SIXTIES STUDENTS McGill (4A): The Realist and the SDU Sit-In, part one

PERIOD FOUR: Summer-Fall 1967 to April 1968 – (1) Liberal Student Council Rejects Wilson-Fekete Reform Proposals; (2) Faculty and Administration React to Reprinting of The Realist Satire in McGill Daily with Repression of Journalists; and (3) then Escalate the Repression Further When Stan Gray and the SDU initiate a Non-Violent Sit-In to Support the Daily Staffers

(Another version of this text exists that I chose not to post, because the revisions were incomplete, and because the changes were not major, but mostly ones of presenting points in a different order. )

MAJOR CONFLICT:  Peter Smith was elected as 1967-68 Student Council president in March 1967 by a landslide against weak opponents.  Mark Wilson also won the external vice-presidency by a lesser but still large margin against stronger opposition.  Both were perceived as being relatively liberal compared to the 1966-67 McCoubrey-Aberman Council.  This was especially the case on a single issue – both rejected the previous Council’s mantra that the Student Council should not take stands on “political” (i.e. especially societal change, but also university change) issues. 

In 1967-68, Smith and Wilson would be on opposite sides in the major conflict of the period – university president Robertson convened the Senate Disciplinary Committee (SDC) to consider charges against three members of the Daily staff for reprinting a sexualized satire of the US political establishment, where the possible penalties included suspension or expulsion; criminal assault police charges (later found to be false by the court) were laid against SDU leader Stan Gray, based partly on a sworn observer statement by Smith and Principal (university president) Robertson; and the SDC actually imposed one-year probationary sentences (that authorized immediate expulsion without trial for any future violation) on 31 students who had engaged in non-violent civil disobedience to demand dropping of the charges against the Daily staffers. The self-consciously centrist liberal Smith repeatedly chose to align with conservative students and with an aggressively reactionary administration and senior faculty.  [[His motives were unclear, but one factor appears to have been an obsessive need to avoid conflict with the administration and/or with perceived existing public opinion on and off campus (where ‘public opinion’ was what establishment figures wrote or said and what was reported as the views of an outraged public in establishment media). ]]

The conflict developed in three stages.  First, engineering student Mark Wilson and English student and Arts and Sciences rep John Fekete presented a series of educational reform and democratization policy motions for Council to debate and adopt as part of the External Affairs Report that they and David Ticoll ETC had spent many hours in the summer of 1967 researching and writing.  Both resigned when Smith and others got Council to table the first set of motions until a representative of the administration could tell Council what it thought of them and then, after the administration rep predictably expressed strong opposition, got Council to gut the motions of key provisions;  second, Fekete reprinted an article from the American satirical magazine The Realist in his Daily column that used a Swiftian ‘why not eat the children’ shock technique to satirize US president Lyndon Johnson’s benefitting from the Kennedy assassination.  University president Robertson responded within two hours by calling upon the Senate Disciplinary Committee to consider charges of publishing obscene libel against Fekete and Review section editor Pierre Fournier and general editor Peter Allnutt; third, Stan Gray and the Students for a Democratic University (SDU) used multiple tactics to pressure the administration to drop the charges. 

A series of moderate actions, that failed to even get the liberal-conservative Student Council to side with the Daily students, eventually escalated to a non-obstructive sit-in in the foyer of the administration building on Tuesday November 7.  The sit-in turned into a sleep-in on Tuesday night.  The SDU leadership won a vote of the protesters to end the action the next day but a minority of students, most of whom had not been noticeably politically active at McGill before this, continued the civil disobedience action.   Robertson eventually called the police to clear the building on Thursday night when some students moved to occupy the president’s office, an act that could readily be viewed as obstructive. 

The police proceeded to break up a late night vigil on the front steps of the administration building aimed at “protecting” the two sets of occupiers, one in the office and the other in the foyer.  Those in the office had already received summonses to appear before the SDC on charges of obstruction.  About thirty had opted to not be summonsed by moving from the office to the ‘non-obstructive’ foyer sit-in.  After several hours of waiting outside (some police had silently entered the building to wait for future orders), presumably to intimidate the sitiners inside the building to leave of their own accord, the police initiated rough treatment of students, some of whom were sitting in on the grass or in front of an incoming police paddy wagon.  That created a standoff of protest supporters facing a line of police.  A police snatch group moved three rows back and assaulted SDU leader Stan Gray, knocking him unconscious.

((FOOTNOTE 1:

Gray was exonerated of police assault charges by photographic evidence and flagrant contradictions between the stories told by the police and by Principal Robertson and Council president Smith.  Third year BA student Paul Joseph was convicted and fined.  English lecturer Steve Faigelman reviewed the night’s events by listing the pattern of lies told by the administration both to protesters and to the public during and after the events, including multiple “evident untruths” in the Smith-Robertson statement (671204p1; 671204p4; 671207p1; 671208 Reviewp7). ))

Then police peacefully removed the students from both the office and foyer sit-ins without arresting anyone (671110p1; 671208Reviewp7; 671215p12).  As had been the case throughout, the protesters had to deal with the vocal opposition of small groups of student counter demonstrators supporting the administration.

((FOOTNOTE 2:

An impromptu rally held the day after the police ending of the sit-in heard views from all sides.  Many expressed concerns about the prospect of non-violent actions by protesters stimulating clashes with counter-demonstrators.    A letter to the Daily stated that, during that Friday all-sides debriefing rally, counter-demonstrators “threw eggs at speakers, blocked the administration toilets and yelled ‘Soap’ and ‘Faggot’” at the participants, apparently perceiving them to be long-haired ‘dirty hippies’ (671113p5).))

The day after the police were called to end the sit-in, Council president Smith and Principal Robertson issued a joint statement justifying the administration’s decision to call the police (671113p1).

((FOOTNOTE 3:

The Smith executive and Student Council purported to be ‘neutral’ in relation to the prosecutions of the Daily staffers and of the protesters who took civil disobedience actions to build pressure for dropping the charges.  Their actions were very clearly non-neutral – the Smith executive met with Robertson throughout and did not inform Council or the student body of what was discussed or decided, including the Board’s plan to refuse to continue collecting student fees until and unless they could make payments conditional on a ‘responsible’student government and student media (671206p5p4); Council refused to defend freedom of the press to print satire or even student autonomy to decide on their own punishments well before there was any polarization due to liberal left protest; in the first hours conservative students allied with conservatives on Council tried and failed to get an Open student meeting to condemn the Daily and support the administration;  in the first day, External affairs vice-president Burkhardt’s nominees to the UGEQ central council openly defended the McGill administration’s proposed repression of the Daily; Council failed to even call for dropping the charges against the Daily staffers until far too late to have any effect when the SDC had already started its proceedings;  Smith issued a joint press release with Principal Robertson supporting the calling of police to end the sit-in; Smith made a joint statement  with Robertson to the court claiming to have witnessed SDU leader Stan Gray assault a police officer;  Council adopted a motion to condemn the office occupiers which gave the SDC political cover to impose a harsh penalty which was explicitly justified by SDC spokespersons as necessary to indicate that there would be no tolerance of any future non-violent civil disobedience at McGill – Law dean Maxwell Cohen explained that the SDC conduct probation penalty was intended to send the message that, unlike in the U.S. South, non-violent civil disobedience in Canada was almost never justified because liberal democracy allowed for all rights to be defended by the mainstream institutions of parties and media [Quote Cohen et al here]. ))

The SDC trials lasted from mid fall 1967 through to near the end of the Winter 1968 semester and effectively imposed a chill on most liberal-left political activity that involved any challenge whatever to the university authorities in 1967-68 (with the exception of protests against recruiters for Dow Chemical and other Canadian companies producing war materials for the US side in the Vietnam war, although those protesters went out of their way to avoid any obstruction).   Not content to intimidate the Daily and the SDU and even previously inactive moderately liberal students who dared engage in non-violent disobedience on an issue of student society autonomy and censorship of student speech, the McGill Board and president Robertson threatened to stop collecting the student fees that funded the Council and Student Society. 

The Board action was a bonehead move that others in the faculty and administration soon maneuvered to sideline – it would have punished the liberal-conservative block that controlled Student Council, the very group that had just provided cover for their repression of the Daily and the sit-iners.  In the longer term, it would have discredited and undermined a structure that conservative students had always greatly profited from as a stepping stone to a career in politics, business or the professions (especially law).  The threatened move was a last straw that almost certainly provided the thin margin of victory for the Hajaly-Hyman-Foster slate over their conservative pro-administration opponents in the March 1968 Student Council executive election.

Now some significant details about the political ideas advanced by Wilson and Fekete and the tactics deployed by the SDU.  On May 5 (?) 1967, Mark Wilson, John Fekete, David Ticoll and Aaron Rynd presented a brief to a Senate and Board committee that had been set up to propose changes in university governance in line with the country-wide AUCC-CAUT Duff-Berdahl Report.  The student brief called for a Board drawn from a more diverse set of social groups than the current nearly 100% big business Board, simultaneous translation to facilitate Board meetings in both French and English, open Senate and Board meetings, 14 (instead of the present 8) elected faculty and 8 (currently zero) elected students on a Senate of 22 ex officio members, 22 elected members and five Board members, and minority student representation on Senate committees -- with larger numbers of students on committees directly about student services.

The brief also argued that its governance proposals were meant to help change a situation where the modern university was losing its way, because it had abandoned the effort to educate the whole [hu]man.  In both teaching and research, the need to consider the ethical implications and social consequences of the ideas being learned and produced was disappearing in the effort to train ever more narrow technical experts.  Furthermore, McGill in particular had to recognize the consequences of its activity for today’s Quebec.  “McGill is the chief educational organ of a minority group” and “the French majority see [it] as blocking the development of their insurgent nation” (670602Rp5).  The Senate-Board committee showed no interest in debating, or responding practically, to either the specific student proposals or their social analysis (671017p5).

These proposals were reworked over summer 1967 and incorporated into the External Affairs Report, which Wilson and Fekete presented to the Student Council on September 27 1967.  One major change from the May proposals was a greater attention to developing procedures to ensure that student representatives actually advocated the policies of the Student Society, and were transparently accountable to the Student Council and ultimately the student body.  Among other things this meant that all Senate, Board and committee meetings had to be open and all student reps had to be formally approved by Student Council and be held accountable by Council for representing Student Society policy.  As external vice-president, Wilson could and did exercize his authority to name students to the few Senate committees that had student reps, by saying that he would withhold any nominations until the relevant committee opened its meetings (670925p1p6). 

A second part of the External Affairs Report called for Council to implement Wilson’s main campaign promise to make the Council’s top priority promoting educational activities, in and outside the classroom, consistent with the philosophy that students must actively educate themselves with expert (faculty) help.  Proposals included hiring an animateur to train students in group dynamics, distributing the Kingsbury Course Design Report as widely as possible, setting up a speakers program of “social and educational critics”, funding the routine printing up of handbills to inform students of Council policies and programs, and agreeing in principle to future funding of student created counter-courses (670926p10).  In the early hours of September 28 1967, Student Council voted 10 to 5 with 2 abstentions to table the entire External Affairs report in order to allow the administration to send a representative to say what it thought about the ideas and proposals in the report (670929p1).  This second set of proposals would fall by the wayside after Wilson and Fekete resigned from Council and the conservative Burkart took over control of the External Affairs department.

Council president Peter Smith then invited Arts and Science Dean Woods to speak to the October 2 Council meeting.  Woods declared that he and academic vice-president Michael Oliver agreed that students could be useful on academic policy committees, but not as voting members, only as persons to consult (671003p1).  He and Oliver had already told a September 30 meeting of student club chairs that they opposed open meetings for either the Senate or Board (671002p1).  Woods added that attacks on faculty and administration in the Daily put people on their guard. “We can’t be sure that students who come to sit on committees would be concerned with solving problems”.  Asked why he opposed student reps on the Board, Woods was blunt: “I’m afraid if you people [i.e. people like those asking him the question] get on it you’ll start governing in a way I don’t like” (671003p1). 

After six hours of debate, Council adopted a watered down version of the Wilson-Fekete proposals on democratization policy.  They retained the policy of open meetings and bilingual Board meetings but rejected the principle that McGill should serve the Quebec government’s educational goals and the idea that non-management employees should be included in the administration group having representation.  They then blatantly contradicted their earlier vote to insist on open meetings as a precondition to student participation in any committee by agreeing to name students to all the committees whose meetings were still closed (671003p1).  Wilson and Fekete resigned from Council the next day.  Noting that a Council based on rep by pop would have resulted in an 8,000 student to 3,000 student weighted vote in favour of the motions instead of the opposite, they declared that “meaningful work toward our objectives is impossible within this structure” (671004p1). 

Fekete joined the Daily to write a regular column.  Wilson would seek a mandate by running again in the external vice-president byelection.  This succeeded in producing a full airing of the different approaches of Wilson and conservative Richard Burkart in multiple venues, but Wilson lost by a 2 to 1 margin (671018p6; 671019p8; 671020p1; 671024p1).  The Wilson-Fekete proposals to amend the student constitution to create a rep by pop Council, vesting of Student Society governing authority in the Student Council (not executive) and the right of Open student body meetings to overrule Council were published in the October 13 Daily (671013p4).  This undoubtedly motivated large numbers of students in the professional faculties to come out to vote against Wilson.  The Smith executive went through the motions, but eventually allowed the constitutional proposals to die for lack of a quorum at an Open meeting (671027p4; 671030p1; 671101p2or4).

John Fekete reprinted “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book” from The Realist, an American satire magazine, in his November 3 column.  It purported to quote Jackie Kennedy to the effect that Jack Kennedy’s vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, who became president as a result of the assassination, was seen by her hovering over JFK’s casket that was being transported back to Washington in Air Force One.  Johnson was “fucking my husband in the throat.  In the bullet wound in the front of his throat”, by implication to enlarge the bullet entry wound so as to prevent investigators from figuring out who really killed Kennedy. This is shocking in its vulgar language and in its description of a vulgar act, but mostly it is shocking because it describes people at the top of the social order in a disrespectful way.  The satire was intended to have people be fooled by their preconceptions about the Kennedy assassination into believing the pretend news report, and then subsequently realize that their preconceptions had made them believe a wildly improbable story.  It was intended to shock people into realizing how easily they could be duped into believing things in the media that were not true. 

University president Robertson was shocked for very different reasons.  Immediately after reading the reprinted article, he called upon the Senate Disciplinary Committee to consider charges of obscene libel against Fekete, Review editor Fournier and general Daily editor Allnutt at a Tuesday  November 7 meeting in the student union building (671106p1?).  An attempt by the student right to get an Open meeting to condemn Fekete and the Daily for publishing The Realist satire failed, in a 112 to 59 vote in a non-quorate meeting (561106p1?).  Ironically, the McGill representatives to the UGEQ CCN council that had been newly named by the conservative new external vice-president Burkart were the only ones at a CCN meeting to argue that the article was obscene.  All but one of them insisted that the McGill administration had every right to impose discipline on Fekete and the two editors, because the article hurt “the good name of McGill”.  Their protestations on behalf of the McGill administration failed to stop UGEQ from condemning the administration for violating the autonomy of the student newspaper and the student society (671006p1).

The Students for a Democratic University (SDU), led by Stan Gray (who was at this point a junior faculty member in political science), used a wide array of tactics to mobilize to get the charges dropped.  It published a statement that framed the issue as one of student autonomy (not primarily freedom of speech):  “Students have the right to publish political satire, publish four letter words, define ‘good taste’ for themselves, publish a newspaper without Administration control, be confronted with precise charges, be tried by the Students’ Society [instead of the faculty and administration, and] be tried in public”.  They distributed a pamphlet that included a reprint of the Realist article and historical examples of repressions of satires now recognized to have been unjustified. They asked that they be equally charged with obscene libel and be called before the Senate Disciplinary Committee (SDC) alongside the “Daily 3”.  A petition was circulated with a focus on getting faculty signatures (671106p3).  A number of faculty, especially from English, eventually responded by submitting eloquent defences of political satire as briefs to the SDC (671208p2p3 Flux Review section).

As would become evident, the supporters of the legitimacy of publishing intentionally shocking political satire were starting from a position where the majority of faculty and students appeared to side with the administration.  Most people likely just wished it had not happened and were unwilling to take a public stand in support of the accused.  Conservatives in the off-campus media, especially hotline radio, had whipped up the appearance of off-campus public outrage.  They and the McGill administration had successfully framed the issue in a way that had always worked in the past, and would continue to work in the future, to elicit mass support (or at least passive compliance) from students and faculty – the Daily had hurt the reputation of McGill as an elite university. 

The challenge for Daily supporters was to change this framing to demonstrate that it was really about student autonomy.  Ideally they would also grab the flag of patriotism for their side.  They would demonstrate that it was McGill’s reputation for upholding liberal norms of free speech and student autonomy that was being damaged by the administration’s repressive acts.  To do this the SDU had to do more than just appeal to faculty allies with a petition and republish the satire.  They had to deploy tactics that would symbolically act out a political drama of students defending the autonomy of their press and organizations against a repressive administration that was threatening the freedoms of the large majority of students (and indeed the academic freedom of the faculty).  And they had to find a way to elicit plausible indications of mass student support for doing so. 

In practice, the SDU had two tactical options.  They could either induce the Student Council, the legitimated representatives of the majority of students, to lead a campaign which would mobilize large numbers of students in public support.  Or they could take a chapter from the Martin Luther King civil rights activists playbook, and engage in non-violent disobedience as a minority willing to take a stand and shame others into eventually coming out in support.  The Peter Smith led Council executive refused to allow the Council to be used to mobilize any sort of collective action in support.  SDU ended up doing civil disobedience, but tried unsuccessfully to make it very brief and non-obstructive, in order to somehow change the politics within Council and get Council to lead some kind of syndicalist action.  It all made tactical sense on paper: to build pressure within faculty for faculty groups to detach from the administration on academic freedom grounds; to rally a majority on Council to override Smith and the Council executive; to engage in a brief civil disobedience action to shame more students into defending the autonomy that they very much wanted for themselves, but did not yet recognize was under threat.  Unfortunately, none of this would be achieved.

University president Robertson convened a public meeting on Monday November 6 where he denounced the Daily and justified the SDC disciplinary hearings to a large student audience.  The SDU announced that they would hold an indoor rally on the first day of closed SDC hearings the following day where sympathetic faculty and a representative of UGEQ would speak.  Then there would be an outdoor rally where the SDU’s Stan Gray would “challenge the validity of the charges and the procedure”.  Then they would present five demands to both the administration and to the SDC.  The five demands were for the charges to be dropped, for a student-faculty committee to draft a new disciplinary code, for discipline against students or faculty to only be considered if the offence was academic (no double jeopardy), complete freedom of the Daily from administration control and a tripartite administration-student-faculty commission on university government decision-making structures and procedures (671107p1).

((FOOTNOTE 4:

Principal Robertson initially rejected all five SDU demands, but soon agreed to the fifth one.  He set up a Tripartite Commission (TC) composed of equal numbers of students, faculty and administration to study university governance (671116p1; 671127p1; 671130p5; 671207p1).  One of the TC’s first decisions was to refuse to open its meetings (a session to hear briefs was open).  None of the student reps resigned or suspended participation.  The Student Council did not recall its reps or initiate a campaign to get the TC to open its meetings (671220p1).  Indeed, they rejected a motion by engineering rep Bob Hajaly to tell the administration they would withdraw students from existing Senate committees, all of which were closed, unless they were open by year’s end (671123p1).  By late 1967, it was the official policy of both CUS and UGEQ to demand open meetings so that student reps could keep their electors informed and be accountable to them.  In late 1968, the administration unilaterally decided to allow the election of a significant (but still token) number of students to Senate.  The main effect of setting up the TC was that it enabled the administration to drag out the closed Commission meetings for almost two years [?], and use the fact that TC proposals were forthcoming as justification for doing nothing further.  Meanwhile the Smith-Burkhardt Council refused to call meetings to ratify and implement any of the constitutional changes which would have moved towards rep by pop in the Student Council (                 ).  )) 

In the event, what actually happened was rallies drawing an estimated 750 students, that ended up with hundreds milling around at the doors of the SDC hearing, which was to be held in the ballroom inside the student union building.  Twenty student protesters sat in, blocking the doorway.  Some of them burned their student ID cards, likely an emulation of the public burning of draft cards that was happening frequently across the United States at this time.  About 100 counter-demonstrators chanted support for the administration and burned copies of the McGill Daily.  The SDC decided to cancel the hearing and to reschedule it for the next Monday November 13 (671108p1).   While the SDU was conducting a subsequent rally on the steps of the administration building, about 30 students broke into the building.  Later a professor opened the locked doors from inside and another 300 demonstrators entered, together with 50 counter-demonstrators. 

The protesters asked to speak with university president Robertson.  He came, and was initially well received when he declared that the original libel charge would be reduced to a vaguer charge of publishing an article that contravened “standards acceptable by and in this university”.  The reception changed quickly to heckling when he made clear that this could still lead to suspension or expulsion, a position made even more explicit by Robertson in a press conference immediately afterwards.  The protesters voted to continue the sit-in as a sleep-in over Tuesday night and 200 did so.  The sleep-in tactic at Sir George Williams two weeks earlier had appeared to help Sir George students win one-third membership on the university bookstore committee (671026p1).  A steering committee of John Smith, David Ticoll, Barry Krego, Martine Eloy (the only female) and junior faculty Stan Gray and Stephen Feigelman was “appointed” by the SDU (??671108p1). 

On the following day, Wednesday November 8, the SDU lost control of the sit-in to a small group of students led by MA student John Smith.  The SDU leadership had appeared unsure about the tactic from the beginning, stressing that the sit-in was non-obstructive and that all university activities could continue unimpeded.  The SDU voted to end the sit-in and 200 students left, but more than 30 decided to stay; by the next day, they had been joined by a few others.  The Daily claimed that the protester minority had been swayed in part by a “fiery appeal” by Evan Stark, a visiting student who had recently led demonstrations against Dow Chemical recruiters at the University of Wisconsin (671109p1). 

SDU leaders met “several times” with the administration and senior faculty in the first two days of the sit-in (671109p8).  An SDU statement on the second day (Wednesday) tried to claim that concessions they had won were enough to declare victory and end the sit-in.  In fact the only concessions were that the hearings would be open and that one or two students might be invited to sit on the disciplinary committee (which would in fact have simply legitimated the entire process that the protests were directed at de-legitimating).  They also argued that a shift in tactics from civil disobedience protest by a minority to a Student Council led student strike was now feasible (671109p4). 

This seems to have been wishful thinking at best, given the open and bitter political divide between Fekete-Wilson and the Smith led Council, and the Council’s continuing failure to do anything in support of the Daily staffers, not even to call for dropping the charges.

((FOOTNOTE 5:

Whether or not this was what the SDU leadership thought privately at that point, nine days later the Smith executive announced a student plebiscite, without getting Council approval, that was clearly designed to head off any possibility of a student strike.  This executive manoeuvre came two days after the Council finally voted to ask the administration to drop the charges against the Daily staffers.  At the same meeting, the Council voted 8 to 7 to throw the 33 student occupiers under the bus by retroactively condemning the occupation of the Principal’s office   (671116p1).  The Smith executive evidently expected students to vote to drop the charges but to oppose strike action, hence validating the Smith-led Council stance of doing nothing at all to apply pressure to have the charges dropped.  On November 22, students voted by a narrow 2,964 to 2,453 against asking for the charges to be dropped and by a massive 4,117 to 1,296 to reject a student strike to pressure for the charges to be dropped (671120p1; 671123p1). Following this embarrassing result, Smith himself barely survived a 9 to 8 to 1 vote of non-confidence for lack of leadership, supported by most of both the left and the right on Council (671207p1). ))

More likely, the SDUers were calculating that they could not prevent the SDC hearings from going ahead, but that they had done enough to enable the Student Council executive and the administration to quietly make a deal to let the Daily staffers off with something like a warning.  They might have placed hope in the decision of the Council on the Wednesday night, after the SDU tried to call off the sit-in, to refer the Daily article to the student-operated Judicial Council.  The JC was made up of law students, who were typically conservative, but it could be expected to, and eventually did, side mostly with the Daily – and this set a precedent for the later SDC decision (671109p1; 671116p1).

As already described above, the sit-in continued as a non-obstructive action through Thursday November 9 without SDU sanction or leadership, turned into what could be construed as an obstructive occupation of the university Principal’s office and was ended when the city police were called by the McGill administration.  The SDC hearings dragged on into early 1968 with John Fekete employing a high profile civil liberties lawyer to conduct his defence.  The three Daily staffers were eventually let off with reprimands.  Highly politically isolated, the building occupiers were placed on “conduct probation”, which meant they could be expelled without trial if they engaged in what the administration deemed to be unjustifiable civil disobedience in the next 12 months (680219p1).

((FOOTNOTE 6:

Liberal faculty on the Senate Discipline Committee went to great lengths to justify their heavy punishment of the 31 office occupiers.  The written text of the SDC decision stated that the basis of their decision was their belief that tactics of civil disobedience were never legitimate at McGill university for two reasons: first, civil disobedience was only legitimate “in circumstances where intolerable conditions prevail” but liberal change was possible in the existing structures at McGill and was indeed already happening in the Board-Senate committee on governance reform and in the Tripartite Commission; second, because civil disobedience at McGill was “a resort to force in a free community…  [that] denies the legitimate freedom of others of the community”, and that a clear example needed to be set to make clear that any students who protested in this way in future would face expulsion or conduct probation level penalties (680213p1; 680219p1 and p5).  Principal Robertson also made clear that the same standard would be applied to McGill employees like librarian Ian Weryho who was one of the 31 occupiers.  Arts and Science Dean Frost declared “You can’t be a loyal servant of the university only between 9 and 5… If someone does not do what the duly constituted authority tells him, is this not an act detrimental to the university?... If this action goes unchallenged, there is no janitor or secretary who couldn’t quote this case as a precedent. ” (680208p2or4; 680223p5). ))

CONTEXT:  The 1967 Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury San Francisco symbolized the emergence of a politicized youth counterculture in the USA that was geographically centered in areas adjacent to universities with militant student movements.  The driving force for this counterculture (which was divided into overlapping hippy ‘drop-out of straight society and oppose war and racism’ and long-haired political activist ‘resist the war and racism with direct action’ wings) was the Vietnam war, and more specifically rising resistance to the draft.   The numbers of young men issued with draft call-ups was escalating as the number of US troops sent to Vietnam increased.  Most male college students were privileged to get deferments as long as they remained students, but this posed a moral dilemma for those with a conscience, who saw others their age being sent to Vietnam to kill and die.  And graduating or dropping/flunking out made those young men immediately eligible to be drafted themselves.

Student protests and direct actions against the draft and the Vietnam war in the U.S. reached a peak in the 1967-68 academic year: in number of campuses involved in on-campus actions; frequency and size of off-campus actions organized by students together with non-students that were coordinated not just nationally but internationally; and level of tactical militancy in both on and off-campus actions.  These two trends – militant opposition to the Vietnam war and draft and emergence of both wings of a politicized youth counterculture -- were emulated by students around the world in the same period, including in Montreal.  However, both trends were somewhat muted in expression at McGill for various reasons, to a significant degree because of the strength of a ‘straight’, and pro-American government, counter counterculture of mainstream (i.e. ‘moderate’, conventional) liberal-conservative professional and business faculty students committed to maintaining McGill as an ‘elite university’. 

There were two main forms of opposition to the Vietnam war in Canada in 1967-68: participation in off-campus national and international days or weeks of protest; and organizing on-campus direct actions to dissuade mostly engineering students from attending on-campus recruitment sessions that would lead to getting a job with companies producing war materials for the U.S. side in the Vietnam war, notably Dow Chemical but also Canada’s Hawker-Siddley.  There was also much quieter work done off campus by church and lay progressives to aid American war draft resisters, many of whom were helped to get into and/or stay in Canada illegally (AMEX founded 671027p?;      ).

The largest local demonstration in Montreal was the 2,000 person march to the U.S. consulate on Friday night November 17 1967, sponsored by UGEQ and other popular organizations, that resulted in 48 arrests, eleven of whom were McGill students (671120p1). Newly elected external vice president Richard Burkart persuaded the Student Council to be neutral, to neither support or oppose the march (671116p4?).  After the march, the ‘neutral’ Council refused to do anything to get the arrested McGill students out of jail, and the University of Montreal Student Council (AGEUM) had to step in to help with bail and lawyers (671129p5). 

The first protests against Canadian and American companies providing napalm and other war materials to the U.S. war effort were organized by the off-campus ban the bomb Voice of Women and the Committee for Peace in Vietnam (led by university faculty from various institutions) against Dow Chemical (671014p3).  Later protests opposing on-campus recruitment were led by Bartolomew Crego and the joint student-faculty McGill Association to End the War in Vietnam, notably the non-obstructive “solemn procession” of 12 faculty and 150 students behind an effigy “representing the Board of Governors drenched in blood” to protest on-campus recruitment by Hawker-Siddley on Tuesday February 13 1968.  The procession was met by student counter-demonstrators throwing snowballs and forming a phalanx to ensure that the doors to the Placement Service building were kept open  (680121p3; 680214p1;680220p2or4).

The issue of whether the university had an obligation to allow private companies on campus to recruit students, even if they were engaged in supplying war materials to a war marked by massive slaughter of civilians, was debated from November 1967 through to the end of the Winter 1968 term.  On November 16 1967, Principal Robertson replied to a November 3 letter from the University Faculty Committee for Peace in Vietnam (co-signed by 60 McGill faculty members) that detailed how Dow and other companies that recruited at McGill contributed to the U.S. military in Vietnam.  He announced that he had persuaded those companies to do their recruiting off-campus in order to “avoid disturbances” (671121p1).  In December, the student-faculty-administration University Placement Committee (UPC) declared that war supplying companies would be allowed to recruit on campus in future, but this was not ratified by Senate until January 24 1968 (680129p1). 

In the meantime, Student Council voted 12 to 6 on January 17 to criticize Robertson for preventing “freedom of choice” by pressuring Dow and other war supplying companies to not recruit on campus (680118p1?).  A quorate Open student society meeting was held in response to a petition on February 20 1968, and voted by 334 to 208 to rescind the Student Council policy favouring on campus recruitment.  The meeting also adopted George Radwanski’s motion to put the issue to student referendum on March 8 (680221p1).  Student Council voted on February 26 to move the referendum date up to February 28 to coincide with the student executive election (680227p1).  This was undoubtedly a political move by Burkart to bring out more conservative students to support him in the election.  However its significance was far greater than that, because the Council justified overriding the Open meeting motion by saying that the Student Council, and not the student body voting in a membership meeting, was sovereign.  An appeal to the Judicial Committee led to a decision that upheld the Council’s authority to override (680227p1; 680228p1). Students subsequently voted overwhelmingly to support on campus recruiting by war-supplying companies.  Despite this, the openly left-leaning Robert Hajaly and his slate of Ian Hyman and Peter Foster were elected the new Student Council executive by the narrowest of margins (Hajaly over Burkart by 43 votes, 1884 to 1841) against their conservative opponents (680229p1; 680308p1).

Although left students in and around the SDU undoubtedly participated in the UGEQ led November 17 march and the February 13 Hawker-Siddley recruitment solemn procession, it is notable that they left it to others to be the organizers of what little collective action took place on the war issue.   There were no more civil disobedience actions after the November 1967 sit-ins, not even non-obstructive ones, for the rest of the 1967-68 year.  The Senate Discipline Committee was still actively considering punishments against some left students, and available to quickly add others to their Star Chamber trial roster. 

Liberal and left students did research and published factually-grounded articles in the McGill Daily linking the university to the war.  Mark Starowicz and Don MacPherson wrote stories that demonstrated that “Canada is by far the largest arms supplier to the U.S.”.  They listed many of the companies and specified what products they supplied which were then used in Vietnam, including Dow’s supplying of the polysterene used to make napalm bombs that attached to victims and could burn them alive (680206p? and p?).  Mark Wilson documented the almost total domination of the McGill Board by leaders from big business, almost all White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.  He also noted that “the real locus of power has been appropriated by Senate” and consequently increasingly by faculty in academic administrator positions (680208p2or4).  Philosophy professor Harry Bracken’s December 1967 brief to the University Placement Committee was excerpted in the Daily.  He made the case that the links of the university to the war were not just at the level of the Board, but even more dangerously so at the level of the faculty (680129Rp5).  Daily editor Peter Allnutt had already raised this issue in his Fall 1966 article revealing the secret war research by a McGill faculty member (this had led to the temporary firing of Daily editor Sandy Gage).   John Fekete and Aaron Rynd did a detailed expose of the links between Board members and war production: “Over two-thirds of McGill’s 33 Governors are involved – through corporate ties or professional association – with companies producing war materials” (680209Reviewp? and p?). On Wednesday February 7 1968 Radio McGill emulated the classic 1938 Orson Welles War of the Worlds hoax news broadcast.  They broke into regular programming (broadcast only to listeners in the student union building) to announce that the United States had just dropped a nuclear bomb on North Vietnam (680208p2orp4).

Both the student right on Council and the Board responded by seeking increased political control over both the Daily and Radio McGill.  Within a week of the Welles-style broadcast, Council voted 10 to 5 to change the selection procedure for Radio McGill station manager to “a committee of three council members, two Radio McGill representatives and two professional broadcast executives” subject to Council ratification.  They also voted to reaffirm that Radio McGill may not broadcast into the student union building “without the prior consent of the Internal Affairs Department” (680215p1). 

The Board proposal to set up a committee  “to review the present system of [automatic, unconditional] collection and distribution” of Student Society fees was likely a response to both the Fekete reprinting of the Realist article and the Daily exposes of the links of individually named Board members to war supplying industries.  Principal Robinson told Student executive members of the Board decision and committee at a secret meeting  ten days before Peter Smith informed Council on February 26 1968.  Internal vice-president Trevick quoted Principal Robertson as making very clear that the word ‘distribution’ in the motion meant direct interference in Student Council funding of particular programs: “Well, you know, some of your activities are valuable but we’ll have to look into the problem of differential distribution” (680227p1; 680228p1).

Student Council had already responded to the Daily’s reprinting of the Realist magazine satire on December 6 1967 by accepting a new procedure for selecting the Daily editor originally proposed by Richard Burkart.  The outgoing Daily staff would have only two representatives (the outgoing editor and one staffer named by him or her) out of seven.  The others would now include two members from local commercial newspapers plus two from Council and the Executive Applications director.  In addition, the new editor in chief’s choices for the editors and managers making up the managers board would have to be ratified by Council (671207p3).  The first time this new procedure was used it failed to work as Burkart had designed it to work.  Mark Starowicz (author of the article on Canadian companies producing war materials) was chosen over George Radwanski (supporter of on campus war company recruitment in the Open meeting) as the proposed editor in chief (680315p1).  No problem.  The outgoing Student Council voted 11 to 6 to 1 to reject the nominee generated by their new procedure.  They rejected Starowicz and chose Radwanski instead (680327p3).  This would eventually be reversed after a long fight in Fall 1968.

 A second major change in the social and political external environment impacting McGill student politics in 1967-68 was the mainstreaming of a debate within Quebec society: should (francophone) Quebecois seek political independence as a means to achieve linguistic, economic and political equality?  A visible separatist political movement, and a cultural renaissance centered on an emerging identity as members of a geographically defined Quebec nation whose relative disadvantages were largely due to being colonized by Britain/English Canada (as opposed to being a French Canadian linguistic and cultural minority across Canada), had been building since at least 1960.  The main political actors were the underground ‘terrorist’ FLQ and the above ground RIN.  In October 1967, Rene Levesque, the most popular cabinet minister in the ‘Quiet Revolution’ Liberal party (PLQ) governments of 1960-66, resigned from the PLQ and soon created the Mouvement Souverainete-Association (671014p1; 671017p6).  The MSA was a step in the establishment of the Parti Quebecois (PQ) a year later in October 1968, which would seek to become the Quebec government (it eventually did so for the first time in 1976).  The PQ’s main mission was to hold a referendum to separate (Souverainete) and then negotiate a common market (Association) with what remained of Canada (unsuccessful referenda were held in 1980 and 1995). 

The militant social movements for independence, mainly the FLQ and RIN, had been greeted negatively by many English Quebeckers as a threat to law and order and as an unwelcome and (in their minds) anti-English nationalism, but there was only modest fear that the RIN or FLQ would win mass support for separation any time soon.  Levesque’s defection and rallying of forces to create the PQ changed that calculation overnight.  Separation was all of a sudden a realistic possibility.  Hence the extra-parliamentary movements of the period, including the student movement at McGill, were much more likely to be seen as contributing to a realistic threat of the creation of a francophone-dominated separate state (see overviews of Quebec mainstream politics since 1960 by Philip Rosen 671013Reviewp3 and by Pierre Fournier 680223Reviewp3andp8). 

1967-68 also saw the rise of a federalist response to the sovereignist threat.  Prime Minister Pearson’s government had already set up a royal commission to come up with proposals for changes that could be made to achieve equality between the English and French languages across Canada and to ensure equal protection for the English and French cultures.  The first volumes of the Bilingualism and Biculturalism report, which had been significantly contributed to by a number of McGill faculty (including academic vice-president Michael Oliver), were published on December 5 1967 (671206p1).  By June 1968, Pierre-Elliot Trudeau had become the federal Liberal leader and prime minister on a platform of implementing this vision of a reformed federalism based on Bilingualism and Biculturalism that might avert Quebec separation.  The clash of visions between Trudeau and Levesque would dominate both mainstream Quebec and federal level politics for the next fifteen years.

The formation of the PQ was achieved by merging the leaderships and memberships of the MSA (many of them ex Quebec Liberals) and the small town populist conservative RN.  The RIN then dissolved itself and the right and center joined the PQ as individuals (Fall 1968 source??).  The PQ was explicitly not a social democratic or labour union based party, but a nationalist party (although Levesque maintained a progressive image and claimed that the PQ had a “prejuge favorable aux travailleurs”).  This fact helped ensure that neither of the two major labour federations subordinated their labour or political cause action to the interests of the PQ or any other Quebec political party.  The mostly industrial worker FTQ supported the social democratic and union affiliated NDP on the federal level and was non-aligned on the provincial level.  The mostly public sector formerly Catholic CSN, and to a lesser extent the public school teacher’s union (CEQ), became even more strongly syndicalist.  That meant that they did not support a political party or focus their energies on electing one, but instead stressed building up their capacity for collective action in the workplace and for promoting specific social and political causes as part of an expanding left-leaning extraparliamentary movement. 

The activists in the extraparliamentary movements who constituted the left of the RIN stayed out of the PQ.  They and other movement activists, including those connected to the Vallieres-Gagnon wave of the FLQ, called for a socialist independence achieved through popular mobilization ‘from below’ (See interviews with RIN leader Pierre Bourgault for his early argument against the RIN left and for joining the PQ: 671006p5; 671012Reviewp2).  One group, the Front de liberation du Quebec (FLP), which spawned student groups related to it on many CEGEP campuses, was formed directly out of the left of the RIN.  The FLP was one of several groups with similar politics who argued that the way to socialism and/or social justice changes was through a Quebec (not pan-Canadian) extraparliamentary movement for ‘independence and socialism’.  These groups and that approach would have a significant influence on individual members of the McGill student left, especially in the latter part of 1968 and beyond.

The first CEGEPs opened in the Fall of 1967.  They provided courses for the first [two] year[s] of a [four year] Bachelor’s degree.  However, the universities did not readily accept the transfer credits when a student was admitted to university and, for francophones, there were nowhere near enough university spaces in francophone universities.  These two concerns became the basis of agitation in all of the CEGEPs and in the Universite de Montreal, the sole francophone university in Montreal, in early 1968 and would be grounds for the massive occupation-strikes in most CEGEPs in the Fall of 1968.

((FOOTNOTE 7:

These issues did not become prominent at McGill until 1968-69.  The only responses in 1967-68 were negative ones.  Richard Burkart got Council to vote 12 to 2 to demand that UGEQ become officially bilingual.  This was a conscious provocation since, as Hajaly and Wilson and Daily editor Allnutt pointed out, its practical effect would be to ensure that anglophones did not need to learn French and that francophones would have to speak English if they wanted delegates like Burkart to understand them.  As conservative Dentistry rep Blau put it: “We’re English… Goddam it…  Let’s antagonize those bastards or get out” (671207p1; 671207p4).  Not to be outdone, academic vice-president Michael Oliver, a prominent member of the federal NDP and a member of the B and B Commission, told the closing banquet of the McGill Seminar on Quebec Affairs that McGill becoming bilingual was neither probable nor desirable.   A bilingual McGill would be “sacrificing for some special linguistic goal her possibilities for excellence” although it would be okay if McGill became “a university made up of a large proportion of bilingual students”, i.e. francophone students who could learn in English but perhaps be allowed to write some papers and exams in some courses in French (680122p3). ))

On Wednesday February 14 1968, 6000 pre-university students across Quebec boycotted classes.  Supported by many of their professors and UGEQ, the public two-year CEGEPs, semi-private (historically Catholic church run) colleges classiques and art schools  organized themselves into regional delegations and conducted study sessions, conferences and panel discussions.  Their major complaint was that the Universite de Montreal refused to grant transfer credit for many of their courses and that there were not enough spaces.  They demanded that a second French language Montreal university be opened by Fall 1968.  In parallel, students from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Universite de Montreal organized a week of meetings to promote a manifesto containing the same core demands (plus others related to changing course content and teaching methods and democratizing the university at all levels).  This culminated in a sit-in by 300 mostly Social Sciences students in the U de M administration on Saturday February 17.  On Monday February 19, some 1800 Social Sciences students participated in the first day of what would turn out to be a week-long rotating class boycott strike that resulted in meetings with Rector Gaudry followed by a debate of the issues in the university Senate.  Although the university failed to concede to their demands, the U de M strike, alongside the newly formed structures of coordination between pre-university colleges achieved from their one-day strike, was deemed a success.  Both mobilizations had raised consciousness of the issues among students across Quebec.  This positive assessment was confirmed in Fall 1968 when mobilization around exactly these issues aroused thousands of students into sustained militant collective action across the province (680215p1; 680215p1; 680219p1; 680220p1?; 680226p1). 

The third UGEQ Congress of February 21 to 25 1968 declared that the reform of education “at the level of content as much as at the level of teaching methods” was a top priority.  Another motion set a guideline for college governance demands of  “direct and equal participation at all levels…  [by] students, professors, administrators and employees”.  A third demanded a Universite de Quebec (on the University of California model, with campuses across the province) plus standardized criteria for entry into all universities in Quebec. The immediate need for a fully-funded second French language university in Montreal was highlighted.   A motion to hold a plebiscite on “the national question” was passed without debate but this did not mean that independence was, or soon would be, central to UGEQ’s activism.  Many of the individuals on the slate acclaimed to executive positions would later be prominent advocates of sovereignty-association (e.g. Gilles Duceppe, Louise Harel, Claude Charron); but UGEQ never carried out a plebiscite, most likely because it knew that nowhere near majority support for independence existed yet among francophone Quebec students 9680222p1; 680226p1; 680226p2or4).

Other minor events at McGill: 

Both right and left students on Council (and eventually the McGill administration) supported the establishment of a student-led campus birth control clinic and the publication of what would become a widely disseminated McGill Birth Control Handbook (671123p1; 680119p3; 680122p12; 680227p1).

((FOOTNOTE 8:

Support for dissemination of birth control information and contraception was not universal.  A fourth year science student wondered where this would lead.  “One envisages a section of the future Student Union [building]… provided with partitions and cots.  Students ‘pop in’ now and then between classes… with some bright, blue-eyed co-ed, quarter in hand, about to make her first selection: ‘I’ll take the clean one’… Across the street, a newly organized group demonstrates against discrimination from heteroes… Next stop – Bread and Circuses” (680202p4). ))

Student organizing around Kingsbury-style reform in course design (excepting a counter-course organized by 60 students within the 900 student Sociology 210 671124p?) was in a general lull in 1967-68 after the rejection of the Wilson-Fekete proposals and the election of Burkart to replace Wilson.  In Fall 1967, Robert Hajaly and others took initiatives to get more engineering students involved in the Engineering Student-Faculty Discussion Group that had been meeting for eighteen months and had considered reforms to course content and teaching process (671107p3).  McGill engineers may have been influential in the Congress of Science and Engineering Students of Quebec who “passed radical motions condemning the intellectual stagnation caused by the lecture and exam system” (680202p8).  But by early 1968, Hajaly was writing about the failure of a long list of student attempts to win support of engineering faculty over the previous two years.  He concluded that change could still happen but only if there were university-level changes to reverse the trend to a multiversity in which professors were becoming a publish-or-perish professional caste that rejected any role for students in deciding course design or the relative importance of teaching and research (680213p?).  This thinking was front and center in the Hajaly-Hyman-Foster slate’s successful campaign to be elected the 1968-69 Student Council executive. [[Engineering dean Mordell was openly hostile, declaring that students had no right to a say in what was taught or how: “[T]hose who want a first-rate education” should “accept the university as it is run now” and should not listen to the “professional agitators” who tried to persuade them otherwise (680202p1).]]