchers. 

The March 22 fees protest was made much easier to justify, and to get away with, despite the hostility of the Board and university administration, by the debates and mobilization involving large numbers of students around the Lenihan walkout, the attempt to punish Lenihan, the Student Council policy on pre-authorizing protests, and the Selma march that immediately preceded it.  A Student Council that a few weeks earlier would have been afraid to risk a campaign relying on mass mobilization of students into explicitly political actions including civil disobedience (and indeed might have been politically lukewarm towards the free education goal) was willing to lead that campaign.  For SAC and the student left, the strategic goal was to mobilize students into student syndicalist action in support of a major political demand raised by UGEQ.   For incoming Council president Sharon Scholzberg, a Quebec Liberal who supported public lobbies by interest groups as part of a mainstream parliamentary politics, the protests served several goals.  First, she hoped that it would get the government to provide more funding so that she could win the fight to prevent a tuition fee increase without having to mobilize students against the McGill Board and administration.  Second, it gave her a very strong hand in negotiations over that summer to get the administration to cancel or reduce the increase.  Third, it gave Scholzberg and her Council immediate credibility in the eyes of UGEQ.  The many different fees protest tactics were designed to allow different sets of students to at least express agreement with the goals of the protests  (thousands signed the petition) and perhaps to participate in at least one at one or another level of perceived militancy (attend the rally to hear the Quebec Education minister, join a peaceful march, sit in outside the Board).

Changes in social understandings and political goals:

The major change in the consciousness of leftward radicalizing McGill students in 1964-5 was the opening up towards the idea of a new Quebec that had to be nationalistic in order to achieve rapid modernization and social equality for francophones.  More specifically, they were giving sympathetic consideration to joining the unilingual French UGEQ (and leaving the pan-Canadian Canadian Union of Students) and to learning about and working with UGEQ’s official philosophy and strategy of student syndicalism.  This opening up was something new for those students who were already socialists or Marxists or in new left groups like the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA), not just for those who might be described as idealistic liberals, with little prior political experience.  It required big changes in thinking for both. 

Students in the first group came together in the Student Action Committee (SAC), associated with the leadership of Stan Gray.  They would reconstitute themselves in future in other SDS-type new left activist groups, completely outside the mainstream parliamentary politics type structures of the Student Council, although operating as a ginger group within it, as the left of the broad student left.  The idealistic liberals were inspired by their experience of the Vietnam, civil rights and free education actions to get involved over the summer of 1965 and beyond.  Some joined SAC, but whether or not they did, they put most of their energies into other arenas, especially into the ‘civil service’ of research and action committees under the leadership of the elected Student executives and into the McGill Daily. 

From 1966 on, Math professor Donald Kingsbury’s Course Design project, that recruited students into workshops that experimented with teaching-learning techniques, would be an important incubator of activism.   Many liberal students would get political experience in the Arts and Science undergraduate student association, the engineering student association and others.  And both conservative and liberal students would continue, as in the past, to develop leadership skills in the large number of non-political clubs and activities.  But the main arenas were the committees under the direction of the Student Executive (president, internal and external vice presidents) and the Daily.

((FOOTNOTE 4:

The two key committees were Education and External Affairs (later there would be Student Council appointments of student reps on Senate or administration advisory committees).  Education had been set up in 1962-63 in response to the Quebec government’s announced plans for the replacement of the Catholic church (and for English-speaking Quebecers, the separate and nominally Protestant) education system with a massively expanded secular system.  Economics student Robert Rabinovitch got some initial government support for studies to figure out what mix of loans and bursaries and tuition fee lowering would be needed.  A high school tutoring program and High School Supplement special issues of the Daily aimed to encourage students to go on to higher education.  Victor Rabinovitch and others joined UGEQ representatives on a government loans and bursaries advisory committee (641016p9).  All this played a significant role in enabling McGill and both UGEQ and CUS to wage campaigns for free education starting in 1964-65.  In later years, Education would be a conduit to subcommittees on democratization of the university, courses experimenting with teaching methods and departmental level unions.  External Affairs was the vehicle for all activities in partnership with UGEQ  and its member campuses.  This meant off-campus demonstrations on everything from free education to Vietnam, solidarity mass pickets with striking workers, and support for student strikes and campus occupations on francophone campuses.  It also meant lots of meetings under the aegis of UGEQ. ))

In both arenas, leftward activism was either facilitated or greatly constrained depending on whether the elected Student Executive and the Daily editor leaned left or right.  Consequently, there were repeated hard fought battles over who got to occupy those posts and to command those resources.  More specifically, the student right rarely accepted the (s)election of left-leaning executives or Daily editors and were active in trying to reverse such outcomes.

Stan Gray’s Daily article on the rising student movement in North America indicates some of the changes in thinking going on.  The American student movement, stimulated by the off-campus civil rights movement and recently anti-war movements, was far ahead of Canada, where the focus, in English Canada at least, was still on narrowly ‘student’ issues like free education.  Many American students had got involved in civil rights organizing in the U.S. South, through CORE and SNCC.  Mostly white SDS had emulated mostly Black SNCC in creating summer community organizing projects in deprived areas (Canada’s SUPA would do the same in summer 1965 as would TEQ within UGEQ).  Many American campuses had seen civil disobedience actions to protest suppression of freedom of speech about off-campus issues, notably UC Berkeley in Fall 1964.  The basis of the new student movement was “the rejection of the ‘passive consumer’ role of the student”.  Its goals centered “around democratization of the university structure and political organization to remedy the many instances of exploitation and injustice”.  UGEQ, argued Gray, was much more advanced than English Canada in moving in this direction.  Hence, the appeal to Gray and others of having McGill get involved with UGEQ and its philosophy of student syndicalism (650226p4).