SIXTIES STUDENTS McGill (2B3B): UGEQ and Student Syndicalism, part two
THIS is PART TWO of the original notes on 1965-66 and 1966-67 at McGill, treated as a single period. The rewrite will separate the chronology of events and analysis into two periods.
CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND ACTION [for both 1965-66 and 1966-67 still]
What radical(izing) students saw as the issues and interests at stake in the major conflicts:
REDO THIS INTO PROPER SENTENCES and select source citations
-- Liberal and left students agreed on the central immediate issue: joining UGEQ and embracing its philosophy of student syndicalism.
They understood at least that UGEQ was an agent of the Quebec Liberal government ‘Quiet Revolution’ and/or of an emergent modernizing nationalist movement and therefore to join it was to support the building of a new Quebec serving the francophone majority, at the very least in terms of supporting the creation of a new free secular educational system (that McGill would have to reconfigure itself to fit into, although this aspect was not as clear as it would become in 1968).
However joining UGEQ was also to embrace the concept of student syndicalism which was understood as being similar in nature to the philosophies of new left student movements in other countries, especially the US. As the Schec[h]ter Report of Fall 1965 (SEE more BELOW incl four other authors) argued, the essence of UGEQ was its commitment to student syndicalism not to what we would now call ethnic nationalism. When CUS adopted the Declaration of the Canadian Student in Fall 1965 the perception was that English Canada was still a step or two behind francophone students, but possibly going in the same direction more cautiously.
For most liberal and left students, joining UGEQ was something that served their interests (as opposed to joining UGEQ solely to do a favour to disadvantaged francophones) precisely because applying the philosophy of student syndicalism meant changing McGill university (to democratize it, to reorganize the educational process to make it a process of active self-education) and changing the student society so that it was more democratic and more exciting and ‘relevant’ to the social problems and change movements of the day.
Right-wing students also recognized the same two immediate issues at stake, joining UGEQ to support a new modernizing nationalism Quebec and joining UGEQ to practice student syndicalism in the McGill student society. They resisted both, but it can be clearly demonstrated that it was the student syndicalist philosophy that aroused the strongest and most persistent counter-movements on the right – the response to the Lenihan walkout in February 1965, the mobilization against the tuition fees ‘strike’ in fall 1965, the repeated attempts from beginning to end of 1965-66 to get Daily editor McFadden fired which was justified almost entirely on charges that he was a Communist not on his pro Quebec nationalist editorials, the mobilization to block student council sanctioning of the UGEQ led march against the Vietnam war in fall 1965, the efforts of Aberman to get McGill to withdraw from CUS because it took [left-leaning] stands on social and political issues, the firing of Gage in fall 1966 for publishing an article that criticized a faculty member for doing research supporting the US war effort, McCoubrey’s offer to provide scabs during the Catholic teacher union strike etc.
Yes, the no to UGEQ movement rested its case on issues of Quebec nationalism mostly – having to withdraw from CUS, having to accept an official unilingualism, simply being an English minority in a francophone majority controlled organization, viewing UGEQ as implicitly pro Quebec separation from Canada. But the vote went strictly along the lines of anticipated class future, with the business and professional faculties solidly against, and arts and science undergraduates solidly for, joining UGEQ to practice student syndicalism. Indeed, as everywhere else, the case can be made that the strongest predictor of whether students leaned left or right in the 1960s on most issues was their “class consciousness” in a particular sense – did they identify with the interests of the private sector business, managerial and professional classes, and put getting themselves into one of those classes as the primary consideration in their stand on issues, or not?
-- Hence the interests at stake in the 1965-66 and 1966-67 conflict were seen by leftward moving students as the interests of liberal and left students on the one hand and right students on the other. Yes the interests of the Quebecois nation and the interests of African-Americans or Vietnamese or black Africans in UDI Rhodesia or low-paid workers on strike at LaGrenade etc that were the basis of protests were also at stake. And the university administrators who were speaking out against student activism and even free education, and who tried to prevent students from participating in off-campus political issue demonstrations, were clearly adversaries of liberal and left speech and action. But the conflicts were seen as disagreements among students about what kind of university and what kind of student society they wanted in the new Quebec. McGill students believed that they were autonomous and free to make their own decisions on these matters within their own student society.
There was an alliance between liberal and left based on a common stand on the two immediate issues but especially on the need to fight back against attempts by the right students to constrain and repress liberal and left speech and collective action. The liberal and left students were in and around the Scholzberg Council, mostly around (i.e. in the ‘civil service’). Most of those remained active in the civil service in the McCoubrey-Aberman regime. They were also the majority of the Daily staff in both 1965-66 and 1966-67. A few of the important left leaders had parents who were Communists or socialists, a number of the liberal students were active in the Quebec Liberals, some left students were already active in the NDP or in the new left SUPA group. However, most liberal and left students appear to have had little or no prior political experience or current ties to political parties or off-campus social movement organizations.
On the other side, the most visible right wing students were disproportionately members of the campus Progressive Conservative party club (which was quite publicly committed to a hard New Right Goldwater Republican version of conservatism), but the majority had no obvious political party connections. Most came from Commerce, Law, Medicine and Engineering and were more strongly or at least more immediately career-oriented than the mostly Arts and Science (but also several engineering) students who became the core activists of the liberal-left, expecting to very soon be competing for spots in the business, managerial and professional ranks. Right students at McGill, like right students on all the campuses we study in this book, were usually in an active alliance with the higher ups in the university power structure, consciously making their actions and words complementary. This would become increasingly evident from Fall 1967 on as the liberal-left grew stronger and more activist. In major conflict situations, top administrators and non-left student council executives consulted and frequently acted in tandem. Indeed, at McGill more than most other campuses, the top administrators and most faculty in decision-making bodies like Senate (including many prominent members of the federal and federalist social democratic NDP) were pro-actively repressive of the student left. The student right had their own ideological and practical careerist reasons to fight the student liberal-left. They initiated their own anti-left battles within student structures, but as often as not they only needed to acquiesce to McGill administration actions or to substitute a student society level action [[For example, SC pres Mirza initially supported president Robertson’s efforts to prevent off-campus political demonstrations in February-March 1965, leaders of McGill clubs meeting as the MCSA before classes began in September 1965 actively followed Robertson’s lead in the fee strike conflict, the Senate allegedly was ready to impose discipline on Daily editor Gage and censor the paper if McCoubrey-Aberman had not acted first etc.]] Having said that, there is little evidence that the administration allied with right students to prevent a vote to join UGEQ.
-- In sum, the 1965-66 and 1966-67 conflicts did involve larger issues such as government policies aimed at empowering the francophone majority, but the basic issue in almost all of the conflicts was what kind of student society would McGill have, whether left-leaning speech and action on societal issues was to be the focus or should the traditional orientation to cultivating a future elite through clubs and activities continue instead. There were the beginnings of a debate on how the university should be changed in terms of educational process and democratization, but only a bare beginning. The real debate was about what it meant to be a student today and the forces on either side were mostly students versus students. Administration were clearly aligned with the right-wing students but, in this period at least, managed to keep sufficiently in the background to avoid drawing too much attention to this fact. Faculty were mostly silent although a few defended the Daily in the attempts to fire the editors in the two years, McFadden and Gage, and some made public declarations of their concerns with the behaviour of the US forces in the Vietnam war. [[But cite Charles Taylor on free trade, academic VP ndper and BandBer X on , other NDP faculty prominent in pushing a B and B line on Quebec as gung ho federalists and Schecter and X observations about the conservatism of McGill faculty.]] Objectively, liberal and left students were pitted on issue after issue against most faculty and administration on campus and most business or government or other establishment forces off-campus, but they did not necessarily think of it that way day to day. Rather they were within a world of their own creation and under their own control, debating and maneouvring back and forth with other students about what the 1960s student (themselves personally) and the 1960s student society should be like.
What the strategy and tactics of the radical(izing) students were:
After the Scholzberg council’s September 1965 announcement of its planned campaign to withhold second semester fees, liberal and left students were on a perpetual strategic defensive against the repressive actions of right-wing students for the full two year period. Scholzberg’s fee withholding was an attempt to act like a student union, although it immediately retreated into acting like a student government ‘estate’ that was one of many that made up the overall university government apparatus. It simply organized affairs within its jurisdiction and represented student interests and views to government, administration and any other ‘higher level authorities’ on behalf of the student society (all students). As a union, it would have persuaded a majority of students to withhold half their fees until January 1966, while negotiating a rescinding or lowering of the fee increase. If the administration did not bargain in good faith, they might have chosen to get students to withhold fees longer, and/or have organized a boycott of classes or other such syndical action. The planned campaign was dead on arrival, because only a few students were prepared to take the personal risk as of registration in September 1965.
After the fees action was dropped, the Scholzberg executive tried to, and actually did, join UGEQ by Student Council vote alone, without referring the matter to an Open meeting of the student body. The anti-UGEQ forces forced a referendum ballot which the pro-UGEQ forces narrowly lost. Instead of accepting the loss, the liberal Council used technicalities to justify a second referendum, which they lost by a wider margin. The same approach of, at most, getting Student Council authorization only, was used to join in other UGEQ activities. The right forced an open meeting on the Vietnam march, and won. To be fair, many liberal and left students were prepared to let such issues get debated out and finally decided in Open meetings, and called a number of them themselves ( ). And Scholzberg, who expressed doubts about whether Open meetings should be allowed to override Student Council decisions ( ), always complied with Open meeting decisions. But the Scholzberg Council’s default mode was to act like a student government, that had the mandate and legitimacy as elected representatives to make all decisions on behalf of their parliamentary constituents.
The main tactics that liberal and left students ended up using were to either serve in the civil service of the two Councils, and come up with well-researched and well-argued reports to Council recommending progressive policies, or to do the same in shorter journalistic form for the Daily, or both. Beyond that, they responded to the actions of conservative students in the arenas defined by the conservative student initiatives – referenda, open meetings and mostly Council meetings. The major exception was the Gage firing, which they responded to by creating SDU. The SDU got 150 students together to debate out their political ideas in SDU meetings over the next months, and this certainly deepened the radicalization of many students and laid the groundwork for liberal and left actions from Fall 1967 on. They also successfully organized an Open meeting of over 1,000 students to demand the reinstatement of Gage. But ultimately they compromised with the McCoubrey-Aberman council to let a Canadian University Press commission of inquiry, a form of binding arbitration, decide the issue. In retrospect, it was a wise move since the commission proposed reinstatement, but what would SDU and the Daily staff have done if the decision of a ‘neutral panel’ had gone the other way?
[[FOOTNOTE? Most mainstream media commentators, and not a few scholars writing about social movements, infer that educated middle class movements are more spontaneous and participatory democratic and militant than ordinary trade union struggles are. It is implied that this is because the first are more educated and higher class. Maybe so and maybe no , but McGill students were not even ready to risk fines for not paying fees, let alone go without a paycheque and risk fines and trouble with police or scabs or job losses, as striking workers routinely do. And McGill students jumped at binding arbitration, which is often dismissed as the tactic of bureaucratic union bosses who are unwilling to test the resolve of their membership to engage in mass actions of any kind.]]
The actions of liberal and left students certainly increased the understanding of, and active support for, the McGill student society version of parliamentary democracy and free press institutions by a large number of students. It also educated many about UGEQ, and its philosophy of student syndicalism, and a little bit about the need to accept the status of an English minority in a new Quebec type organization. Beyond this type of consciousness-raising, mostly a greater affirmation of belief in liberal democracy as practiced in the wider Canadian society and a greater openness to the new Quebec, it did not result in very many practical victories for leftward change at McGill.
Changes in social understandings and political goals:
Leftward moving students agreed on what practical stands to take in all the battles with the right-leaning students in 1965-66 and 1966-67, but they also had somewhat different politics. Stan Gray and others who formed the Student Action Committee in February 1965 to defend Lenihan’s walkout and to uphold the right of students to engage in political demonstrations without administration or Council permission, were distinguished by already being either Marxists or socialists, although most also saw themselves as part of the emergent Canadian and American new left. Their voice was overshadowed by those of the second and third left groups from January 1966 through to mid Fall 1967 when they would begin to regain some prominence. From 1968 on, this first group would be made up of individuals who at least occasionally participated as individuals in off-campus francophone Quebec labour, student and even pro-independence (and left socialist) groups and brought those politics in modified form to the campus. Victor Rabinovitch is representative of the second group, a liberal-left group within the student council ‘civil service’ who drew upon the ideas developed by delegations at the annual congresses of both CUS and UGEQ and stressed the need to channel liberal-left politics through CUS and especially UGEQ and through the local elected student councils who constituted those national student organizations. Their influence was most marked behind the scenes in the Scholzberg Council in Fall 1965 and again in forming and leading the SDU to fight for the reinstatement of Daily editor Gage in Fall 1966. Mark Wilson, John Fekete and David Ticoll are representative of a third group, also operating within that civil service, influenced by Donald Kingsbury’s ideas, who put less stress on mass mobilization and being left or right, and more on doing research to come up with the scientifically most sound policy proposals to present to tripartite committees of students, administrators and faculty. Their influence was continuous from summer 1965 through to March 1968. In Fall 1968 and early 1969, the most left students from all three groups came together in a series of civil disobedience actions on the fundamental issues of student power and McGill’s role in the new Quebec. Those actions resulted in isolation from the large majority of students, especially after the Sir George Williams computer burning incident in February 1969. These three subgroups overlap and over time converged. They were not competing factions, certainly not in this period. It is more accurate to say these were three tendencies, which most individuals drew upon to varying degrees to constitute their personal political awareness.
GROUP ONE
The first group, associated with the leadership of Stan Gray, was active in beating back the effort to punish campus NDP leader Bill Lenihan for his walkout from Model Parliament to join a march against the Vietnam war in February 1965.
((FOOTNOTE 1:
Stan Gray was a Montreal native who graduated in 1965-66 with a first class honours degree in Economics and Political Science. His familiarity with Marxism came partly from having parents who had been in the Communist Party. He went to Oxford’s Balliol College on a scholarship to continue his studies in 1966-67 and came back to McGill as a lecturer in Political Science after that. He was the president of the McGill chapter of the ban the bomb group CUCND, that reconstituted itself as the Student Union for Peace Action in late December 1964. SUPA was the main new left group in English Canada in the mid 1960s. Gray did a lot of off-campus organizing for SUPA, especially to organize protests against Canada’s nuclear missile base at La Macaza Quebec. Gray was the chair of SAC at McGill in February-March 1965. After being fired from McGill in 1969 for his role in student protests, Gray led in organizing off-campus groups for Quebec independence and socialism. After being arrested under the War Measures Act in October 1970, he moved to Hamilton Ontario where he worked as a steelworker and subsequently as an advocate of workplace health and safety. ))
Gray, Lenihan, Phil Resnick, John Bordo, Sherman Sitrin, Alex Urquhart and others formed the Student Action Committee. SAC led in getting the Council to agree that students needed permission from no one to engage in on or off campus political demonstrations. They played a significant role in getting the Mirza Council to organize the Selma march and the series of events that mobilized thousands of students to demand a McGill fee freeze and free education for all in Quebec. These mobilizations helped change the political climate such that Sharon Scholzberg got elected in March 1965. From that point on, the Scholzberg Council and ‘civil service’ took over as the arena for doing student politics. Gray and others continued to be active in Fall 1965, but more as individuals joining with all other liberal-left students operating in and around the Scholzberg Council and the Patrick McFadden left-leaning Daily. Gray and others continued to write articles and speak at meetings to put forward a distinctive neo-Marxist new left view in Fall 1965, but the second and third groups from the ‘civil service’ provided most of the visible practical leadership and initiatives from January 1966 on.
The first group was a disparate group of students who already identified as some kind of left socialists and/or neo-Marxists (i.e. drawing on Marxism but seeking to develop a new analysis of contemporary capitalism that connected a class politics with anti-racism, feminism etc) because of experience in or near the Communist Party or the NDY, the youth wing of the social democratic NDP. This likely gave them a greater sense of the need to build a movement that related to working class people and other off-campus groups in order to change the overall society, but they were more or less at the same stage as other leftward moving students in trying to work out a new left politics different from the ‘old left’. They always stressed making on campus McGill activism serve the building of a capital-m Movement beyond the campus. Like other left students they saw joining UGEQ in order to be part of the Quebec-wide francophone-led student movement promoting a new Quebec as a key first step. They distinguished themselves from the others in coming at student politics from a more deliberately international as well as Canada-wide perspective. Hence they led in organizing participation in the first Vietnam protests and in the march in solidarity with civil rights marchers in Selma Alabama. Gray was a leader in SUPA’s civil disobedience actions and summer community organizing project at the nuclear missile base in La Macaza in 1964 and 1965.
Gray and others were also among the most insistent on mobilizing from a base of participatory democracy. In relation to Council, this meant stressing the calling of Open meetings to make Council accountable and to override its decisions when necessary. It also meant seeking, in major conflicts, to get the student council to consider acting like a trade union by organizing a student strike and not just pass resolutions in Council. They also were among the most committed to the use of civil disobedience tactics and to the calling of meetings of all interested students to debate and decide on those tactics. Their guiding criteria was the building of a new left movement that stretched beyond the campus and this meant putting public debate and collective action by a liberal-left minority first.
The Rabinovitch group shared the commitment to Open meetings and to the goal of making the student society act like a student union. However, they tilted more in the direction of picking issues and tactics that would win the support of an effective majority of students than to collective actions that only mobilized a liberal-left minority and could lead to a conservative backlash at the level of student elections. Their focus was on keeping liberal-left control of the Daily and of the Student Council. Hence Rabinovitch and SDU proposed regular and sovereign Open meetings, student political parties running on platforms, a Judicial Council to ensure that Council respected the student constitution and perhaps separate left and right student newspapers in order to institutionalize a more representative and more politicized student government. The third group supported UGEQ and student syndicalism and consequently democratization. Insofar as they were influenced by Kingsbury, they were less sure about the need for protest tactics directed at the administration. They were more optimistic about winning changes by doing research that would enable students to win rational debates with faculty and administration leading to change.
Stan Gray wrote several Daily articles analyzing the state of the new left in the United States. In February 1965, at the time that SAC was created, he argued that the American student movement had been stimulated into a higher level of social-political consciousness and militant action by the Vietnam war and civil rights movement. The students at UC Berkeley and elsewhere rejected “the passive ‘consumer’ role of the student in the educational process and… abstention from political action. Hence the goals of the new movement tend to center around democratization of the university structure, and political organization [outside existing parties] to remedy the many instances of exploitation and injustice [off campus]”. In contrast “In Canada activity has been mostly around more narrow student issues”. However the “situation in Quebec is… significantly advanced over that in the rest of Canada” because of UGEQ’s commitment to student syndicalism, which was “an articulate philosophy explicitly linking the student with political involvement in… society”.
((FOOTNOTE 2:
Phil Resnick ran for external vice-president in March 1965 (and lost to CUS chair and moderate Ken Cabatoff who was perceived as being allied with Scholzberg) on a SAC platform that was prescient about where the McGill student left was going. “The student has a right to joint determination of courses with the faculty. He has the right to joint bargaining on all matters affecting students – residences, fees (until they are abolished) etc. The Board of Governors must be reformed to include not only representatives of business, but trade union and government members as well… [We] must not hesitate to become actively involved in political and social issues. The role of the student is to change the world not to accept it. This is my definition of student syndicalism” (650303p1).))
In short, the US was more advanced, both in its on campus campaigns for a student-centered education process and democratization and in organizing around societal issues, because it saw the campus issues in the context of the off campus ones and put the latter first in importance. Joining UGEQ was not just the right thing to do for a more equal Quebec, it was also the shortest path to catching up to other countries in building a student movement at McGill (650226p4). In a Fall 1965 article, as the Scholzberg Council was experiencing defeats in its efforts to engage issues through the Student Council, Gray noted that American students did not channel their action through a student union “or other mainstream organizations” like established political parties. Instead “a significant number of radical and left-wing organizations with different ideologies and strategies coexist” (650930p8).
((FOOTNOTE 3:
As already noted, former UGEQ external vice-president Daniel Latouche made a similar point a year later. The American new left channeled its activism through openly leftist groups that did not have to get majority consent to act. UGEQ leaders understood “that student councils are [inherently] conservative indeed reactionary bodies”. But Quebec students “had a nation to build”, so building unions that could educate and mobilize effective majorities was necessary. UGEQ tried to simulate the consciousness-raising role of the “anarchist” activist groups by doing social animation of their memberships within the union structure (661104p8). ))
GROUP TWO
In 1963, Robert Rabinovitch and others responded to a survey of McGill clubs about how to make McGill student activities more relevant by setting up a standing Educational committee. It took up the goals of the Quebec Liberal government for a greatly expanded tuition-free and secular education system. Robert Rabinovitch became the main author of a government funded survey of student means that was later spread across Canada by CUS in February 1965. The Education committee also developed plans for high school visitation and for tutoring of students in less advantaged areas. In fall 1964, Robert’s younger brother Victor became editor of the High School Supplement to the Daily, published twice in October and on the last Friday of November, January, February and May (640921p4). Victor was active in various committees of UGEQ from the beginning and worked in the CUS national office in the summer of 1967. His thinking in this period was very much that of someone who was seeking to interpret and apply the ideas developed by others within the elected bodies UGEQ but also, less directly, those of CUS. Like most liberal-left McGill students, he was both an English-Canadian, whose ideological influences and sense of self-interest were English-Canadian, and a Quebecer who supported UGEQ and student syndicalism as a means to a new Quebec, above all by supporting what he called “the educational revolution now in progress in Quebec” (641002p?).
It followed from this way of looking at things that it was in the interests of progressive English-Canadians in Quebec to ally with all those forces that supported that educational revolution – the Quebec government and the administrators and faculty as well as students in the francophone schools. The way to do this was to join UGEQ and to emulate their philosophy of student syndicalism, which was “a philosophy of action, students working to take part and play a useful role in society”. Syndicalist students “express their views on current social and political issues and, if the need arises they will put down their books and ‘go into the streets’ to bring this cause to the attention of the public” (650514p7). “Students form a distinct, recognizable class within society – the ‘young intellectual workers’ class… [As such they] have a right (and the duty!) to make known their views and present suggestions on any problems facing society”. Far from being radical, “The Minister of Education has commented favourably on this notion of student action several times” (650129p2). Indeed, this notion meant that students had an important role to play in building a new modernized nation. A key notion in theories of modernization is that all sectors of the population need to be activated to recognize and express their social interests and get mobilized into active participation.
UGEQ had reorganized their student associations “around two axes: service to the members and service to the nation”. Rabinovitch recognized that English-Canadian students at McGill did not necessarily share “the same enthusiasm about the Quebec Quiet Revolution” and the building of a new modernized nation. Nevertheless, “[t]he McGill student society is following a unique path but achieving the same effect”. McGill’s different motives were “the desire to improve the techniques of student government” to make it more professional, a concern with educational issues and “the influence of student action all over the world (McGill has many foreign students)” (650514p7). Note the differences here with the approach of francophone UGEQers – improving the local student government not just joining a province wide student union, concern with on-campus quality and process of education issues not just building a new Quebec education system, drawing on other examples of student movements such as Berkeley and SNCC and SDS in the USA and CUS in English Canada. Francophone students were said to be primarily concerned with creating a new education system to achieve massive upward mobility for a generation committed to building a new secularized and modernized Quebec nation. Anglophone students already had all that in the Canadian nation. Their most pressing interest was in the liberalization of their own university while actively supporting francophone efforts to ‘catch up’.
Stephen Schecter and four other students (Marty Friedman, David Ticoll, Morris Goldberg and Aaron Rynd) presented a thoroughly researched and incisive report on UGEQ to the Scholzberg Council in Fall 1965. It is still worth reading in full today to grasp the nuances of UGEQ’s initial politics and the various internal organizational and ideological tensions that would play themselves out in the next several years. They stressed that, while some francophone students indulged an ethnocentric nationalism, UGEQ did not. A universalistic student syndicalism was its overriding political philosophy. UGEQ began with a committee to prepare for a founding congress in March 1963 out of a need to bring together Quebec students from all types of post-secondary schools. “It is apparent that UGEQ did not arise primarily in opposition to CUS… but out of a need in Quebec society”. In other words, UGEQ was not anti English Canadian but pro the achievement of a new Quebec (651018p3?).
In its Fall 1965 congress, CUS shifted to the left with the adoption of the Declaration of the Canadian Student, which put forward a different conceptual grounding for student activism. Instead of seeing students as a collectivity that is part of a larger corporate whole of a collectively developing nation, as UGEQ did, the CUS statement derived its justification from the rights and responsibilities of students as individuals. The argument was that students could and should be active producers of their own education together with faculty, in accordance with the medieval European ideal of the university as a community of scholars. The key formulation was one about the rights and responsibilities of active citizenship. Students were citizens within the university and citizens within the wider society. They should be treated like adults with the capacity to govern themselves and to join in the governance of the university. They had the right and responsibility to act like adult citizens in taking stands on societal issues and promoting progressive societal changes. UGEQ’s philosophy of syndicalism saw student societies as unions (but also as estates within a corporate whole) with a duty to work to activate other subgroups of the emergent nation to achieve secularization, modernization and national equality beyond the campus as well as on. CUS’s philosophy was about the rights and responsibilities of the individual student. It therefore grounded the idea of student participation in making decisions about issues in which students had a direct interest as students. Conceptually, this left unresolved the extent to which local student societies should be taking stands and leading actions on off-campus societal issues, where students had no particular interests as students. It could, and did, lead in practice to a politics of student power in order to change the university and thereby indirectly change the society.
The UC Berkeley student protests had made the point clear. On one side there was the trend towards making universities into corporations that trained students as passive recipients to fit into slots in corporations after graduation. On the other there was the ideal of a liberal education whereby the student was free to actively educate him or herself. Doug Ward, the 1966-67 CUS national president, told McGill students that CUS was mainly concerned with two things, “who goes to university and what they do when they get there. The first has to do with who has access to higher education and what we are doing to overcome the social and financial barriers to higher education. The second is concerned with the quality of a university education, who governs the university and what is the role of the university in our society… Our aim is to change the priorities of provincial and federal governments… [and] to change the aspirations of young people” (670125p5). That is pretty much what Rabinovitch, and liberal-left McGill students like him, were beginning to think like in 1965-67.
When the McCoubrey-Aberman council fired Daily editor Sandy Gage, Victor Rabinovitch was a leader in organizing the Students for a Democratic University (SDU). Rabinovitch noted that SDU was modelled on the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist groups on US campuses. But it was SDU, not SDS. SDU would take stands on societal issues and might organize protests around societal issues, but the focus was on educational issues and on changing the university.
((FOOTNOTE 4:
Rabinovitch’s stress on educational issues, and on working within UGEQ primarily to be part of a province-wide lobby that could push the Quebec government to fully implement its promises of a greatly expanded free education system, was conservative relative to what UGEQ aimed to be, and sometimes was – a student union that educated its members to take stands on social and political issues and mobilized its members into strikes or demonstrations. But he actually echoed the more conservative turn in UGEQ in this period (although it was also a period where UGEQ applied community organizing techniques to activate participation in its ‘base units’, when backlashes on its campuses after its first year revealed that it had gone too far politically, and too fast, for much of its base). UGEQ president Robert Nelson told the Fall 1965 UGEQ congress that the primary role of UGEQ was to “first seek out the injustices to education and correct them before we attack injustices in Quebec society as a whole” (651101p1). In January 1967, Nelson was asked what UGEQ had “done to increase student participation in the administrative affairs of the university?” and his answer was “Not much… We have not had the time”. Most of the time was spent in finding out what students wants and needs were for a new educational system. “Students within a given region are encouraged to define their needs which we in turn present to the government” (670125p5). ))
Indeed it was focussed on changing the student society within the university, so that there would be no more need for conservative councils to censor liberal-left student newspapers or vice-versa, and no more problems with student councils having clear mandates from their electors to take stands on issues in the university and in society. “The answer to these serious problems can possibly be found in [students running for council as members of campus] political parties or perhaps in the establishment of a competing newspaper on campus” as well as regular Open meetings that could override Council and thereby keep it honest (670117p2 or 4).
GROUP THREE
A third group of liberal-left students, who were in and near the University Affairs committee part of the ‘civil service’, overlapped with the second group. They were distinguished, at this stage in their political evolutions, by their attempt to apply a value-free scientistic approach (a technocratic elite of experts would provide solutions based on scientific facts and methods) to the problems of the undemocratic corporate university and to the failures of the existing lecture-based teaching methods. Rabinovitch, and those in his more moderate pragmatic wing of the SDU, aimed to continue with the Scholzberg council’s policies of joining UGEQ to help the Quebec government and the francophone modernizing nationalists make a success of the ‘educational revolution’. They saw achieving a new secular free education system as the central issue, and saw the interests in conflict as all those who had privileges due to the old system versus all those who would benefit from the change. The second group shared this broad stance, but were more immediately concerned with issues internal to McGill (both groups, and virtually everyone on the liberal-left, were also aroused by international conflicts like civil rights and Vietnam, but connecting local issues to international ones eventually took a back seat in this period, as the liberal-left in various ways ‘retreated’ into educational issues in the face of a conservative backlash to liberal-left initiatives on society change questions). Most of them were involved in the experiments in course design fostered by Donald Kingsbury and a Morris Goldberg headed spinoff from the University Affairs committee, that began to study alternatives to the lecture system in Fall 1965.
In January 1966, the University Affairs committee summarized its activities as an offshoot of the Scholzberg Council. Its first goal was to win faculty and administration support for changes in the curriculum and in the methods of education at the classroom level, based on a John Dewey like idea of education as an active process of self-education. But this necessarily implied and required that students be recognized as adult citizen members of a community of scholars who were co-producing that educational process. A subcommittee, led by David Ticoll and others, had been created to “study the way in which power is exercized in the university”, to “demand membership on those boards and committees where the real power to make decisions” lay, and to inform students of the existing distribution of power through reports to the Daily. The Senate committee on curriculum had refused their request for student membership and thereby blocked the most straightforward channel for students to share in decisions about “the content of their courses and the methods of learning”. The University Affairs committee responded by setting up a committee on course evaluations and by joining the project of the Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Society (ASUS) for a Course Guide to third and fourth year courses based on student responses to questionnaires. The committee was also setting up some trial courses, run as seminars instead of lectures, in Boolean algebra and in communications (660121p10).
Spurned by official university channels, members of the University Affairs committee and its periphery also responded by ‘going private’, by getting involved as individuals in math professor Donald Kingsbury’s 1966 Summer Project in Course Design. Kingsbury’s approach to educational reform was different from either the CUS or UGEQ approach philosophically and practically. Indeed it was ultimately incompatible with both. In a nutshell, Kingsbury wanted the university to be run more like a private corporation and he advised students to win their freedom by organizing themselves the same way separate from the university. This incompatibility does not appear to have occurred to any of the left-moving students who responded to his call (perhaps because the last several student councils had in many ways already been doing just what he recommended and they had come up through that system). They wanted to learn what he had to teach about developing a classroom process that was student-centered and a break from ‘sage on the stage’ lecture classes, and did so.
Kingsbury’s goal was to persuade the administration and senior faculty to fund him in setting up “a formal department of teaching, research and development… to give university teachers expert assistance” in learning theory based teaching techniques. He saw an opportunity to get students to carry out a pilot project, while also building up a constituency of student leaders to support his goal since, by his own admission, “such a program does not have the backing of your professors at this moment”. He told a student audience in January 1966 that “all radical ideas come from industry rather than the universities”. The administration was content to have teachers operate at 55% competence level in teaching where industry would insist on 100%. Education reform would never come through students getting representation in university decision-making bodies, which were inevitably slow to accept innovations, let alone to initiate them.
McGill students should join UGEQ because UGEQ leaders were the future elite in Quebec (660126p4), but UGEQ membership was “marginal” in importance. “Protest – marching, sitting, writing, shouting, crying is the tool of the weakling who is trying to convince some more able person to do the job for him”. Students would only be listened to if they trained an elite of competent leaders to develop a professionalized student organization operating like an innovating and efficient private corporation. “Don’t just accept the Dean of Students the Administration is appointing. Hire your own”. The course design program would provide just such a training in the “executive skills that the Student Council needs”. He praised the decision of the University Affairs committee people (including Michael Ornstein, Bob Lozoff, Jack Semiatycki, Sharon Axler) who started pilot courses and design workshops of their own instead of waiting for the administration: “[T]he aware elite is always impatient”. “How does an elite go about creating an environment where a great education happens routinely? Learn how to handle your tools first. The tool of this revolution is a learning theory” that was being developed in industry, and not by academic psychologists (660125p1; 660225p7).
Engineering student Mark Wilson was the general coordinator of the 1966 Project in Course Design and became University Affairs committee chair in Fall 1966 (660930p4). John Fekete worked with editor Simon Taunton and others on the Fall 1966 ASUS Course Guide and became the editor preparing the next one in January 1967 (660923p1; 670116p1). He claimed that the 1966 Guide had required “the efforts of over 500 students, 5000 man hours and $17,000” and was consequently “the most elaborate undertaking on campus” after the McGill Daily (670118p?). Wilson and Fekete co-authored an article in Fall 1966 titled “After the Course Guide, What? The Lecture Hall: Imperatives of Change”. They announced that “the Project in Course Design is now ready to launch ‘modules’ in Math, Physics and other subjects” including an existing team in English 100. The Kingsbury approach started from the assumption that mastery of the subject matter by the teacher was not a sufficient, or even strictly speaking relevant, basis for effective teaching. Courses needed to be designed by technical experts in learning theory. Students who took Kingsbury course design workshops were at least apprentice experts. Effective learning had to be organized like “a cybernetic control system”. First, a course had to be broken down into sequential units, in each of which a clear goal of mastery of specific content was made explicit and grasp of the content was made testable. Then “the resulting error signal is used to apply to the process a correction strategy designed to reduce the error”. This involved “members of the design team, armed with clipboards, hover[ing] on the fringes of the… small self-operating groups [of students] within the same classroom” (660930p5).
Kingsbury applauded the 1966 ASUS Course Guide that had been organized by ASUS students on their own as an instance of his ‘get power by making yourself an expert’ approach. He also applauded the administration for providing “solid help without interference. The result of that decision by the administration is very apparent this year – there is an unprecedented respect of the administration by the vast majority of effective student leaders” (660930p4). Wilson and Fekete echoed this sentiment in their attack on Daily editor Gage’s January 10 1967 editorial. Gage had argued that as “universities eagerly take on the role of service stations to society, the undergraduates are pushed further and further from the pumps of knowledge”. Students should recognize that “in many ways they form a class” and “demand a voice in the decision-making within our institution” which could lead to “effectively demanding relevancy of their courses to the outside world” (670110p2or4). Wilson and Fekete replied that in loco parentis was a non-issue at McGill, and always had been. Students like them recognized that the way to get change was “to articulate discontent and analyze the situation for intelligent action. When you run off at the mouth as in [Gage’s editorial]… you obviate this effort”. They listed off multiple examples of where students like them had taken initiatives such as the course design experiments and ASUS course guide or Ticoll’s study of the existing university decision-making system, which had led administration or faculty to invite them to present their ideas to university committees (670111p2).
At the same time, Wilson and Fekete had joined Rabinovitch and the SDU in mobilizing against the McCoubrey-Aberman Council’s attempted purge of Sandy Gage in Fall 1966. They and other graduates of the Kingsbury school of course design, like Engineering student Robert Hajaly (later elected for 1968-69 as the only overtly left-wing Council president ever), ran successfully for Council in December 1966. Fekete explained that he had run because he was appalled with Council’s misuse of power but also because Council needed to go beyond just providing services. “Students are here primarily to get an education and Council must involve itself in the whole process of education” (661209p5or6or7). The successful liberal-left candidates all saw the need to avoid a repeat of the Gage purge. Many supported empowering a law student Judicial Council to rule on any violation of the student constitution by a future Council (conservative students instead sought a law student court that would confine itself to imposing discipline on disorderly students). They agreed that both Council and other student societies should be accountable to regular Open meetings and should be subject to overrule by referenda, but disagreed as to whether Open meetings should be allowed to do the same (661209p5). SDU’s Rabinovitch and Harry Edel proposed that Open meetings be required to be held at least twice a semester in each faculty and that Judicial Council decisions should be made “subject to appeal to an open meeting of the Students’ Society (661209p10).
Fekete and the other new Council members, supported actively by the SDU, would go on to wage an ultimately unsuccessful weeks long battle to challenge McCoubrey’s offer to provide student scabs to the Montreal Catholic teachers strike and to provide assistance to the strikers instead (670118p1; 670119p1; 670210p1; 670213p1; 670223p3; 670310p6). Fekete would also be chastened by the hostile response of faculty, who mostly refused to cooperate with a second ASUS Course Guide, which led to its cancellation (670313p1).
Steven Schechter wrote a long article on McGill faculty. They had signed up for the new corporate multiversity and worked to “help the Liberal establishment perpetuate itself”. “If McGill has betrayed the historic commitment of a university, the blame lies not on the administration and even less on the students but squarely on the shoulders of the faculty. The faculty teach; no one else. They set the tone. They outline the issues. If the faculty is reactionary, dollars to doughnuts the students are too… Why are the voices of social criticism muted so that they never get beyond the walls of our campus, except for the occasional formation of the same group of seven or eight professors… Are not the faculty the real conservatives at our university? Are they not the ones with income and status interests to protect?” (670127 Reviewp2). ))
In March 1967, Mark Wilson would be elected in a landslide as external vice-president in the 1967-68 Council. He would reaffirm his view that the key issue was to change Council’s priorities to take an active role in promoting changes in the educational process at McGill (while also working within UGEQ to encourage it to orient to the same goal as part of the fight for a new secularized free education system). “All decisions by student government have political consequences. When people don’t want Council to ‘take political stands’ they really mean that council should not challenge the status quo. Don’t vote for Wilson if you support a status quo of underpaid [Catholic high school] teachers, misused lectures and general copping out”. Having said that, “Rather than ‘taking stands’ for McGill on issues for which there is no clear consensus on campus, Wilson wants to bring the issues to the campus by such techniques as teach-ins and newsfeatures. He intends to reorganize the External Affairs branch as a centre of critical excitement in the student community” (670301p1 and p7). Mark Wilson and John Fekete would work with others throughout the summer of 1967 to research and write an External Affairs report for presentation to the Fall 1967 Smith Council that would spell out in great detail a blueprint for implementing this promise. It would be the opening salvo in a series of events that would spark all the major conflicts at McGill in 1967-68.
** British and American pop music and youth counterculture had an influence but somewhat of a muted and delayed one. The Quebec nationalist movement sought to create its own new nationalist popular culture and did so very successfully. For example, the pop singers quite consciously drew more on the acoustic folk and pop music traditions of Quebec and France than on British or American blues and rock and roll. Francophone students who wanted to be cool were more likely to emulate the styles and ideas of Paris than London or New York. Left-moving McGill students, who were mixing with francophone students and trying to be responsive to the new Quebec, might listen to Beatles and Rolling Stones records as much as English-Canadian students outside Quebec did, but they had half a foot in francophone styles and sensibilities too.
NOTES on WHERE TO FIND EVIDENCE OF YOUTH COUNTERCULTURE AT MCGILL
[[Indications of rise of a politicized youth counterculture at McGill and in Montreal:
* Logos and other underground press newspapers.
* How Montreal was changed by the experience of Expo 67.
* Articles on marijuana and LSD and other like drugs and related behaviours.
* AMEX and other anti-draft organizations, presence of young Americans evading the draft.
* Were the 31 who stayed in the Robertson office occupation in fact mostly Americans directly motivated by what was happening in the US? Were they in fact mostly previously not politically active liberals of the sort that later supported Eugene McCarthy and RFK in the USA? Were they more hippy-like than the rest of the McGill student left at this point in time? I am assuming the answer is yes to all these questions.
* Hajaly, Wilson-Fekete report plans to get SC and admin support for coop housing to address the razing of cheap apartments that had provided the close-by student ghetto before. When support for this is delayed and/or fails to come through Hajaly and others plan informal privately arranged shared housing which is most notably planned to be coed.
* Birth Control Handbook and oncampus Clinic. Articles by Kingsbury and others on abortion. Eventually articles on Morgentaler and Humanist Society. Also more direct indications of more visible and more normative premarital sex and especially multiple partners in serial monogamy as norm replacing having sex with one person you claim/believe you will later marry.
* Indications of feminist critiques and consciousness and of left leaning female students organizing themselves. Also indications of how this is both facilitated by women’s experiences of change in the counterculture as well as the political left, positive and negative. As with all of these points, the timing of the first mentions and on what specific subissues matters.
*Free university set up outside McGill by Our generation NDG crowd and some from McGill.
* Articles on decline in belief in religion and increase in atheism or agnosticism or at least not seeking to directly apply religious do’s and don’ts to guide one’s life choices and secular beliefs.
*Articles indicating changing attitudes to homosexuality or relative lack of this. Same on changes in attitudes to sexuality per se and to gender per se, i.e. any indication of a break from the binary biological determinist, God and Nature determinist thinking or lack (simple absence of reference to) the same.
* Visible signs of hippy dress and symbolism, psychedelic patterns, psychedelic blinking lights in nightclubs etc. Articles on 1960s pop music that encourages alternatives to God, Country, Military, Career, Family status quo.
* Sympathetic articles about the [politicized] youth counterculture elsewhere.
* Articles indicating opposition to war and racism in practice e.g. attending Viet demos in US, civil rights speakers. Speakers, actions, articles – and their relative lack – on Quebecois national oppression and on First Nations colonization and genocidal oppression.
*NOTE: What stands out to me in reading the Daily is the relative lack of indication of the influence of the youth counterculture on the way the student liberal left felt, thought and behaved. I assume that some of this is real, and is evidently so when you compare the clear presence of the counterculture at U of T expressed in the Varsity to its relative lack at McGill in the Daily. How much of this is due to being in the context of a wider francophone local society? Francophone Quebec is within Canada and shares more than a bit culturally and politically with the rest of Canada, but it was and is a “distinct society” as well. Canada is typically (culturally and politically) 70% American and 30% European. In Montreal of the period, the American (counter) cultural influences are slightly muted and/or delayed and for many refracted/distorted by being perceived through one’s second language. For francophone Quebecois students of the time this is due to language and national identity and a slightly stronger tendency (compared to anglophone Montrealers) to emulate the European ‘Old Country’, including the youth counterculture styles of France. Some European youth models are consciously emulated by the francophone intelligentsia instead as a way to counter (English) Canadian influences more than American ones. This was apparent to me at the time in terms of styles of clothing and coiffure that made up the ‘uniform’ of the Quebec student more broadly, and the Quebec nationalist and student syndicalist more specifically. Left students at McGill were trying to show respect for the emerging new Quebec, and were trying to work within its new organizations, so it is not surprising to find that they moved culturally toward their francophone sisters and brothers. Another factor could simply be the fact that older and more conservative students in the professional and business faculties never ceased to dominate the student council and clubs and most campus institutions. I also assume that the youth counterculture presence is greatly underreported in all student newspapers, because the counterculture is mostly about changes in private life, even when those changes are taking place in student communes etc.