SIXTIES STUDENTS McGill (2A3A): UGEQ and Student Syndicalism, part one
PERIOD TWO: Summer-Fall 1965 to April 1967 – Right-wing students seek to hold back a tide of liberal and left political speech and action
*** The following is the current draft which needs to be completely rewritten into two periods, period two = 1965-66 and period three = 1966-67. SEE BELOW for a note on how to do the (two) rewrite(s).
PERIOD TWO 1965-66
MAJOR CONFLICT: Sharon Scholzberg was elected Student Council president in March 1965 on a platform of joining UGEQ and applying a mix of radical and moderate student syndicalism: keep the focus on issues of education and fees, establish your legitimacy as a representative of a student majority by getting a ‘strike vote’, participate in UGEQ-led protests on off-campus issues, but mostly maintain politics at the level of student council and its committees legitimated as a representative democracy student government (rather than a ‘syndicat’ or union) that represents student interests to the government and university administration. For both 1965-66 and 1966-67, right wing students organized pro-actively to constrain, and where necessary repress, the threat of increasing liberal and left student activism. This was especially the case for issues related to accepting minority status within the new Quebec and for both speech and action on international issues like Vietnam.
To do so, conservative students were willing to uphold the (in loco parentis) right of the university administration to censor and intervene in student affairs. They were ready to support the administration’s categorical refusal of any kind of student power in university decision-making. They proactively took one action after another to limit and constrain any kind of bottom-up student democracy (parliamentary or direct) and to exert political control over the McGill Daily. In fall 1967, an openly right wing student executive fired Daily editor Sandy Gage for printing an expose article about an engineering professor’s research that rendered US bombing of Vietnam more effective. That was a step too far. It led to the creation of a liberal-left alliance activist group, the Students for a Democratic University (SDU) and to a reversal of the firing.
Hence the major conflict in 1965-66 and 1966-67 is actually a sustained campaign by conservative students to suppress an emerging student left, and especially to prevent that left from changing the Student Society and student newspaper into vehicles for debate and action on societal and student power issues.
Here are a few of the high points in that right-wing campaign for 1965-66:
* University president Robertson told the annual September 1965 meeting of the McGill Conference on Student Affairs (MCSA), made up of the leaders of all campus clubs, that nothing would change his decision to raise fees. He expressed strong disapproval of the Scholzberg Council’s leafleting of fall registration to urge students to pay their tuition fees in two instalments, part in September and part in January. If enough students complied, it would amount to a strike vote, a promise to withhold the balance of their fees if the administration failed to negotiate the fees with the student union in good faith. Robertson declared that this was “dangerous in that it advised students to deliberately disobey the University regulations”. Conservative students aligned themselves with Robertson. The MCSA pressured Scholzberg to have a referendum before doing anything. An informal Daily poll indicated that only 30% of students would risk withholding fees, and the campaign was dropped. Scholzberg’s education-issue focused student syndicalism was defeated before it had begun. (650913p1; 650920p1 and p3; 651025p?).
* Progressive Conservative club leaders got 1500 signatures on a petition to demand the resignation of Daily editor Patrick McFadden for left-wing political bias and for devoting too much space to international, national and political stories at the expense of coverage of traditional club activities (651025p4; 651027p4?). Anti-McFadden speakers red-baited him at a Hyde Park. Other student clubs wrote the Daily to defend McFadden. Student Council voted to back his policy statement (651028p1). An Open meeting voted 357 to 118, with many abstentions, to support McFadden (651109p1).
* After Student Council voted to join UGEQ (651014p1) and McGill was accepted by a 113 to 4 vote at UGEQ’s second Congress (651029p1), conservative opponents won a 216 to 146 vote at an Open meeting calling for a referendum (651117p1). Council complied and UGEQ membership was rejected in a close 2859 to 2540 vote (651202p1). A revote on a technicality in January 1966 upheld the rejection by a wider 2893 to 2254 margin (660127p1). FOOTNOTE Schecter Report Fall 65 pp37-45.
* Chastened by a campus poll indicating that 56% of McGill students supported the US war in Vietnam (660128p4?), the Council nevertheless voted 9 to 7 to join a UGEQ-led march against the Vietnam war (660203p1). Conservative students called an Emergency student meeting (660216p1) and won a 269 to 228 vote to rescind the Council decision (660217p1). Many of them went on to support the short-lived McGill chapter of Canadian Students Supporting American Policy in Vietnam. It was set up in the week following a highly successful 2,000 person UGEQ march and the announcement of what would be the first major anti-war march (and civil disobedience action) directed at Canada’s national Parliament in Ottawa, led by SUPA (660223p1). Conservative students had attacked the Council’s stand in very ideological pro-U.S. terms, not just on anti-syndicalist grounds. They were quite properly alarmed by the first stages of a rising tide of anti-war sentiment, that threatened the traditional consensus in favour of the leader of the Free World.
* One area where the Scholzberg Council did not evoke a conservative student counterattack was student participation in university decision-making. David Ticoll and others researched and wrote a very detailed report on the history and current state of university decision-making structures. The Senate responded by offering students voting representation on six minor Senate committees, none of them concerning academic policy, in December 1965. It was not what the Scholzberg Council wanted, but it was a start, so they took it (661007p?).
* James McCoubrey and Arnie Aberman were elected president and external affairs vice-president in March 1966 on an explicitly right-wing ‘backlash’ platform. Aberman declared after the election that it was a mandate for his view “that the Students’ Council cannot take political stands” (660304p1). McCoubrey had promised before the election “that the Daily would be controlled in order that both sides of any question be presented to campus” (660225p1). After the election, he said more bluntly that the Daily “will have to represent Council policy” (660311p1).
In 1965-66, right-wing students had to challenge ‘from below’ and did so successfully. The liberal Council and Daily failed to educate and mobilize a mass student base to support their initiatives. They spent too much time bunkered in the safety of their dominance in Council and especially in its ‘civil service’ of bright young leftward moving intellectuals (not to mention the comfort zone of writing leftish articles in the Daily). They mostly acted like elected members of a parliamentary government, albeit one with a presidential-style strong executive branch that really ran things. They allowed the right to appear to be the democrats who were willing to let the people decide directly. To their credit, and contrary to the right-wing 1966-67 Council that followed, they consistently respected Open meeting decisions that went against them. Nevertheless, the 1965-66 Council mostly engaged in top-down liberalizing politics, and lost.
(Still the original draft) THIS BECOMES PERIOD THREE: 1966-67
Here are a few of the highlights of the right-wing campaign to depoliticize the Student Society and Daily in 1966-67, when the McCoubrey-Aberman executive had effective control of student council:
* The McCoubrey-Aberman delegation to the Canadian Union of Students (CUS) annual Congress in September 1966 expressed sympathy with the right-wing delegations from Memorial and Alberta, led respectively by Rex Murphy and Branny Schepanovich, who opposed student councils engaging with societal issues, especially national and international ones. Memorial and Alberta led a wave of withdrawals from CUS. McGill stayed in temporarily, with McCoubrey arguing that CUS president Doug Ward should be allowed time to show that he was serious about keeping mostly to educational issues. A more likely reason was that withdrawing from CUS would have built up pressure to join UGEQ instead (660919p1p4p5; 660921p1).
* McCoubrey and Aberman expressed no objection to a public speaking campaign by the university president Rocke Robertson and many appointed deans that denounced student activism, including the articles in the McGill Daily, as the work of a “lunatic fringe”. The administrators declared that students were incapable of participating in decision-making within the university. At most they could be consulted, as consumers, on a few narrowly student matters.
((FOOTNOTE ONE:
President Robertson told an American Alumni dinner that “out and out radical youth” were a “ridiculous fringe” whose radicalism stemmed from “loose family ties and permissiveness” (660119). He told a Daily interviewer that the social consciousness of the responsible student majority was “healthy”, except for “the lunatic fringe which is associated with the Daily”. The majority would support the Duff-Berdahl report, that called for student participation to be restricted to an advisory role (660124p?). Arts and Sciences dean HD Woods asserted that “students are totally incapable of administering their own universities”. They were “birds of passage” and lacked the experience to run a “complex university”. Students had a role “but in a purely advisory capacity” (661102p3). Woods’s successor Dean Stansbury declared “students are not scholars” as the CUS-promoted idea of a community of scholars suggested. “Students are not members of the university community” and “students are not here to learn but to be taught” (661104p1). ))
McCoubrey-Aberman held back any movement for ‘control from below’ student power in university decision-making structures, by simply doing nothing to advance it. They similarly did nothing to democratize the Student Society, not even to strengthen the legitimacy of the top-down parliamentary type democracy of Student Council. They might have chosen to accomplish the latter by accepting the proposed changes to the Student Society constitution to achieve something closer to rep by pop. (Undergraduate and graduate Arts and Science students – the mass base of the liberal-left -- were 50% of students, but they had a minority of Council seats, which was consequently typically controlled by the reps from the professional faculties and Commerce, the mass base of the student right) (670215p5).
((FOOTNOTE 2:
In November 1966, leaving aside executive positions, the 1,875 Arts and Science undergrads had 3 seats and the 889 grad students had 2 for a total of 2,764 students getting 5 seats on Council. The 2,953 students in the remaining faculties had 12 seats (661129p3). CHECK since total enrolment was 11K?))
* The newly elected McCoubrey-Aberman executive did nothing to interfere with the ongoing efforts of David Ticoll, Mark Wilson, John Fekete and other members of the University Affairs committee, that had been charged with negotiating greater student representation. There was no danger of them achieving student syndicalist power by stealth in the short term. Senate had refused the committee’s request for voting membership on the Senate curriculum committee, which would have meant having a say in “the content of their courses and the methods of learning” (660121p10). The committee decided to come at the issue a different way. They would do a pilot project in course evaluation in third and fourth year Arts and Science undergraduate courses (it would fail when faculty refused to cooperate). They would volunteer to participate in math professor Donald Kingsbury’s proposed Summer 1966 Program in Course Design. The Kingsbury project trained about 50 students to be technical experts in the methods of a type of programmed learning, so that they could assist faculty in designing and delivering courses where their students proceeded individually at their own pace (660225p7; 660930p5). Kingsbury pitched his program as something that a conservative administration (and Student Council) should like. “Protest… is the tool of a weakling who is trying to convince some more able person to do the job for him… Effective change is based on ability”. His program would train a technocratic elite with the ability to engineer change. It would provide student government with “a steady source of competent leaders” (660225p7).
((FOOTNOTE 3:
Kingsbury was a maverick, who was unlike many faculty in that he mixed with students as a relative social equal. He wrote progressive Daily articles on the need to adapt to the new Quebec and on issues like birth control and abortion. Nevertheless, Kingsbury’s libertarian notion of a technocratic elite had a lasting impact as a liberal-seeming meritocratic version of the traditional idea that McGill had no need of participatory democratic change from below, because it was a place where administration, faculty and students cooperated in cultivating society’s future meritorious elite. Fekete and Wilson disagreed strongly with a January 10 1967 Daily editorial that had argued that McGill students were being treated as a subordinate “class” in an increasingly corporate university and should “demand a voice in the decision-making” (670110p4?). While acknowledging that “few struggles have been won, that students, faculty and administration are far from pals”, they counterposed the perceived successes of collaborating with administration and faculty in advisory committees and in spinoffs from the Kingsbury project. “The point of student disaffection should be to articulate discontent and analyze the situation for intelligent action” (implicitly, by an elite of intelligent individuals). Protests to win student independence or power as a class or group were unnecessary. “In loco parentis is not only assailed but moribund… At McGill it never has had much currency” (670112p2). ))
* Aberman wrote a report on CUS, and proposed that Student Council withdraw, because CUS took stands on societal issues, including international ones like the Vietnam war, and encouraged its member student societies to do likewise. This backfired, because it led to a referendum, where left students succeeded in having the ballot expanded to include the option of joining UGEQ, and students voted to join UGEQ (661014p1; 670209p1).
((FOOTNOTE 4:
The 50.5% (2,067) yes vote for UGEQ (1489 or 36.4% for CUS instead, 540 or 13.2% for neither) was due almost entirely to the 1601 to 882 to near zero vote by undergraduate Arts and Science students. Grad studies was 132 to 104 to near zero and Nursing, Divinity and Architecture were close to 50% yes. But all the other faculties, especially Law, Medicine, Engineering and Commerce were strongly against UGEQ, even though both national CUS president Doug Ward and, in a last-minute switch, conservative Council president McCoubrey had urged students to vote yes to UGEQ (670125p5; 670119p1). ))
* Without contesting the over-riding authority to intervene and punish students that the university administration claimed for itself, the McCoubrey-Aberman Council transferred the authority to discipline students that students had claimed for themselves from the elected Student Council to an appointed law student Student Court (661024p?). They also empowered the appointed Judicial Committee, made up of law students, to force any student organization (including the Student Society and Council) to revise and/or uphold its written constitution according to their rulings (661202p1). These actions created a system where students who objected to any action by a student group could ‘sue’ and tie the group down in legalisms and/or punish students with minor sanctions. [[CHANGE THIS or ADD FOOTNOTE Benedict and some in SDU supported the JC showing faith in yet another institution of liberal democracy, the impartial judiciary as long as it is made up of students (NOTE also is this distinguishes it from the Rob Walsh SFU courts that included faculty as judges). Note right’s attempt to make it solely responsible for disciplining whereas liberal left saw it as upholding constitution to prevent a recurrence of the attempts fire Daily editors etc]]
* The Council changed the process for selecting the new Daily editor for the following year that took place each spring. The new procedure had the effect of preventing outgoing Daily staff from recommending the new editor, with Council only confirming or rejecting. Instead Council would be able to substitute their own choice. This gave force to McCoubrey’s frequently repeated intention to give Student Council political control over the Daily. Council also voted to reject the policy statement of the already selected 1966-67 editor, Sandy Gage, because it included the idea of the Daily allowing free expression of social and political views without being confined to representing the lowest common denominator of existing student opinion (661103p1). This might have led to dismissing Gage, but a controversial article was published soon afterwards that provided an even stronger pretext.
* When Daily editor Sandy Gage allowed publication of a thoroughly accurate article by Peter Allnutt, that revealed that a McGill engineering professor was doing research that helped the U.S. military to be more effective in bombing Vietnam, the McCoubrey-Aberman Council fired Gage and appointed a more amenable replacement (661111p1; 661118p1). Almost all of the Daily staff resigned in protest. Liberal-left activist Victor Rabinovitch, who had been an official within both UGEQ and CUS, led in the formation of the Students for a Democratic University (ASUS Free Press 661123p3). The SDU played a leading role in very large “Open meetings” of students that voted to demand that the firing of Gage be reversed (661123p1). McCoubrey had already declared that Council would not be bound by the decision of any Open student body meeting (661116p5). After the meeting, he reiterated that “our student government is representative government” and that “forums of hysteria” like the Open meeting “can only result in chaos” (661125p6). Eventually, an inquiry led by the national Canadian University Press (CUP) recommended reinstatement. Gage was made editor again (661202p1).
* As a parting shot, McCoubrey made a public offer, in his position as McGill student president, to help provide student scabs to break a Montreal public school teacher’s strike (670113p1). John Fekete tried unsuccessfully at several Council meetings to get a motion adopted to support the teachers instead (670118p1; 670210p1). SDU activist Sam Boskey vowed that the SDU would work with the teachers union in the summer of 1967, after a government bill forced them back to work and imposed an unfair contract (670310p6).
* In March 1967, PhD student Peter Smith was elected Student Council president and Mark Wilson became external vice-president. They were not a slate. Nor did they refer to themselves as either left or right. But the Daily declared that “students have supported an activist policy” because both Smith and Wilson agreed that “students should be concerned with society”. Smith suggested that his election was “a reaction against last year’s Students’ Council” (670302p1). In the event, in 1967-68 Peter Smith would collaborate closely with the administration to repress the Daily, and student protesters who supported them, much more than the expressly right-wing McCoubrey-Aberman Council ever did. John Fekete and Mark Wilson would be on the other (liberal-left, pro Daily) side.
In 1966-67, right-wing students controlled the Student Council. They increased their pro-active campaign against liberal-left speech and action, but his time it was all ‘from above’. They engaged in top-down conservatizing politics, and lost a couple of battles, but they managed to make bottom up student democracy more difficult. They did so in many ways: by denying that student body meetings could overrule the Council; by increasing political control over the Daily; by accepting administration in loco parentis authority to discipline students for political speech or action; by extending that authority by creating legalistic self-policing structures; by accepting the administration’s public policy that rejected the idea of students having decision-making power in matters of academic policy; and, not the least, by holding back any move to change the system of electing Student Council so that it was ‘rep by pop’.
CONTEXT (still original draft, hence for 1965-66 and 1966-67 treated as one period):
Let us look at the context for the 1965-66 and 1966-67 period on three levels:
first, on the level of mainstream government politics and the major new social movements in North America and elsewhere;
second, on the more immediate level of the off-campus context, especially in relation to UGEQ and the francophone student movement;
third, on the level of changes in how McGill students were beginning to see themselves and the significance of their social and political involvements.
LEVEL ONE (GLOBAL): In Fall 1965, the Scholzberg Council was coming into office in the middle of a roughly twenty year long liberalizing trend in mainstream politics in Quebec, Canada and the United States.
((FOOTNOTE 5:
In Western Europe, the French refer to a longer period of rising incomes due to an expanding welfare state that redistributed income and opportunity from 1945 to 1975 as les Trentes Glorieuses. The British look back to the immediate post-war Labour government. Germany, the Benelux and Scandinavian countries similarly see the thirty year span of the post-war welfare state as a long wave of liberalization socio-economically and culturally, and for the most part politically.))
In the U.S., the civil rights movement of 1956-65 had peaked in mainstream influence with the 1963 March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Jack Kennedy became president in 1960 and his 1963 assassination created the myth of a martyred liberal. His successor Lyndon Johnson took advantage of this to be pro-actively liberal on a range of domestic issues from 1964 to 1968. The February 1965 bombing of Vietnam sparked a liberal-left anti-war movement, just as the civil rights movement shifted into a more radical Black Power movement during and after the March 1965 Selma marches.
In Quebec, the long period of conservative Catholic rule by Maurice Duplessis had come to an end in 1960 with the election of the Quebec Liberals, who promised a ‘Quiet Revolution’ of modernization and secularization. Above all, they promised a greatly expanded secular and tuition-free public education system to allow francophone Quebeckers in all classes to catch up economically. (Scholzberg was a leader in the youth wing of the Quebec Liberals). After the 1962 election, fought around the issue of whether to nationalize private hydro-electric power companies to create Hydro-Quebec, differences between the social democratic (use a built-up state sector to pro-actively invest to seed new francophone businesses) and private sector business wings of the party emerged. Future separatist Parti Quebecois premier Rene Levesque was prominent in the former. A movement for independence emerged at the end of the 1950s and especially in 1962-63, with the rise to prominence of the centrist but fierce-sounding RIN, and the underground FLQ, created by left elements within the RIN. The RIN became a parliamentary party, and won 8% of the vote in the summer 1966 Quebec election, helping to defeat the Liberals.
On the federal level in Canada, Lester Pearson’s Liberals were self-declared “reform” liberals who would introduce federal medicare and many other liberal social reforms over the next several years. In 1963, the newly elected Pearson Liberal federal government decided to make progressive reforms to head off an emergent separatist threat. They created a royal commission that eventually published the Bilingualism and Biculturalism (B and B) Report in ( ). The main thrust of the recommendations was to rethink the nature of the Canadian nation, to see the country as the result of two founding nations, French Canadian and English Canadian, that ought to be equal. Hence the federal civil service and all federal government offices and services should be practically bilingual at the management level and in the delivery of services. At least the three mainly English provinces with a significant French-speaking population (Ontario, New Brunswick and Manitoba) should move in the direction of bilingualization. Provinces were encouraged to make French a required course in public school and to experiment with French immersion in the earliest grades. It is highly likely that the large majority of McGill administrators, faculty and students were committed to the idea of combatting separatism with B and B federalist reforms (not too difficult to commit to, since in Quebec it would mean protecting the existing privileges and rights of the English minority to at least schools and government services in English). The emerging McGill student left, however, was more open to the new Quebec nationalism, if not necessarily (yet) to independence.
By 1965-66, the Quebec economy was entering a period of prolonged recession, combined with the rise of a new labour movement led by the mainly public sector CSN (the period of labour militancy would continue until 1975, peaking with the public sector Common Front general strike of 1972). The speed of cultural changes, especially a decline in church influence and Catholic faith with rapid urbanization, had produced a backlash in the smaller towns. The conservative Union Nationale, reinvented by leader Daniel Johnson to run on a slogan of Equality or Independence, defeated the Liberals in summer 1966. They immediately launched a campaign of repression of militant workers and radical separatists.
The McCoubrey-Aberman came into office in the middle of the same two decade long wave of liberalization. However, they also benefitted from the conservative backlash at the level of the Quebec government and, to a lesser extent, from the disconnect between the pro-UGEQ student elite and the mass of francophone students that provided fertile ground for conservative students and administrations to attack leftist student papers and pro-syndical action councils.
((FOOTNOTE 6:
UGEQ was very aware from its beginnings of the fundamental challenges facing any elite of activists, whose ideas about changing society are new and discomforting to the mass of people they want to mobilize. Their founding congress committed to an off-campus summer program of “political and social animation”, of getting people in deprived areas to come together with animators to identify local problems and then volunteer to help in solving them (651018p3). The same problems of passivity and lack of social and political consciousness existed among the mass of students on the campuses. Consequently some 200 students were trained to be on-campus animators to do consciousness-raising and to generate grassroots groupings. Former external vice president Daniel Latouche explained that UGEQ leaders understood that student councils were inherently conservative, and indeed reactionary, bodies but they had to be the main vehicle for student action, because they had the legitimacy achieved by getting mandates from a majority of student voters (661104p8). ))
Despite the rise of new social movements (in Quebec, mainly the independence, new labour and student movements), the most visible political conflicts still seemed to take place in elite-dominated establishment structures like parliamentary parties and (student) governments, on campuses like in the wider society. But those elite-dominated politics were under challenge from within as much as from without. Leftward-leaning liberals, influenced by the new social movements, were in the ascendant in mainstream parties like the U.S. Democrats and Canadian Liberals. The Goldwater candidacy of 1964 marked the emergence of a more radical New Right. The new left and the new right were both influential at McGill in the mid to late 1960s.
LEVEL TWO (MONTREAL AND QUEBEC): The second-level context for McGill was the off-campus social movements. From 1964 on, McGill’s engagement with the predominantly leftwards moving and often militant labour, independence and student movements, that were visible and active everywhere outside its campus, was mostly through the participation of individual McGill students. Sometimes this individual participation was individuals occupying roles as McGill Student Society representatives or official observers, but often it was just by getting involved as individuals on their own initiative, in UGEQ (in UGEQ meetings and demonstrations and even, informally and as individuals, in mobilizations on local francophone campuses). The impact of the theory and practice of both student syndicalism and Quebec nationalism was decidedly progressive, obliging privileged English language McGill students to confront their privileged status in both class and national terms. Nevertheless, the political reality on UGEQ member campuses was as complex and polarized as it was at McGill. At both Montreal (UdeM) and Laval (in Quebec City) universities, whose students (especially UdeM’s) dominated both UGEQ congresses and the provincial level executive and ComCor executive council, the promotion of student syndicalism and left nationalism was, despite efforts at social animation and decentralization, almost as top-down as it was at McGill.
From 1964 to 1969, the more working class and middle class students at the technical, teachers and classical college (later CEGEP) campuses engaged in far more strikes and strike-occupations than the francophone universities. Early on, this included a week-long strike at the College de Beaux Arts (651122p?) and a province-wide technical college strike (660118p1; 660119p1; 660112p1; 660121p1). UGEQ led multiple off-campus demonstrations for free education, several against the Vietnam war and at least one in support of striking low-paid workers (La Grenade 651119p?). There were many militant conflicts on francophone university campuses too, but at Laval and Montreal and Sherbrooke the student right was strong and counterattacked just as often. The UdeM student newspaper Quartier Latin published many articles favouring both independence and socialism, but it was frequently threatened and sometimes actually purged by both administration and Student Council (651111p1?; 660202p1; 670113p1; 670116p1). The Daily published several articles about the failures of left and liberal Councils and newspapers in winning mass student support for UGEQ’s philosophy of student syndicalist solidarity with other social movements, let alone anything close to majority support for Quebec independence or socialism (650125p4; 650312p6?; 670120p?; 670303p2 or 4).
UGEQ’s influence was not 100% leftward. The UdeM students waged a long publicity campaign to pressure the provincial government to change their charter, to create a corporatist style democratization where students were only one of multiple ‘estates’ or stakeholders (670112p1). McGill consciously emulated UGEQ’s approach, which was a conservative one, at least in contrast to the CUS policy of seeking power for the “community of scholars”, i.e. for students and faculty only, everywhere except on the Board (Simon Fraser would become the leading exemplar of this approach).
((FOOTNOTE 7:
SDU chair Victor Rabinovitch, who was an important officer in UGEQ at the provincial level, asserted that the new left SDU believed “in the existence of a university community… a community which does not encourage the false and limiting distinctions between ‘students’. ‘faculty’ and ‘administration’” (670117p2). ))
LEVEL THREE (ON CAMPUS): A third level of context for the campus political conflicts of the mid 1960s was the personal level changes that were happening among the baby boom cohort of students. Those changes increasingly came into conflict with the institutions designed to train mostly upper-middle class English-speaking white men to be the future ruling elite. However, what stands out in reading the Daily in the three academic years up to summer 1967 is the persistence of hierarchically organized clubs and activities. Students on both left and right continued to get involved in them to cultivate precisely those skills and abilities necessary to be an executive or professional within hierarchical institutions after graduation.
((FOOTNOTE 8:
Daily editor Joy Fenston contrasted the individualistic career-preparing focus of McGill students with the supposed greater orientation of francophone student syndicalists to the problems of society. At McGill, she noted, the focus was all on clubs and activities that served as “a vehicle of expression for the individual or group of individuals” active in them and which “serve primarily as a kind of ‘proving ground’ where students acquire experience in skills which will later be valuable” (641127p4?). [[Fenston did not mention something else of equal importance. The hierarchical way that the clubs were organized lent itself to a specific kind of training experience, the experience of joining multiple clubs, getting on the executive, moving up in the executive or to a higher level student association each year, and thereby first learning by observing others in leadership positions at close range and eventually getting experience as higher-level managers and professionals in running things.]] ))
What stands out is the extent to which the growing social and political consciousness of McGill students was still a ‘noblesse oblige’ consciousness of a group that considered itself to be already liberated, but wanted to help out those who were less fortunate and more backward than them.
In summer 1965, future liberal-left SDU chair Victor Rabinovitch wrote in the Daily supplement circulated to high school students to encourage them to go to university: “[T]he so-called ‘passive generation’ has given way to a new generation of students” who want “to help those who are less fortunate than themselves”. The francophone students in UGEQ took stands on “current social and political issues”. They were also motivated by a desire to win “complete autonomy of their student councils”. McGill students recently took stands on Selma, Vietnam and free education too but “a search for autonomy was not necessary as complete autonomy in student affairs had existed for many years at McGill” (650514p6p7). Young Communist League president David Dent claimed in January 1965 that McGill students stood out in contrast to most American campuses in tolerating leftist groups like his own. “McGill remains one of the most tolerant and broad-minded universities on the continent… Perhaps it is because everyone is too rich to care” (650115p4).
In January 1966, Mark Wilson predicted that a student revolt like the Free Speech Movement one at UC Berkeley in fall 1964 would not happen at McGill, because the McGill administration would not be so ham-handed in repressing student political activity. McGill students would not need to use the big weapons of sit-ins and strikes used at UC Berkley except as a last resort (660121p10). Daily editor Sandy Gage wrote in October 1966 that “The multiversity system in the United States has produced… hostility to the university administration” but “[i]n contrast to other campuses, McGill has benefitted from fruitful co-operation between faculty and the student body” in areas of educational reform (661012p4?). In February 1967, Victor Rabinovitch made a joke at a UGEQ meeting. He “challenged the conception of a ‘McGill bourgeoisie’, saying French-speaking delegates are also bourgeois, and suggested that the union be called the ‘Union Generale des Etudiants Bourgeois du Quebec’” (670216p1). Perhaps both the UGEQ students and McGill’s Rabinovitch had a point, not so much about what the actual class origins or class future of UGEQ and McGill activists were, but about what their conception of themselves still was.
((FOOTNOTE 9:
Victor Rabinovitch comes off snooty from these quotes. In fact he was anything but bourgeois and motivated by noblesse oblige. A child of Communist party parents, and a very funny guy, he was a center-left social democrat who went on to play a significant role as a researcher for the Canadian Labour Congress and a deputy minister in many federal government departments, among many other accomplishments. ))
Perhaps the clearest example of how much traditional conceptions and activities actually continued at McGill as late as summer 1967, despite its self-image, is the way women were viewed and treated. The 1960s are often seen as the time of women’s liberation and of a ‘sexual revolution’. It is less commonly recognized that these struggles were sparked by a very explicit patriarchal traditionalism that persisted in quite unapologetic forms up to 1968 and beyond. Some of that was due to the culture of the whole society. Some of it was due to McGill’s take on how to train women to be ‘ladies’ in the future elite. There were still separate men’s and women’s honour societies , the Scarlet Key and Red Wings, who served as private school style free-floating prefects in 1964 (although the Daily complained sarcastically that they were no longer chosen for real accomplishments, but because they “belong to the ‘in’ organizations, have impeccable manners, are not in the least disturbing”) (641026p2). In September 1964, Women’s Union Jill McMurtry explained that “Every female student at McGill is automatically a member of the Women’s Union… We act as a service organization” that sponsors “Shoe Shine Day… a volunteer hospital service, Year dinners, China Display and Book Exchange” (640914p5).
Automatic membership in the Women’s Union was abolished a year later but in September 1966 first and second year female students from out of town were still required by a Senate policy to live in women’s residence “unless she is 21 or has close relatives in the city with whom she can live” (660923p1; 650312p8). As of January 1965, students from the RVC women’s residence complained in a letter to the Daily that they had to wear a dress when they went out “unless going skiing” (650128p2?). Women were still required to sit separately from men in the front rows of History 100 in fall 1964 (641127p6). Women were not only segregated in residences and some lectures, they were also segregated by the existence of separate sororities and fraternities, to which 10% of McGill students belonged. Segregation by gender was a given and not criticized, although there was commentary on separation by religion (Jewish versus Christian) and race (“[I]t goes without saying that there were no Negroes present to sign up for the sorority”) (651012p2?).
((FOOTNOTE 10:
Simon Fraser students voted several times to prevent the establishment of fraternities and sororities. The main argument against fraternities at SFU was that they were private clubs created on the principle of exclusion in order to achieve exclusiveness. Exclusion was based on race-ethnicity, religion and gender, but equally much based on class. Frats were intended to be clubs where members got to mix with People Like Us, and to make lifelong connections that would be useful to them in their future business or professional careers. McGill never even considered banning their frats. ))
The mid 1960s was also a time when McGill, like most campuses, held female (but not male) beauty contests, as well as “slave auctions” where male students bid for the right to go on a date with female students who paraded across the stage in front of them. A letter to the Daily argued that the Winter Carnival beauty contest should not be cancelled just because law students had held a “mock trial of our five Carnival Princesses” and the candidates “were slandered, scorned, insulted and generally degraded in every conceivable way… Why is it that the Medical Faculty… can always be subtly off-colour with them and yet have full respect for them?” (650223p2?). A report by John Fekete on his experiences at a CUS national seminar in fall 1966 inadvertently reveals the prevailing norms among McGill students about premarital sex. “A total freedom situation existed… no defined structure… no official supervision… The sexes were nominally segregated… but the doors of all the houses were open at all times… We hypothesize that the complete freedom of action that delegates had was fundamentally responsible for the corresponding sexual inhibition at the seminar… [We] were unwilling to experiment with an anti-Establishment value system” (661011p3). In other words, there was little or no premarital sex, but considerable focus on the possibility, and a connection made between premarital sex and a more general anti-Establishment rebellion.
((FOOTNOTE 11:
McGill was far from unique in this. A poll by a French news agency at about the same time found that 35% of students under 21 in France had had sex. Today we would find this number surprisingly low, but the news in this report was that it was surprisingly high (661012p6). There were of course very practical reasons to avoid premarital sex before 1968, in both Canada and France. Unwanted pregnancy was a likely outcome. Abortion was still illegal. An increasing demand for birth control pills in January 1967 forced the McGill Health Service to decide whether to make pills available to unmarried female students (a recent survey indicated that 96% of campus health services in the USA did not) (670123p?). ))
END of Part One (2A3A) of 1965-66 and 1966-67 treated as a single two year period. See the next post (2B3B) for the rest, for Part Two.
REWRITE THIS COMPLETELY AS PERIODS TWO (1965-66) and THREE (1966-67). 1964-65 was PERIOD ONE. The way this is currently presented is about initiative by the right and response by the left but this is backwards, despite the fact that the left was constantly on the defensive against a highly motivated and organized right wing student counter-movement.
PERIOD TWO = 1965-66 – liberal left initiatives within the logic and constraints of the ‘train the future rulers, we are Harvard North’ culture and structure of activities at McGill:
* Scholzberg Council fails to implement student syndicalism in fee strike and in joining UGEQ anti-war demonstration and in getting student support to join UGEQ officially; THIS IS THE MAJOR EVENT with the ‘civil service’ initiatives as subordinate clauses within that overall ‘Scholzberg Council attempts student syndicalism’ event.
* The right wing from below counter-mobilizations are part of that event also. So is the fact that the new left appears to not be organized into a group like the SAC that was created in February-March 1965, i.e. a regularly meeting distinctly new left activist group that plans initiatives separate from the liberal Scholzberg Council and the SC civil service and Daily structures for lefties to plot and plan within. Not sure if Daily is included as an attempt at a ‘journal de combat’ or as part of the Context of minor events but I lean to including it.
* The civil service of Ticoll and Rabinovitch and Schechter and so many others get involved as individual diplomats and participant observers in UGEQ’s structures so there is a direct and powerful politicizing effect of UGEQ nevertheless;
*Morris Goldberg and others in the civil service start researching and experimenting in alternatives to passive lecture type education and by Winter 1966 Donald Kingsbury has latched onto this student initiative and steered it into his summer 1966 Project on Course Design. This arouses interest and participation from many students in engineering and the sciences (Hajaly, Wilson, Ornstein) and humanities (Fekete) not just sociology and political science and fine arts as is typical most places – although it is true that many of them end up leaving science and engineering;
* Ticoll and Rynd and eventually Wilson and Fekete and others develop the other main aspect of the Education Committee then University Affairs committee activity which is to research and develop proposals for university democratization (which apparently is from the beginning not a student power ‘students and faculty only are the university and administration works for them as bureaucratic support’ approach that prevailed at SFU but a multiple estates general or tripartite co-gestion approach in the U de M and UGEQ – having said that, when it came down to departmental and faculty level democratization there was more of an SFU type approach by the same people; to say you are for ‘not one of those people who is for student power’ is like saying ‘I am not a radical feminist man-hater’ or more concisely even ‘I am not a feminist’ in order to have any chance at all to be listened to in putting across feminist ideas). Both of these civil service initiatives are things the Scholzberg Council and its intelligentsia can get away with doing without requiring any mass student democratic mandate and it is also non-threatening to conservative students for various reasons. The liberal left take ‘what the pitcher gives them’. Of course it fits within the established elitist ‘do what you want in private clubs as long as it achieves high standards and brings credit onto McGill’ and top down representative student government rule traditions of McGill also. This sets the liberal left on a course to take a Royal Commission instead of bottom-up mobilization approach to winning democratization that is consolidated with the set up of the Tripartite Commission in 1966-67 in part based on a proposal by the supposed radical popular action left of the Stan Gray led SDU. There are multiple causes of this path being taken including the absence of hardly any faculty allies and the ability of the student right to win almost any referendum (and the inability to get enough students to provide a quorum at Open meetings with a handful of exceptions namely February-March 1965 and the Gage firing of Fall 1966 – why was this the case when Hyde Park debates drew a thousand plus routinely and debates and outside speakers drew large crowds?) and to command a majority most of the time within the Student Council on anything polarizing and to use their control of the SC exec to act unilaterally when they were not sure of commanding a majority in SC.
* For the first time in McGill history apparently, the Daily editor is clearly left and sets up as independent of Student Council and changes the content of the paper from publicity for student clubs and activities to being a literary and political journal of real investigation and report journalism and real debate between left and right and other in articles and letters. The right tries repeatedly to reverse this by purging McFadden but it is notable that they fail to win as much support on this as on their other anti-left mobilizations. This sets up the Daily as an institution for the left and right to fight for control over that is at least of equal importance to controlling Student Council – in fact it is more so because the extremely biased non rep by pop system makes it next to impossible for the right to ever do any worse than have enough reps on the SC to veto and water down any attempts to do things through Council; controlling the SC exec matters though. It is notable that the right never succeeded in purging a liberal left SC (not Scholzberg, not Hajaly) and never really tried. They did purge the Daily editor multiple times, and tried several times more.
* The sumup of this rewritten period period two = 1965-66 is closer to what Rebick and others write in the Daily in February-March 1966. The Scholzberg attempt at syndicalism is defeated by the student right but the liberal-left wins on the ideological level because large numbers of students get politicized through an activism attempting Council and its periphery and through a new type of student newspaper that puts journalism about the offcampus world and articles and letters about social and political issues and related ideologies ahead of Winter Carnival and the victory of McGill debaters against international competition. I disagree on one small point. It was not really a matter where the left won for a while and by the end of the year the right counter-movement prevailed. That puts too much onto a narrative to explain the McCoubrey-Aberman victory that had just happened at the time of the end of the year reviews. My guess is that this only appeared to be true because the liberal left had control of people in the key areas of SC exec and Daily editors at the beginning. They never had anything close to majority student support for any of the things they tried to do. My guess is that the numbers of McGill students moving to liberal-left positions only increased every step of the way from beginning to end. The right started out with de facto silent majority support and could and did win every showdown except the ones concerning purging the Daily. But in 1965-66 as in every period afterwards until at least February 1969 every formal victory by the student right was a kind of Pyrrhic victory – they were losing the ideological and political (and countercultural) war to the new left every step of the way. Your rewrite should highlight and demonstrate this.
THE NEW PERIOD THREE = 1966-67 Yes the initiative here is by a student right that controls the SC exec but the Daily remains the new type of student newspaper that is about society and politics and is under the effective control of left-leaning editors even though Gage is not a leftist. The MAJOR CONFLICT becomes #1 the Gage affair and the creation of the SDU and its success in mobilizing very large numbers of students in support of Gage; and #2 the winning of the UGEQ-CUS-Neither referendum which is at least partly due to SDU campaigning (but the changed result is due to a complicated set of factors that I need to explain – it is definitely not due to a simple shift left towards either support for syndicalism or sympathy for Quebec modernizing nationalism in the student base; that occurs in part of the student base and very definitely the opposite is mostly the case in other parts of the student body – sharp polarization between student left and right and a very strong base for an aggressively anti-left student right is the rule at McGill in all periods) . The continuing activities of the Kingsbury group on course design issues, including at the departmental and faculty levels in places like engineering and sociology, and other and University Affairs people like Ticoll on democratization count as MINOR CONFLICTS within the CONTEXT section for the simple reason that they do not generate much conflict.
The trick here is to maintain the structure that I have chosen for presenting the McGill student movement from 1964-65 to 1969-70. It is a narrative about an emerging student new left and about the changes in consciousness, commitment and level of action that the members of that leftward moving movement went through. Hence each major conflict and even most minor conflicts need to be presented from that vantage point and to yield insights about that subject matter. The Gage affair and the UGEQ vote were the outcome of right-wing initiatives that led to victories by an SDU coordinated student liberal left. But the framing and analysis need to be first and foremost about what the left students did and what consciousness changes they and the people they influenced went through. As with the rewrite of 1965-66 as period two the rewrite of 1966-67 as period three will show a student right that is like King Canute trying vainly to hold back a surging new left political tide supported by a more diffuse and not-that-visible youth counterculture one. You should definitely retain and highlight what you wrote below about how U de M and UGEQ were also facing a counter mobilization by their own student right and by meddling administrations that especially tried to censor and purge the student newspapers, a counter mobilization that was there from the beginning but became especially salient at some point in 1965-66. UGEQ moved right in the sense of retreating into the core issues of fees and getting the Parent Commission proposed expanded francophone higher education institutions set up and by a shift to animation and consciousness raising away from attempts to get students into the streets especially under Robert Nelson in 1966-67 but even earlier. While I will not be able to do the research to be able to give a proper analysis of what happened on francophone campuses, it is striking how parallel the political trends are on U de M and McGill campuses and by extension the rise and fall at the CCN level of UGEQ because U de M always controlled UGEQ at that level. Ask Ticoll, Wilson, Schecter, Rabinovitch and others for their capsule analyses and judgments about this.
Here are quick points on what to insert in the rewrites especially in the CHANGES IN CONSCIOUNESS AND ACTION section, especially in the effort to distinguish three subtrends within the liberal-left:
-- more on Kingsbury drawing from material in later period to show how it is seen as progressive -- despite (or for some because) of his right-wing libertarian technocratic elite political philosophy -- because of its organizing of learning into self-directed small groups of students, its recasting of tests as ways for student to learn what they don’t yet understand as opposed to as a means of grading etc.
-- more on Stan Gray first group. Note that Gray and SDU when he leads it in Realist sit-ins and even Socialist Action Committee is by no means ultra left or knee jerk predictable in tactics. They deploy many moderate within-channels tactics. The difference is that they are also willing in a crunch to take unpopular stands and/or to take direct action as a minority when it is the only way to move the campaign forward when within-channels efforts are totally blocked. (This is largely because they frame all struggles much more clearly within the goal of off campus societal change, when push comes to shove, although the other two groups do so also but differently in both degree and kind of social change sought). So are many individuals from the other two groups in 1968-69 but it is under the leadership of the Gray first group.
-- Flesh out and correct the presentation of the actions of the University Affairs and other committees. Show importance of David Ticoll’s work on so many committees plus mention more on Hajaly, Hyman, Foster and others who belong in group three and come to power in the SC exec in 1968-69 and try to achieve agenda on democratizing (not SFU style student power but UGEQ style) and especially on changing the teaching process and by implication content at the classroom level through departmental organizing resulting in PSSA strike.