SIXTIES STUDENTS McGill (4B): The Realist and the SDU Sit-In, part two
PART TWO of PERIOD FOUR: Summer-Fall 1967 to April 1968
CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND ACTION
What the radicalizing students saw as the ISSUES AND INTERESTS AT STAKE in the major conflict:
The Realist Satire major conflict had two main components: first, the McGill Administration, acting through the Senate Discipline Committee (SDC), threatened to expel or suspend three Daily staffers for reprinting what they deemed to be an obscene (vulgar images and language) and libellous (slander of the sitting U.S. President) political satire; second, the Administration, with the active collaboration of both liberals and conservatives in the Student Council executive and Council, criminalized the civil disobedience actions of students in support of the Daily staffers by calling in the police, and the SDC imposed a penalty designed to send the message that civil disobedience actions at McGill were always illegitimate and grounds for expulsion (or firing for employees).
The two repressions raised different issues and involved slightly different alignments of interest on both sides. The Daily Three repression was about in loco parentis, more specifically about whether students should have complete control of their own organized extra-curricular activities and organizations -- and be the ones to evaluate any possible violations and dole out any necessary punishments (although it was inevitably also about the ‘freedom of the press’ issue of whether the Realist article was a legitimate satire, in which case the charges against the Daily should simply be dropped, because there was no crime to punish by anyone). The sit-iners repression was about the right of students to engage in civil disobedience. Both Administration and the student left agreed these were the immediate issues at stake.
For liberal and left students, freedom for students to operate their own extra-curricular activities and the right to civil disobedience were both important in themselves. They were also necessary preconditions to reorganizing student societies to become syndicalist unions, that would be capable of mobilizing large numbers of students to seek changes in the basic structures and policies of the university. The administration shared the same perception, and made it clear that it was exactly why they were pre-emptively imposing harsh punishments, to nip such a movement in the bud. The disease of student syndicalism in the francophone colleges, and the wider youth and student revolt around the world, would not be allowed to infect McGill. Law dean Maxwell Cohen summarized their reasoning: Civil disobedience is only allowable in extreme conditions when the avenues for policy change of any given system or subsystem are entirely blocked; at McGill the existing mechanisms of Board and Senate and faculties and departments (that excluded students from any voice or vote in decision-making bodies) were entirely sufficient to achieve any necessary reforms; liberal and left students who protested these decision-making structures were by definition against liberal democratic society and institutions, nihilistic, seeking only to destroy, and their disruptions could not be tolerated ( W68p12,p36,p42; p67;F67p20p24and reply by Stan Gray listing efforts to reform within channels p ).
Initially, the issues at stake were freedom of the press, the legitimacy of the Realist article as political satire, and the autonomy of student society organizations (including the right to impose their own standards and to impose their own discipline). It might have stopped there if the Student Council, and especially the Student executive, had defended the Daily and opposed the right of the administration to impose punishments through the SDC. Instead, the elected student leaders denounced the Daily article as obscene and accepted the SDC’s trial as legitimate. This forced the student left to use minority tactics, civil disobedience tactics. That had become the only way for the student side of the argument to gain visibility and to build popular pressure on the SDC to at least be lenient. This in turn led the Student executive to double down, to collaborate even more closely with the Administration by supporting the calling of police and the laying of criminal charges against SDU chair Stan Gray.
The charging of the 31 for employing civil disobedience peeled the layers of the onion down still further to what had been the core issue all along. The administration, supported in practice by the elected student leaders, said the issue was the need to preemptively repress a small group of nihilistic left-wing extremists, who were a threat to McGill’s reputation and hence to its status as an elite university, but also a threat to the existing liberal structures of hierarchical authority at McGill. The student left did its best to reframe the issue as a case of extremism by an administration that violated a long list of liberal and democratic principles -- from freedom of the press, through the autonomy of student extracurricular organizations, to the following of basic principles of law in conducting trials. Really this was the same issue seen from opposite sides: Did the student left have the right to an independent press and student organizations, or, did the threat of a student movement need to be prevented by imposing harsh penalties, even if it had to be done somewhat illiberally?
The perception of the issues and interests at stake in the repressions of the Daily staffers and the 31 occupiers was seriously muddied by two factors: first, the Realist satire was about the Kennedy assassination four years earlier, and about the gullibility of people who believed in conspiracy theories about who really killed Kennedy. This was hardly an issue that either left or right students at McGill in 1967 were likely to have viewed as serious or relevant; many undoubtedly saw it as needlessly offensive, as a flimsy excuse for vulgarity;
((FOOTNOTE 9:
Debate on Fekete and Wilson’s proposals for reform was the culmination of two years of work by a large number of students operating quietly within regular channels. The entire report had been summarily dismissed by a Student Council that would have adopted it if the votes of Council members had been weighted by the number of students they represented. After the vote, Fekete declared that, without a rep by pop council and other changes to democratize the Student Society itself, all avenues for reform within the existing structures were blocked. How could liberal or left students get the pressing issues of the day to be seriously debated to develop a shared agenda for change, if the unrepresentative elites controlling the Student Society would immediately back down – and prevent even extended debate -- on any change that might offend the Administration? Fekete appears to have thought that, with the Council blocked, provocative articles in the Daily might be an alternative avenue. The problem was that his serious political purpose got lost; people reacted to the Realist satire itself instead of being led to confront the issue of the need to have free-ranging debate on important issues. Having said that, reprinting the satire certainly worked to generate a very public scandal and a sustained student protest representing the large minority (but still a minority) who “got it”. ))
second, the specific act of civil disobedience by the 31 was most likely not widely supported by very many liberal or left students, let alone apolitical or conservative ones, because the office occupation was a breakaway action done in defiance of a large majority vote by the SDU-led protesters to end the sit-in 24 hours earlier.
((FOOTNOTE 10:
Civil disobedience is a shaming tactic, a willingness to suffer some kind of personal punishment in order to awake the consciences of a majority who are not yet ready to act to oppose some kind of injustice. It generally requires the ability to claim some kind of moral high ground, the ability to show that the protesters are performing a moral witness for the important values that the majority (even many in the ruling elite) actually share but are not able or willing yet to apply in practice. The continuation of the sit-in by an outvoted minority only made sense as an attempt to shame the majority of those already protesting for not being willing to sacrifice enough. Instead of arousing more awareness of the values the majority actually shared that were at stake, it distracted attention onto the side issue of whether the student left was militant enough. This split the student left. The 31 were isolated. The lack of mobilization to support them during their trial allowed the SDC to impose a harsh punishment that served as a warning that civil disobedience would never be tolerated at McGill. ))
What the STRATEGIES and TACTICS of the radical(izing) students were and why:
As of September 1967, Mark Wilson and John Fekete were leading members of a large group of students who sought to work within the existing structures of the student society to achieve what they saw as ambitious but achievable reforms in the university. They were influenced by the example of the “student syndicalism” approach to changing the university and the wider Quebec society set by the francophone student association UGEQ, which aimed to change student societies into student unions. Many of the students had been active in the various reform-seeking committees in and around the Student Council since the election of the Scholzberg Council in spring 1965, or even before that. Quite a few had gone through Kingsbury’s Programme in Course Design in summer 1966. The strategic goal of these reform efforts was to democratize the university at every level from the classroom up to the Board, not all at once but incrementally as committees of students, faculty and administration in various areas experimented with and implemented specific reforms. Insofar as the approach emulated student syndicalism, the strategy was to act like a bottom-up democratic and socially conscious union that could raise claims for change and seek to negotiate them piecemeal and to use various agitation, propaganda and sometimes pressure tactics to achieve specific gains.
The approach was nevertheless not reducible to student syndicalism. A second element was the commitment to doing and publishing serious research (like the EA Report) and engaging in open debate in as many meeting contexts as possible (central to Wilson’s election platform), in both separate student structures and in joint university structures, aimed at the classic idealistic notion of the university as a “community of scholars” seeking to achieve truth(s) progressively (as scientists were thought to do), outside as well as inside the classroom and research facilities. The strategic goal here was the uncovering of new truths that would be widely recognized as such, but also achieving the Enlightenment philosophy liberal education goal of stimulation of critical thinking.
A third element was the (countercultural and/or entrepreneurial) idea of students directly experimenting with new practices that were self-changing as well as being generators of new ideas for reform -- such as the Kingsbury program influenced counter-courses and the beginnings of setting up mixed sex cooperative living off campus (both referenced in the EA Report). The strategic goal here was to get students to “do it themselves” without waiting for agreement with faculty or administration, and to develop tested ideas and new skills and knowledge in the process.
A fourth element, also central to the theory and practice of UGEQ and important in the pre-1967 practice of both SNCC and SDS in the US, was the community organizing idea of “animation sociale” – the need to educate your mass membership to become informed and active citizens in their community, through workshops and activities that stressed participation and self-education and identification of what issues were important to them personally, that the people in the workshops might then volunteer to become active in doing something about. This fourth strategic goal was to engender participation among previously inactive students based on greater self-awareness of needs and wants.
All four of the strategic goals were stated or implied in the External Affairs Report. The tactics to implement those goals were proposals for what the Student Council should do to arouse the consciousness and participation of the mass of students. Fekete and Wilson’s only tactic was to get elected to Council and then take on the mandate of writing up the EA Report to present to Council for adoption. They did no mobilizing of others to build up support for the ideas in the report. They did not try to get others to run together with them on a slate, with the idea of getting more votes for their ideas on Council. They would write up the culmination of the last several years of researching, debating and experimenting by progressive students in and around Council into a report. They would get Council to vote to carry it out on two fronts: (1) funding and enacting a wide programme of consciousness-raising and participation-inducing activities among students; and (2) start negotiations about democratization with administration and faculty.
Peter Smith and other self-defined liberals on Council moved quickly and pre-emptively, together with conservative council members, to reject key provisions of the report. Why? Smith was explicit that he was guided by the fact that the response of the McGill administration to the ideas contained in the report (especially seeking a degree of student power in university decision-making and accountability of decision-makers through practices like opening all meetings) was dismissively and categorically negative and indeed hysterical. He wanted to avoid conflict with the administration [cite his quote on this]. Perhaps he harboured illusions of achieving similar goals more diplomatically but he and his allies never did a single thing subsequently to advance similar goals so that is very unlikely – liberals like him joined conservative students in opposing the goals. Apparently change had to come from the existing decision-making structures and power holders, without unruly social conflict, or it must not come at all.
A majority in Council voted to overturn Wilson’s negotiation tactic of withholding the nominations of students to any university committees that refused to open their meetings to observers. If Council were unwilling to even employ that level of pressure tactic – which did not interfere with the running of those committees while student members boycotted the closed meetings – then they would not have any taste for stronger tactics any time soon. Wilson and Fekete had no backup tactic available to them other than to do what Mark Wilson did, when he resigned to run again for external vice-president on a platform of implementing the External Affairs report. When he lost it ended any possibility of working through the Student Council to push for step by step democratization of the university in 1967-68.
John Fekete decided that he would try to stimulate student consciousness and participation by writing an intentionally controversial regular column in the McGill Daily [insert quote from first column about atheist and leftist slant]. His reprinting of the Realist satire gave rise to a whole new series of events which raised new issues. The main actors were also different: Fekete and the two Daily editors who faced suspension or expulsion for reprinting the satire and those who engaged in protests in support of them (some of whom subsequently faced even more serious charges of their own) on one side; and administration, senior faculty, counter-demonstrators and a majority of students who voted in the plebiscite to reject calling upon the administration to drop the charges on the other side. The Student Council executive at times pretended to be neutral but they mostly worked with the administration against Fekete and the Daily editors and those who protested in their support.
The strategic goals and tactics for the Realist satire affair phase were correspondingly different. The main actors were neither Wilson nor Fekete nor any other students who were acting through Council or any of its committees. The refusal of the Council, and especially the Council executive, to do anything to oppose the SDC trials, and their more or less open collaboration with the administration to repress any civil disobedience protests, precluded that. The new main actors were those who were willing to mobilize a campaign to protest the charges. Mostly this was the Stan Gray led SDU which was open to anyone who wanted to engage in a campaign through SDU meetings. It appears that there were also quite a few individuals who spontaneously engaged in protest actions of their own from the beginning, even prior to the open split after the majority voted to end the sit-in. There were certainly semi-organized and intentionally intimidating actions by groups of counter demonstrators, which led on multiple occasions to tensions where there was fear of fighting between students [Quote the two Daily editos on this by Alboim and Raboy and see below in changed ideas].
The EA Report was an attempt to build a student movement for democratization and related teaching and research reforms from within the regular structures of the student society. The two strategic goals were: (1) to raise consciousness and build bottom up student support for ‘democratization’ at all levels from classroom to Board, with Council leading the way in seeking negotiations with faculty and administration in multiple areas to start achieving those kinds of reforms incrementally, beginning with all committees and decision-making bodies being open; and (2) to reform the student society itself to make it a democratic membership-controlled student union. The assumption of Wilson and Fekete appears to have been that if they did (1) then (2) would follow as a matter of course as mass support for a progressive reform agenda was built up through the activities they proposed for Council to sponsor. In the event, the absence of a rep by pop Council and other undemocratic aspects of the existing student society allowed a minority of students centered in the professional faculties to block both (1) and (2).
After the repression of the Daily, and refusal of Council to support the Daily, the immediate goal became to get the charges dropped. Failing that, the goal was to minimize the penalties and to avoid precedents sanctioning future in loco parentis repression. However, the SDU tried from the beginning, with the raising of its five demands, to turn that defensive mobilization into a simultaneous counter-offensive. The SDU-led protesters raised demands for the creation of committees that would lead to a major restructuring of the university, justified in part by the need to ensure that such repression of the Daily and other student society bodies would not happen again. The breakaway group of occupiers raised demands that were similar in spirit, although different in subtle but significant ways (see below).
The dilemma faced by the SDU and other pro-Daily protesters at the beginning was that the rapid response of Principal Robertson to the article, immediately announcing his intent to pursue libel charges against Fekete and the Daily editors through the Senate Disciplinary Committee, stimulated a campaign of hysteria in the Montreal media, especially on talk radio. This made the administration’s key argument for the libel charges, that McGill’s reputation was damaged (and hence the value of student degrees and faculty prestige was too), immediately credible. The SDC agreed to proceed right away, the Student Council executive publicly agreed that the article was libellous and individual faculty and students piled on to agree with the libel charge and need for punishment.
In short, at the beginning any voices in support of the Daily and student autonomy were drowned out by multiple people in authority framing it as an issue of libel hurting McGill’s reputation. Partly for that reason, but likely also because the Realist satire offended many students, the pro-Daily protesters started off with the majority of students siding at least passively with the administration and their own student council leaders. Hence, it was heavy lifting for the SDU to turn a defence campaign into a movement to get structural changes in the university. Even waging a campaign to defend Fekete and the Daily editors would require changing a lot of minds first. Consequently, the goal was to change the balance of opinion among both students and faculty, and to establish a counter narrative that would lead at the very least to minimal punishment by the SDC (which is what ultimately happened for the Daily students but not the 31 occupiers).
The SDU’s five demands were the basis for the counter-narrative. The issue was that the administration must respect the autonomy of student extra-curricular organizations. If there was libel it was up to the student society to deal with it. But to ensure this, there needed to be changes in Senate by-laws and in the de facto old in loco parentis norms they legitimated, and there needed to be democratization. The SDU used many tactics simultaneously, from a petition to drop the charges aimed especially at faculty, to various public meetings with known figures from outside and inside McGill making the case for the Daily and supporting the counter-narrative. They held rallies on the day of the first SDC meeting. In the event, the door to the meeting was blocked by protesters sitting in (it is not clear if SDU intended this). Then the SDU initiated the sit-in in the administration building while negotiating with the administration about dropping or modifying the charges etc (the sit-in gave them the leverage to be granted status by the administration to do this negotiating, since the Council executive was not willing to make the pro-Daily case). On the second day of the sit-in, a large majority of the sit-iners voted to end the sit-in, but a minority continued. The SDU felt they had won whatever they could win. Stan Gray wrote in the Daily that the campaign needed to move back within the Student Council and other student society structures. Only a student society acting like a union with majority support could increase pressure on the administration. Arrests for civil disobedience risked being a distraction, and might not earn majority student support for the arrested protesters either – it might not work as a shaming tactic. The minority disagreed.
(3) What changes in social understandings and political goals were expressed by the radical(izing) students:The Wilson-Fekete-Ticoll External Affairs Report -- and Mark Wilson’s platform and speeches in his victorious spring 1967 campaign for external affairs vice-president, and in his unsuccessful Fall 1967 campaign to win a mandate for that report by resigning and running for re-election – were highly sophisticated, detailed and well-articulated expressions of a set of ideas and reform proposals that had been developed by liberalizing students in and around Student Council, the Kingsbury course design movement, UGEQ, and to a lesser extent CUS, since 1963-64. [Add specifics from Wilson in spring 67 and fall 67 here or below. Burkart made UGEQ bilingualism and keeping McGill as a private university not subject to external control by a majority francophone general public central to his Fall 1967 campaign. That issues was also prominent in spring 1967 but Wilson managed to make the positive theme of the need to promote a self-education approach to the classroom and to extra-curricular student society sponsored activities and animation social decentralization to engender informed participation equally central.]
The student right had repeatedly mobilized to block and reverse all these changes, especially those connected to allowing left-wing content in the Daily and to any Council sanctioning off-campus protests on societal issues like the Vietnam war. The student right mostly succeeded in preventing the Council itself from taking political stands and sanctioning political actions. They mostly failed to censor or purge the Daily. This resulted in repeated use of the Council to change the procedures to select the new editor, and to then try to purge the new editor. The trigger for attempted purges was always when the new editor allowed content into the paper that offended the administration or senior faculty or the Anglo-Saxon big business establishment that was so well represented on the McGill Board. The student right, and the self-defined centrist liberals like Peter Smith, relied on two factors that gave them a power advantage: first, their alliance with a hawkish administration that was shameless in its willingness to intervene in student extracurricular affairs; and second, on their ability to have professional faculty reps on Council outvote those representing the majority of students. A third factor was the desire of most McGill students to hold onto the reputational myth and partial reality of McGill as Harvard North for elite students. That idea was always connected to the need to defend McGill as an institution of, by and for the English Quebec minority, in response to a rising modernizing francophone Quebec nationalist movement.
From 1963-64 through to 1968-69 the liberalizing students never gave up trying to work through the mainstream channels of the student council and its committees. They repeatedly sought to get elected and to submit their ideas to the vote of the student body in Open meetings, plebiscites and referenda (although the right used those structures more frequently to block and reverse left and liberal initiatives). The Wilson and Fekete External Affairs Report initiative was a continuation of that effort that came in the aftermath of the McCoubrey-Aberman 1966-67 Council that aggressively opposed taking political stands. Both Peter Smith and Mark Wilson said they supported a Council that took stands. Wilson was very explicit in his spring 1967 campaign. Every decision that Council took was political because it involved applying different political values to produce different desired outcomes. We students must be political. Above all, we must engage the issues of the day and choose what changes we wanted within the university and in the wider society. And in order to do that we must change ourselves. We must raise our own moral and social consciousness. We must train ourselves to articulate our needs and wants and to participate actively in struggles to win changes serving them ( cite spring 67 and fall 67 Wilson ). The External Affairs Report spelled out a programme of action for Council to adopt to enact this vision. The very long list of specific proposals were anchored around two main themes, self-education and democratization. Self-education involved Kingsbury style experiments in course design, Council funding of an extensive programme of outside speakers and debates on the issues of the day, a Council that sought to consult and mobilize the student body by holding open meetings and distributing leaflets explaining their proposed political stands and actions, and the hiring of a professional animateur to train McGill students to be animateurs operating training sessions for other students to enable those students to raise their own consciousness and participation level. Democratization was an idea whose meaning was only in the beginning stages of articulation. It was understood as the indispensable core principle, to be applied differently in different contexts, in order to bring about the many different social changes sought in and outside the university. The Report argued that “the entire question” of social change “must be viewed not in the context of student representation or student power but in the context of democratization of basic social structures of which the university is one” (670925p1p7).
The EA report approach to democratization was subtly different from that of the student power movement at Simon Fraser University that unfolded in early to mid 1968. The SFU approach, ultimately distilled in the PSA Statement of summer 1969, shared the same idea of there being three interconnected areas of social change -- critical self-education in the classroom, decision-making power for students as status equals in all university bodies and remaking the university to serve progressive ends in the wider society. But the SFU student movement stressed the goal of student power, or more precisely the idea of students and faculty having equal participatory democracy type power (with both autonomy in their own areas and mutual veto in shared areas) at all levels, from classroom to Board of Governors, in a community of scholars.
The McGill EA report was clearly influenced by the more corporatist-syndicalist approach to democratization formulated by UGEQ, and more specifically by the Universite de Montreal student society (AGEUM) in its spring 1967 university charter campaign (670925p7). The UGEQ approach called for a democracy that would represent all social groups (all stakeholders, in today’s corporate speak). The EA Report favoured a tripartite democracy in which administration (which was to be subdivided into managers and employees), students and faculty had equal power. At the level of the Board, and to a lesser degree Senate, other groups from outside the university would also have voting representation. Tripartism prevented any one group, including students, from having a veto. It favoured collaboration and the harmonization of interests between the different social groups, for the good of the corporate whole.
Transforming student societies into student unions, with a syndicalist conception of unionism that stressed the absolute autonomy and self-rule of student organizations formulating ideas of distinct student interests (and more complexly, being the necessary instrument for students to constitute themselves as “young intellectual workers” with the capacity to exercize equal rights in decision-making as adult citizens already contributing to society), was the necessary counter-weight to the corporatism-inducing tendencies of tripartite decision-making. This idea resonated particularly well with francophone Quebec students in UGEQ, who saw their primary mission to be the building of a new nation and the mobilization all sectors of society into active participation in the remaking of the institutions of Quebec society. The remaking of the universities was just part of that larger movement. The changes sought by the EA Report, like the changes sought by the AGEUM charter campaign and UGEQ, were not just about students or student power. They were about a movement to activate all sectors of the university and of the wider society to organize and articulate their interests, and to work with other groups to modernize and democratize the institutions of Quebec society. Having said this, the EA Report was not very specific about changes outside the university. The focus was on changes internal to McGill, albeit including quite centrally the idea that McGill must work to adapt to the new Quebec and to accept the minority status of English Quebecers in that new Quebec.
The first three motions presented by Wilson and Fekete to the student council give a clear indication of what they considered to be the most important elements of their programme of democratizing reforms. Motion one was that faculty, students and administration (including support staff employees not just management) must govern the university. Motion two was that McGill must integrate into the Quebec educational system by achieving a more socially representative Board. Meetings must generally be open and bilingual. Motion three was that students who are elected to bodies must represent student society policy to avoid co-option. “Meanwhile, pending Council action, Wilson has refused to name delegates to the Senate committees” until they open their meetings (670925p1p6p7).
The withholding of student reps from committees was a low level pressure tactic meant to lead to negotiations with administration and faculty about their very different conceptions of democratization. At McGill as elsewhere, the administration’s approach was to integrate an increasingly professionalized “publish or perish” faculty hierarchy into the existing corporate structure, and to expand the role of academic and bureaucratic managers in administration to run the university more like a business. For them, students were at most consumers who could be consulted, not members of a university community with the right to significant decision-making power. They also opposed anything close to empowering a cross-section of social groups to control university Boards, a change that might oblige universities to pay greater attention to the interests of a general public. At McGill, this would mean paying greater attention to the interests of the francophone Quebec majority. In the name of autonomy and academic freedom, they supported the de facto privatization of universities (while graciously accepting public funding), with Boards still controlled primarily by big business interests.
Faculty were focussed on getting control of decisions related to membership in their exclusive professional status group (especially credentials and performance criteria required for entry and promotion, but also protection against disciplining or dismissal by non-faculty) as well as control over their teaching and research. Some sought to form faculty unions and a few were open to allying with students. But the large majority of faculty at McGill were quite open to this taking the form of being integrated into a reformed corporate structure, where an increasingly hierarchical faculty structure was melded with an increasingly hierarchical administrative one.
Another key idea in the EA Report was the need for the educational process (teaching-learning and research) and university decision-making to be guided by ethical principles and progressive social goals, instead of promoting amoral technocratic training/research to fit into corporation defined-slots. This notion had already been presented in the Wilson-Fekete-Ticoll brief to the May 9 1967 joint Senate-Board Committee on reforming university governance. The joint committee had been set up about 18 months earlier to engage with the Canada-wide AUCC-CAUT Duff-Berdahl Commission, and had met in secret with zero student consultation or input. The preamble to the student brief argued that the contemporary university had “abandoned the quest for a philosophy of education” behind a screen of pursuing research and teaching that were increasingly specialized, expert and “value-free”. The result was that corporate and narrowly professional interests defined the values and interests served by both. “[I]t is the responsibility of the academic and the university to recognize the social consequences of its activities and, further, to explicitly consider the ethical implications of its activities taken both individually and as a whole… We propose as our philosophy of education the creation of an environment where value decisions are part of the educational process”. One implication of such an approach was made explicit. “McGill is the chief educational organ of a minority group. This minority group has a position in the power mosaic which opinion-moulders of the French majority see as blocking the development of their insurgent nation… McGill has become dependent on public support to maintain itself at the same time as the public is led to see less and less return” (670602Reviewp5).
Brief co-author David Ticoll was elected as a student rep to the Tripartite Commission (TC) on university governance in December 6 1967 (671207p1; 671220p1). In a public TC seminar, he challenged the view of Law dean Maxwell Cohen and other faculty that New Left students were nihilists, because they engaged in civil disobedience and other lesser actions to challenge the moral and social goals served by the university -- rather than confining themselves to intellectual discussion as Cohen and others did when they were students. Cohen said “Just because the university seems to accept the status quo – there is no need to ask whether the university is performing its proper function” (680124p1). Ticoll replied that today’s universities served the interests of corporations, and that both the university and corporations made daily decisions grounded in explicit or implicit social interests and ideological preferences. “ ’Ivory tower’ is no longer a serious argument as to the function of the university… We must try to discover the latent functions and attitudes of the university. The teaching process presses people into moulds of certain attitudes. The Commission must study why… and how [the inculcated attitudes] can be changed through educational restructuring” (680124p5).
Bob Hajaly, former Liberal party activist, and a leader with Mark Wilson and other engineering students in meeting with engineering faculty to consider Kingsbury type reforms to curriculum and teaching methods since early 1966, supported the EA Report. [1]
((FOOTNOTE 11:
See 680123p? for a detailed history of the efforts to achieve reform within engineering since early 1966. Hajaly presents his analysis of why faculty resisted even minor changes proposed by students. ))
He tried unsuccessfully to get the new EA vice-president and Council to set a deadline of December 31 1967 for committees to open their meetings, after which the student reps would be withdrawn. He argued that this was a way to seek democratization patiently and incrementally. Step one was opening meetings which made it possible for the student body to observe the decisions made by university bodies and to come to understand the reasons for those decisions. Equally important, open deliberations were an indispensable condition to having student reps who were accountable to the Council and the student body for advocating student society policies.
The goal was a democratized university where all groups affected by decisions had an “equitable” role in “legislative decisions only. Administration should be by professional employees”. The “student right to such power in particular is not based on any claim that they are the equal in maturity to faculty but rather on the fact that students are different, have a different worldview, values and personal and educational goals, and that as a result conflicts with the administration will increase unless steps are taken to effectively conciliate the divergent views on the important issues facing the university”. Opening meetings of “the Senate and Board… [would] make available all pertinent information, briefs etc necessary for intelligent decision-making. This will permit all parties to learn the issues and techniques of university government” increasingly well over time (671123p2or4). Hajaly argued that the way forward to getting the university to “adopt an academic philosophy applicable to what is being taught and what is researched” grounded in “the conscious considerations of value” is for students “to take collective action through their student government” (680123p?). He subsequently practiced what he preached when he ran successfully for 1968-69 student council president on a left reform slate with Ian Hyman and Peter Foster, who took the other two Council inner executive positions (680308p1).
Daily editor Peter Allnutt wrote several editorials that connected demands for self-education and democratization within the university to the role that the university served in society. One editorial noted that a court that banned students from sitting in to block Dow Chemical recruiters said they were doing so because the protests were “obstructing the functions of the university”. This begged the question. “What exactly are the functions of the university?”. Banning sit-ins posed another question. “Who is to control them?... First our university must decide if it is going to aid corporations who supply the war in Vietnam. Then it must re-evaluate its whole relationship with the business community” (671121p4). Another editorial made the connections between inside and outside even more explicit. “The examination of basic university structures currently going on appears concentrated on one aspect – the role of the students… However a more basic problem must be tackled simultaneously if the results are to have any meaning, i.e. the role of the university itself… The university produces trained personnel to fulfill given functions outside… The intellectual community should be producing individuals who are aware enough to understand the role of power in our society, critical enough to seek improvements in that society and concerned enough to act upon its inadequacies. It should teach people that the same process which repressed the students of McGill University because they were powerless is that which keeps Negroes in ghettoes, Indians on reservations and napalm in Vietnam. When we challenge the system at McGill we are challenging the same system which works throughout North America keeping power in the hands of a few behind the veil of ‘competence’. Student participation is the first step. Creating new goals for the university in society is the next” (671122p2or4). The words of that editorial come as close to any published anywhere to distilling the essence of what motivated students in Canada and around the world in the mid to late 1960s to build a New Left out of the campus-based student movements.
The fall 1966 CUS Congress declared that “academocracy”, starting with open decision-making, was the top priority for its member student societies across (mostly English) Canada (670925p7). The 1966-67 CUS president Doug Ward argued in Fall 1967 that the modern university had betrayed the ideal of its medieval origins of being a community of scholars whose purpose was “the pursuit of some medieval truth”. The modern university “has gone wrong… because its model… [is] the business corporation” serving amoral and technocratic ends, instead of critical thinking and the pursuit of scientific and humanistic truth. Faculty had “retreated into publishing or perishing”, surrendered their control of the university and accepted a reduced status of employees of an “academic corporation”. A year earlier, Ward had said: “We are presently developing ‘student’ identity and ‘student power’” demands, but “neither… should be preponderant elements” in a reconstituted community of scholars that included students as well as faculty. “We must think in terms of a community in which students are involved with older scholars in deciding the ‘whats’ and the ‘whys’ and the ‘hows’ of their studies. And we must ensure at the same time the academic freedom of the faculty” (670602Reviewp5;670918p6?).
The July 1967 coalition of trade unions and francophone student organizations seeking to change the contents of the provincial government bill amending the Universite de Montreal charter sought a tripartite democratization, but stressed three principles. The university must be separate from any church, must include all members of the university community in governance and must serve the interests of the general public. According to the EA report, the “truly significant” idea that came out of the U de M charter campaign was the “demonstration, once and for all, that education [was] a process of fundamental concern to all groups in society and not only to students or professors or their immediate administrative bosses” (670925p7). There is a subtle but real difference in emphasis between the CUS approach enunciated by Ward and the UGEQ approach restated in the EA Report. The francophone Quebec students highlighted the need for the university to serve the general public, to serve the building of a Quebec nation that would foster upward mobility and equal status for francophone Quebecers. The demands raised in the February 1968 rallies and one-day strikes of the francophone CEGEPs and the sustained rotating strike of Social Sciences students at the U de M made this goal specific and concrete. The universities must accept full transfer credit for courses taken in the CEGEPs and there must be thousands of new places opened up for francophone students from the CEGEPs by September 1968 (680219p1; 680220p1?; 680226p1). There would be a major uprising involving occupation strikes by CEGEPs across Quebec on precisely these issues in Fall 1968 that would also go further in demanding a more particpatory and more radical democratization.
When the Student Council refused to defend the Daily, and Peter Smith and the Council executive collaborated both secretly and openly with the administration to use the police and criminal charges to break up the sit-in, and then did nothing to object to the punishment of the 31 occupiers for civil disobedience, it changed the leadership of the progressive student forces to those outside Council and its committees and even, for a while, outside the Daily. Some of the individuals were the same, but the visible leadership came from two main sources, students who appear to have been previously not active in student politics or protests who were the core of the 31 occupiers, and students who opted to work with and through the Stan Gray led Students for a Democratic University (SDU).
The SDU printed leaflets, circulated a petition, published statements and articles in the Daily and made speeches at rallies and during protest actions. They also formulated two major sets of demands. The first set were in the leaflet that reprinted the Realist satire. “[S]tudents 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 Student Society (and) be tried in public” (671106p3). The second set were the five demands that accompanied the first anti-SDC protests. They were both the basis of their negotiations with the administration and the justification for the overall campaign tactics ranging from petitions, rallies and debates to civil disobedience. The demands were “that the charges against the three students appearing at the discipline committee today be dropped; for a new discipline code prepared by a commission of students and faculty [but not administration]; university disciplinary action only for scholastic improprieties; complete freedom for the McGill Daily from control by the Administration; and revision of the structure of university government by a [tripartite] commission of students, faculty and administration” (671107p1?).
There are three main things to be said about the SDU’s demands and the many statements made in all the venues. First, while the SDU raised the level of non-violent disruption (what I will call physical or action confrontation) with some of its actions, it was obliged to dial down the level of ideological or idea confrontation compared to the challenge to the status quo of power relations implicit in the EA Report. It had to shift the focus, from substantive arguments about how the university needed to change in future that the EA report had begun to advance, to mostly procedural arguments about how the administration’s actions were in violation of the principles and procedures of justice that the university and the existing legal system had supposedly supported in the past. It chose to do so because the first goal was to protect the Daily students and later the 31 occupiers from serious punishments, and to avoid precedents that would intimidate students from future speech and action that the administration or faculty or indeed the majority of students and the general public might not like. It also chose to do so because it needed to persuade the majority of students to understand why the administration’s actions were unjustified and a serious threat to basic freedoms and the autonomy of student organizations. It was starting out in the minority of public opinion on and off campus and in a strategic position of having to build a coalition to defend against attack.
Hence both set of demands were expressly designed to stress ‘defensive’ demands to protect the students from unjust repression, and then to link them to ‘offensive’ demands to reformulate key features of the EA Report, that sought a democratization of the university and an end to in loco parentis intervention in extra-curricular student organizations and activities. Yet even the demands calling for pathways to reform were collaborationist and non-confrontational, the setting up of committees that would take the issues behind closed doors (which is exactly what happened with the Tripartite Commission cite decision to close meetings where students do not withdraw and cite later decision to extend the time frame to the indefinite future to at least Fall 1968 XXX). The selling point for administration and senior faculty and conservative students was that issues of discipline and democratization might thereby be removed as a basis of open conflict until the committees researching and debating the issues reported back in as far away a distant future as possible. The selling point for liberal and left students and others was that the committees might change the debate on reforms from a blanket rejection on the most general level to consideration of a list of specific reforms that could be debated and decided separately on their respective merits. And it might get some administration and some senior faculty on the student side, so that the debate did not align so closely with the social status cleavage of students versus the rest. Incremental reform might be less threatening. And, even if one did not believe in all that, setting up committees to consider issues like the use by administration of its in loco parentis powers might lead the more strategic power holders to urge backing off on disciplining the journalists and protesters pending a revised system (which is what happened when the Tripartite Commission stepped in to save face for the McGill Board by getting them to postpone its plans to make collecting and release of student fees to the Student Council conditional in order to let the TC include the issue in its report – cite source March 1968XXX). Most of the SDU’s statements -- and especially the several extensively argued Daily articles by Stan Gray published after the sit-in protests had been crushed and the 31 occupiers who had continued and escalated the sit-in in defiance of the majority of protesters accepting the SDU’s leadership were extremely politically isolated and vulnerable -- amounted to a detailed presentation of the case that a defense lawyer would make in defending people facing charges for their political beliefs and actions, albeit a defence that restated the defendants’ views that the trial was politically motivated and was in service of a reactionary power structure (671107p1?; 671108p4;. 671109p4; 671122p2or4; 680212p5; 680213p1 and p3; 680315p5).
[[ See Canadian Dimension Vol 38 No 6 November/December 2004 “The Greatest Canadian Shit-Disturber” by Stan Gray which overviews his health and safety and rank and file shop steward activism post McGill up to that point. He puts forward a variant of Wobbly style worker syndicalism that has to fight top down vanguardist Communist Party of Canada speechifiers like in his UEW union and other labour leaders in Ontario who collaborate with the bosses and government to put down independent bottom up worker activism.]]
Second, SDU agreed with the EA Report and with virtually all of the reform proposals and points of social analysis advanced by Wilson, Fekete, Ticoll, Hajaly, Allnutt and many others. This included the general strategy of changing the Student Society into a real student union guided by student syndicalism that sought to build up a student majority for the self-education, democratization and ‘make McGill serve the progressive interests of a francophone majority new Quebec’ reforms put forward or hinted at in the EA Report. Stan Gray described both the SDU’s minoritarian strategy and tactics during the Realist satire crisis, and the majoritarian “student syndicalism” approach of acting like a real student union that bargained and led collective actions including strikes to progressively win changes that it sought to get the student society to adopt, as “confrontation politics” (671109p4; 671122p2or4). Nevertheless the SDU was not trying to copy the shift in tactics of SDS in the US since Fall 1967 towards overt resistance and disruption of the draft and the Vietnam war, let alone the shift to Black Power militancy in the civil rights movement, or even the more pacifistic late 1950s and early 1960s SCLC and SNCC non-violent civil disobedience protests. The most visible conflicts, and the social and political movement organizational forms that were emerging off-campus in Quebec and Canada at the time, were different enough to warrant a different approach. This would change somewhat in 1968-69 with the upsurge of militancy in the francophone student movement, and in both the Quebec independence and labour movements, but not fundamentally. The McGill left, including the SDU, was united in feeling that it still could mostly work within majoritarian structures to get the student union to lead campaigns, including ones which supported its student members using protest tactics, and only deploy minoritarian civil disobedience tactics when working through majoritarian structures was blocked by student ‘leadership’ at the top.
Third, at this point in time Stan Gray and the SDU differed from Wilson, Fekete and others in their emphasis on the need for collective action to create the conditions for winning radical reforms, on the need for “confrontation politics”, a difference of degree only, but still a difference (Ticoll and Hajaly and others appear to have still believed that change could be advanced by winning arguments within structures like the Tripartite Commission and engineering student-faculty committees despite their awareness of the strong resistance to change of faculty as well as administration, while supporting and even personally engaging in protest tactics). Action confrontation and idea confrontation were viewed as complementary aspects of “confrontation politics” – the strategy of exposing the true nature of the power structure with critical analysis and debate, and of challenging it to respond positively to radical reform proposals with non-violent but disruptive actions that drew public attention to the critiques and change proposals. Waiting for top-down change or change as a result of working quietly within the existing undemocratic corporate and professional structures would never in itself produce any change, except for cosmetic token changes aimed at co-opting a student elite to help legitimate the corporate-professional power structure. Confrontation by a self-educated student rank and file, mobilized into a participatory democracy movement, would reveal that the emperor had no clothes. Then, and only then, would the doors open for real debate and real bargaining to win reforms (671109p4; 680315p5p6).
Gray also stressed that conflictual tactics were inevitably a permanent feature of university-student union relations because the interests represented by the Board and administration were in fundamental contradiction with the reforms sought by progressive students. Future 1968-69 Daily editor and subsequently producer of the CBC national news Mark Starowicz and future Canadian Press, Montreal Star, CBC and Montreal Gazette journalist Don MacPherson would provide factual grounding for this in their expose articles on the direct links of Dow Chemical, Hawker-Siddeley and other companies producing napalm and other products in Canada that were being used by the US military in Vietnam (Starowicz 680206p?; MacPherson 680206p?). Those articles were followed in short order by articles by Mark Wilson and then John Fekete and Aaron Rynd that documented extensive direct links between members of the McGill Board and administration and war-related companies (Wilson 680208p2or4; Fekete and Rynd 680209pR?andpR?). Allnutt had already presented some analysis of the professional caste interests which would lead many faculty to engage in research and teaching that served corporate interests and even the US war in Vietnam in the article that had led to the firing of Daily editor Sandy Gage in Fall 1966 ( ). That analysis would be further developed in 1968-69, as faculty increasingly overtly aligned with the administration against the student left to advance its professional interests and the interests of English Quebec. The rejection of the EA report by a Student Council – a Council that would have adopted the report by a large majority if Council reps had had their votes weighted by the number of student they represented -- brought to the fore again the need for rep by pop. That vote also supported the view of many on the student left that there were differences in anticipated and intuited class and status interests between most undergraduates and graduates on one side and most students in professional and business faculties on the other (Wilson and Fekete resignation statement 671004p2or4).
Stan Gray summed up the 1967-68 conflicts at McGill as “a year of confrontations – debates and direct actions [the two aspects of confrontation politics] around serious and important questions”. On November 3 1967, John Fekete reprinted “a satirical article implicitly critical of the American Establishment. Dr Robertson reads it and thinks its indecent… what does he do? Write an article or give a speech outlining his disagreements? No – for that would be… a creative response, inaugurating perhaps a dialogue”. Instead he “inaugurates disciplinary action” and when the trial takes place “he explicitly refuses to discuss the university’s standards of decency” which justify the punishments, and is not even called to testify or produce expert witnesses in support. The SDC repression is used to suppress any dialogue about “political and moral issues”.
Gray pointed out that Law dean Maxwell Cohen, Engineering dean Mordell and Registrar McDougall and other senior faculty and administrators were no different from the Principal. They wrote articles in the off-campus press and made public statements that foregrounded ad hominem attacks on students. “Rather than discussing the questions of censorship, students’ society autonomy or university democratization… these spokesmen chose to speak about ‘destructive minorities’, ‘power-hungry activists’ or ‘professional agitators’”. At times they mouthed rhetoric about “academic freedom and rights”, but were only able to demonstrate that “one person’s freedom was thus violated – the Principal’s”. The SDC trials were transparently motivated by factors that had nothing whatever to do with academic freedom, except to suppress that of students. Robertson and his apologists claimed to be upholding the moral standards of the university, and asserted that only they could decide what those standards were. But they refused to specify the standards, while exercizing crass hypocrisy in refusing to ban Dow Chemical and other war industry recruiters on the grounds that the university must remain morally neutral.
Gray went on to document in detail facts that contradicted the administration and senior faculty slanders that progressive students and faculty were “a tiny minority” and that they were “purely destructive”. It was the “status and interests” of the power holders that “have caused them to misperceive the reality of the situation. As men whose power and authority is being challenged they assuage their insecurities by reading outside manipulation, destructive intent and minoritarian status into the facts of widespread opposition… If we had an Administration that preferred to engage in creative dialogue… then McGill wouldn’t be the scene of disruptive confrontations. Perhaps if we were able to democratically choose our Administration, we might get some responsible, constructive and creative people in there” (680315p5p6). Before the Realist satire conflict, Aaron Rynd expressed the view of many left-leaning liberal students who had experienced the frustration of serving on Senate committees with token student representation and closed meetings. They were powerless, were unable to present the issues to the student body and have status as their accountable representatives, and served only to “sanction current policy and practice”. To make any progress there had to be a radical change, in the sense that students had to have real status and real power. “A radical is neither a fanatic nor a professional revolutionary”, but just someone who wanted some democracy, serious debate and “coherent action on social issues” (671017p5). In 1967-68, the SDU and the students working on committees whose ideas were expressed in the EA Report were on the same page.
Some liberal students appear to have preferred holding back from promoting democratization reforms if it risked producing administration repression and polarization among students. Daily editorial writers Elly Alboim and Marc Raboy argued that the goal ought to be to restore the informal community and communication between individuals in the academic community, regardless of status and power differences, that allegedly used to exist at McGill. Seeking student power would only formalize relations and block communication. Further, the ugly actions of the student counter demonstrators during the civil disobedience protests were frightening in raising the menace of violent confrontation within the student body. This was what happened when the Student Council failed to act to represent the views and interests of the majority of students because of a lack of rep by pop, and the vacuum is occupied by left and right crowds. If there was to be conflict, it needed to be contained within reformed representative democracy structures. “Before all this happened, this university functioned as all universities do. It… managed to maintain an even keel because of wholesale systems of informal communication and action. But then the crisis flared… Before anyone knew it the only way to communicate was through the formal channels … What we will get out of it is either a superpowerful administration or a student power group flushed with success… we have to make confrontation impossible”(671113p2or4). “[T]here has been a total lack of leadership from our elected student government… Consequently those who had strong feelings on the Administration’s action had to act by themselves and we almost witnessed two opposite student factions fighting it out in the front yard of the Administration Building. This type of quasi-action is to be expected when the Students’ Council is grossly unrepresentative” (671115p2or4).
The breakaway group of protesters led by John Smith, 31 of whom were punished by the SDC for occupying the Principal’s office, were more militant in their action than the majority of sit-iners and the SDU. However the views expressed in their personal testimonies in the SDC trials and in the collective statement by 28 of the 31 were very similar to those contained in the EA Report and SDU statements. The collective statement used strong language. The hasty decision of Principal Robertson to get the Senate Disciplinary Committee to punish the Daily journalists “stripped away the veneer of harmonious student-administration relations, exposing the basis of this relationship, a total monopoly of power on the part of the Administration… McGill is not a democracy… students do not participate in decisions concerning them”. Robertson’s assertion that civil disobedience was not necessary to get justice for the Daily journalists because there were “normal channels of communication [available] through which grievances could be expressed” was “fatuous”. Robertson’s actions “exhibited nothing short of contempt for the abilities of students to conduct their own affairs properly”. They made four recommendations. First, “[s]tudents must be regarded as full members of both society at large and of the university community”. Second, “the power of persons external to the university should be curtailed while the power of students and faculty [should] be greatly increased”. Third, “[a] new Disciplinary Code should be drawn up recognizing the complete autonomy of student activities”. Fourth, “[a] committee composed equally of students, faculty and administration should be established in order to maintain a continual dialogue among all groups on campus, to present the results of these discussions to the school at large and to make recommendations to appropriate groups within the university. The committee should have wide powers to put into effect declared changes” (680206p5). The statement is militant in criticizing Robertson and clearly sees student autonomy and student power in a democratized university as the solution. However, there are also hints of a desire to change the existing hypocritical informal McGill academic community into some kind of ‘beloved community’ that would minimize the internal conflict that alarmed Alboim and Raboy. The main agent of change proposed is a tripartite student-faculty-administration commission, rather than a student syndicalist student union closely aligned with the francophone Quebec student movement, but this may just be an artefact of the fact that these were recommendations to the administration for what it could do.
[[INSERT above in the description of the major and minor events. Take the current overly long footnote on the same point and add in the following into the main text. The student right took advantage of the new climate of repression and intimidation of the student left to push through a motion to change the method of selecting future Daily editors which greatly reduced the influence of the preferences of the outgoing Daily staff (671116p1; 671207p3). They also took a ‘neutral’ position of neither opposition or support for the UGEQ led march to protest the Vietnam war. When eleven McGill students were among the many students arrested in the demonstration, Council did not put up bail or otherwise support them (671116p1; 671120p1; 671129p4-5).
Also their actions on Dow chemical and the chilling result of the student plebiscite massively endorsing ‘freedom’ for war supplying corporations to have the rights of persons but none of the moral responsibilities required of individuals. And revocation of Fekete scholarship is not protested (671206p1). And SC votes to demand that Stan Gray be banned from being SDU chair because he is faculty (but the SDU constitution previously approved by Council allows faculty to be members) (671116p1). ]]
[1] See 680123p? for a detailed history of the efforts to achieve reform within engineering since early 1966. Hajaly presents his analysis of why faculty resisted even minor changes proposed by students.