SIXTIES STUDENTS McGill (5A): the Political Science Strike
PERIOD FIVE 1968-69: The Political Science departmental strike and the Hajaly Council championing of francophone CEGEP student striker demands result in a faculty-led counter-revolution to defend their professional control and McGill as an elite university serving English Quebec privileges. A mostly francophone off-campus coalition responds with a march demanding a McGill Francais.
Note: the date and page for the McGill Daily sources (in brackets) are replaced here by page numbers from the printed summary documents. Date and page will be inserted later. Note: All sources cited for up to Fall 1968 p13 or September 25 1968 are from the Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Society (henceforth ASUS) student newspaper, the McGill Free Press, edited by moderates Gordon Garmaise and Georgette Jason. The Starowicz edited McGill Daily starts with the Thursday September 26 1968 issue on Fall 1968 p14.
PIVOTAL CONFLICTS: (1) THE POLITICAL SCIENCE STRIKERS SEEKS ‘CRITICAL UNIVERSITY’ REFORMS AND EMULATE FRANCOPHONE CEGEP STUDENT STRIKERS; (2) BOTH THE HAJALY COUNCIL AND OTHER LEFT ACTIVISTS DO WALK-INS TO PRESSURE FOR OPEN MEETINGS AND TO CHAMPION CRITICAL UNIVERSITY AND CEGEP DEMANDS. (3) THE STAN GRAY FIRING STIMULATES AN OFF-CAMPUS COALITION TO MARCH FOR A MCGILL FRANCAIS.
The three major conflicts of 1968-69 were: (1) the late Fall 1968 (Monday November 25 to Ed/Thurs December 4/5) ten day Political Science Association (PSA) strike (as the most militant instance of organizing by departmental level student associations); and (2) several walk-ins (my terminology) to closed or restricted access university decision-making meetings that variously aimed to get the Board, Senate, a key Senate Committee (the Nominating Committee) or the Arts and Sciences Faculty Council to open their meetings and to put student concerns on their agenda for serious debate and sympathetic response. (3) the massive Friday March 21 1969 McGill Francais march, initiated by CEGEP student action committees and McGill student radicals, to demand that McGill change itself to help the realization of the CEGEP student demands, by a very wide coalition of off-campus groups that shifted the focus in a more francophone Quebec nationalist and pro-unilingualist direction.
The Political Science strike was deemed a success, but the gains would turn out to be short-lived, not the least because the faculty were playing a double game, meeting in closed sessions to plan a Senate set policy that would make student participation in hiring, promotion and firing illegal. Whatever significant power had been ceded to students on the departmental or faculty level would be taken back on the university-wide level (p and p38 Paul Wong warns. p146 MAUT Nov 26 1968 closed meeting seeks ban. p ). The walk-ins were all met immediately with administration and faculty moves to punish the protesters for unacceptable “disruption” justified by flat out lies about violence and intimidation supposedly deployed by those who walked in to the meetings, which ultimately led to the decision to single out junior Political Science professor Stan Gray and to fire him. While both the Political Science (PSA) strike and the walk-ins raised demands that were about changing McGill, and both grew out of the past struggles focused on changing McGill, they were also strongly influenced by multiple events off-campus, above all by the October 8 to October 18 1968 CEGEP occupation strikes. The McGill Francais march was initiated by an off-campus coalition after the McGill Senate rejected motions that would have led McGill to make changes to help realize the changes sought by the CEGEP student strikers. The trigger was the firing of Stan Gray as punishment for the walk-ins. Gray’s firing was portrayed in the mainstream francophone media, and within labour and nationalist groups, as based on his championing of the CEGEP student demands.
There were multiple centers of student left activism at McGill in 1968-69, mostly because there were now many departmental student groups, especially in Arts disciplines, seeking student power in decision-making (including, and indeed especially, in hiring faculty). They wanted that power not just for its own sake (to achieve ‘democracy’) but explicitly in order to transform the content and process of teaching and research. (Faculty-level associations tended to be avenues for conservatives reacting against left initiatives coming from elsewhere, with the more mixed partial exceptions of Arts and Science and Engineering, although this was largely because the professional degree students and Commerce students were organized into “faculties” not departments). Nevertheless there were still three main campus-wide locations of student left initiative – in and around the Bob Hajaly led Student Council executive, in the Stan Gray led Radical Socialist Alliance and associated activist groupings, and in the Mark Starowicz edited McGill Daily.
(In the Daily, the ‘initiative’ was simply providing a venue where left as well as right analyses could be published, and left as well as right political actions could be publicized, but the selection of things to cover and the editorial opinions benefitted the left more than the right. The 1968-69 Daily could also be said to more or less reflect the political mood of the campus given clear evidence of a shift left within the overall student body, at least up until a series of both relatively-removed-from-campus indirect and very salient and more direct backlash-inducing events provoked a successful countermovement. It is striking how relatively demobilized and quiet the student right was in Fall 1968 and how the counter-movement against the student left had to be led by those who purported to be left, even socialist, themselves from Julius Grey to Norman Spector to Gordon Garmaise and various ASUS leaders. See discussion below.).
Plenty of individuals operated at various points within some combination of these three campus-wide vehicles (Council and committees, radical activist group, student paper) plus their own departmental association and less often (usually as a minority) within a faculty-level association. The three campus-wide left groupings had developed and publicly articulated their plans for changing McGill student activism by spring-summer 1968. In all three cases, they ended up doing what they planned, but in ways significantly altered by both on and off campus events.
In March 1968, left-leaning Mark Starowicz was proposed to be McGill Daily editor (Winter 1968 p68) over George Radwanski by a search committee procedure that had been set up (671116p1; 671207p3) by the student council to produce a more ‘neutral’, less likely left or activist, choice for editor. Starowicz had stressed his intention (which he later implemented) of training his staff in the methods and skills of properly sourced professional news journalism, but again the ultimate Council decision was made on purely left-right political grounds. The outgoing Council rejected the selection committee’s nominee 11-6-1. A subsequent motion to install Radwanski instead failed when seven Council members broke the quorum by walking out (Winter 1968 p74 680327p3). This left the Daily without an editor or staff, until Starowicz narrowly won 1556 to 1517 over Radwanski in a student plebiscite vote on September 25 1968. The plebisicite was called at HFH’s initiative to prevent the student right from conducting an endless campaign asserting that a Council-selected Daily editor was illegitimate (Fall 1968 p1 p7 p14).
[[The plebiscite result suggests that support for the student left at McGill was still broadening in Fall 1968. Further, a liberal-left alliance where the new left or left of the left was leading the way was still operative. However it was also true that the left was differentiating. And the left of the left was moving to a self-defined revolutionary perspective. As I will argue below, these latter two trends are more or less inevitable for a left that now has to develop an analysis of what are the systematic factors that underlie the various specific injustices in the wider society and then take definite stands on a programme, strategy and tactics for changing the system of which the university is but a part. It is relatively easy to unite to oppose specific atrocities by a regime. It is much harder to agree on changing the regime and especially hard to agree on the underlying factors to be changed to actually achieve more than a cosmetic change. ]]
In March 1968, the Robert Hajaly, Peter Foster and Ian Hyman left-wing slate (henceforth HFH) narrowly won election as Student Council president, external vice-president and internal vice-president. [[Well known engineering student activist Robert Hajaly, a former Liberal, perhaps best known when elected in March 1968 for promoting Kingsbury style reforms in engineering, but also as someone who wrote Daily articles supporting the EA Report reforms more generally, defeated the conservative outgoing external vice-president Richard Burkart (who had defeated Mark Wilson on November X 1967 in Wilson’s bid for re-election on a very explicit anti External Affairs report, anti student syndicalist and anti unilingual UGEQ platform). Hajaly won the Council presidency by 43 votes, 1884 to 1841 W68 p43 pp58-60 p64]]. The HFH platform stressed their managerial competence to run an expanded and more activist student government (more so than a student union that applied syndicalist tactics of collective action, but also not against using a syndicalist approach if and when necessary). However, the written statements, interviews, debates and speeches of the candidates on both sides, perhaps especially on the student right presidential candidate Burkart’s side, clarified for voters that the “ballot question” was twofold: HFH intended to pursue the kinds of reforms outlined in the Fall 1967 Wilson-Fekete External Affairs Report that had been rejected by the previous Council (including the pro UGEQ and pro new francophone majority run Quebec positions); and they would defend the autonomy of the McGill Daily and Student Council and all other extra-curricular student organizations that the previous Council and HFH’s electoral opponents had refused to defend in the Realist satire affair (Fall 1967 earlier bios in p81 p82; Winter 1968 HFH slate bios and platforms p43-44 pp49-50 p57 p58-60 p64 and p66 HFH win).
The HFH Council executive made clear, through its many actions and statements before the Fall 1968 semester even started, what its plans were for reforming both the university and the student society itself. It would operate as a student government providing an expanded range of services that would try as much as possible to work within conventional channels (pp2-3 F68 and retrospective written by H and H W69 p101 and p104). Hajaly stated in early September what their most important strategic goal was, i.e. what goal most needed to be achieved in order to facilitate the attainment of all their other goals. His statement also made explicit what the ‘Critical University’ type goals were: “The most important thing is democratizing the university” in order to be able to progressively “change the type of education given and the relationship between the university and society, leading to the eventual use of the university as a model for the democratization of the society (p2)”.
On June 3 1968, the HFH Council adopted a brief that it presented to the June 17 1968 Senate meeting. The brief “asked for 8 student representatives on a Senate of 51; a radically recomposed Board of Governors representative of all major segments of the community as well as of students and faculty; open meetings of Senate, the Board and their committees; statutory student participation in the selection of Deans; and increased student participation at Faculty and departmental levels” (W69 p104). In September 1968, the Senate proposed to the Board that it grant 8 students on a Senate of 65 [check F68 p83 which says 62?] (where elected faculty would have a majority) and a highly restrictive formula for open meetings. Initially Senate also declared that Senate would set the manner of selection and restrictions on eligibility of student senators. It backed down on this under student pressure, reinstated it when Principal Robertson insisted and finally backed down again when the HFH Council made it clear that this was a deal breaker (F68 p1 p10 p12 p13 p21). Decisions on student representation at Faculty and department levels, including selection of deans, were put off, ostensibly for Senate to decide (although it did make the decision -- consequential for openness to student representation at the department level -- to include junior faculty, assistant professors, in Faculty decision-making bodies F68 p1). The composition of the Board was little changed, although Senate was given a significant role in a Board Membership committee empowered to select future Board member replacements (F68 p1).
HFH had initial success in getting Senate and Board to go along with two measures to guard against violations of student society autonomy. The Council proceeded with plans to incorporate the Student Society (F68 p13 ). On November 20 1968, Senate agreed to discuss creating a tripartite committee to draft “a code of discipline written by all sectors of the university – faculty, students and administration – and applicable to all sectors” (F68 p1 pp121-122, see also for history of prior discussion of student-only discipline codes since 1963). Although major issues, including agreement on genuine openness of meetings so student and other representatives could be held accountable by their constituencies, were not yet resolved, things were looking up for progress toward democratization by late Fall 1968. The Hajaly created slate had won six of the seven student seats that it was eligible to run for in the October 30 election (F68 p79 p83 Executive Applications director and ‘center-left’ NDPer Julius Grey won the other; the Macdonald College council president appears to have been the eighth representative ex officio). This was crucially important because it meant that HFH could implement their plan to raise radical reform demands as a student government representing the will of the student body entirely within the conventional channels of the Senate and its committees, or so they hoped. The other hoped for avenue of reform (backup if the first failed), a student syndicalist winning of a student body vote to back up reform demands with majority syndical action, may have seemed more possible (although HFH’s early use of the minority ‘vanguard’ walkin tactic does not exactly suggest a belief that this would be achievable, see below for discussion of strategy-tactics). The Political Science strike was deemed a success by strike leader Harry Cowen when it ended on December 4 (F68 p168). HFH and the student senators looked forward to the Winter 1969 semester with some optimism that they could advance the cause of real democratization within the Senate and its committees (This was a non-starter for many reasons but, as noted below, their principled stand in support of the demands of the CEGEP strikers, and refusal to act as a co-opted student elite on that issue alone, was sufficient to guarantee a united stand of most liberal and NDP socialist faculty alongside conservatives against ceding any leverage in policy-making bodies to students.)
On August 1 1968 Stan Gray made a long speech to the Couchiching conference that was reprinted in the McGill Free Press under the editor-chosen title “Student Radicalism: Made in the U.S.?” (W68 p75 F68 pp4-6). Gray’s speech included a detailed analysis that countered the hysterical mainstream media stories of spring-summer 1968, which declared that the increasingly radical new left student movement in Canada was a foreign import, and that violent riots were being secretly planned by outside agitators moving from campus to campus (see F68 p6 “Summer Madness”). The main thrust of the speech was a positive one that explained the increasingly radical understandings of new left activists in Canada and elsewhere about the nature of contemporary capitalist societies and of the capitalism-serving universities within them. Gray asserted that student radicalism in Canada had its roots in systematic injustices in Canadian universities and Canadian society. However, it was true that student movements around the world had many common features. That was for at least seven reasons (which he specified), the overriding one being that they were responding to common emergent features in what Gray called neo-capitalist society (see the seven points from the speech below).
Having said that, it was possible to lift phrases out of the speech and quote them out of context to suggest otherwise. For example, Gray concluded the speech with language that no doubt inflamed university administrators and mainstream media editors alike. He argued that “Marxism is coming more and more to be the common denominator of all student movements in North America and Western Europe” and that, towards the end of the 1967-68 academic year, “we saw the development, in the United States, of newer issues and strategies, i.e. students taking the offensive and picking the issues themselves, specifically attacking the university’s connections to the imperialist machine and its racist policies and forcibly seizing university buildings and making the university grind to a halt to make their demands effective”. The student movement in Canada would have its own issues and strategy-tactics but “this is a welcome development, i.e. students pursuing an aggressive strategy, choosing issues demonstrating the link between the university and ruling class interests, and using to maximum effect their collective power in disrupting and forcibly taking control of campus” (p6). On October 2 1978 Stan Gray, John Fekete and Steve Albert convened the first public meeting of the Socialist Action Committee (SAC), billed as a debate on how to begin planning a “Fall offensive” (p22). The Daily reported that SAC was being “formed to present, in theory and action, a Marxist-Socialist interpretation of student action and to orient the aims of various campus leftist groups along the same lines” (p23).
Hence, the three major campus-wide forces on the left at McGill in 1968-69 -- the Hajaly-Foster-Hyman (HFH) Council, the Mark Starowicz Daily and the Stan Gray led activist SAC -- all had well thought out goals in mind for 1968-69. In the event, each of their respective plans would have to be adjusted on the fly in response to events, especially events occurring off-campus, above all the Quebec-wide occupation-strikes by mostly francophone Quebec CEGEPS (pre-university colleges). The CEGEP student strikers demanded that sufficient spaces be created for francophone CEGEP graduates to enter university in Fall 1969 – mostly through the creation of a new multi-campus French-language University of Quebec with its largest campus in Montreal, but also by having McGill reorganize itself to admit a significant number of those students both immediately and in the long term.
1968-69 PIVOTAL EVENT #1: the Political Science (PSA) occupation-strike
THE CEGEP STRIKES PROVIDE BOTH CONTEXT AND INSPIRATION: The single most pivotal event in 1968-69 for all student lefts in Quebec, francophone and anglophone, college-CEGEP and university, was the October 8 to 18 1968 province-wide series of CEGEP occupation-strikes and the repression and resistance to repression that followed for months afterward. The two strike issues were both about opening access to higher education to francophones: government policy was reducing the money available for loans and bursaries; both universities and government appeared to be failing to create enough university spaces by September 1969 for the tens of thousands of francophones who would be graduating, coming from semi-private ‘colleges classiques’ and especially the public CEGEPs, in spring 1969 (F68 p32; see listing of reasons for the strikes p38 and the HFH Council brief to Senate explaining the CEGEP student demands F68 p48 and articles on both the background to the strikes and the history of separate Catholic and Protestant, in practice separate French and English, school systems in Quebec pp42-43). On Tuesday October 8 1968, students at Lionel-Groulx in the skilled blue collar General Motors plant town of St. Therese north of Montreal (p32).
The immediate response of McGill chancellor Howard Ross previewed what would be the response of administration and faculty. He told the Tripartite Commission that the rapidly increasing costs of funding higher education was leading to greater dependence of universities on government funding and, in a province where the francophone majority saw the government it controlled as an instrument of its economic liberation, there was an increasing threat to anglophone McGill’s “academic freedom” (p34). Ross clearly implied that McGill should not bend to pressure to change itself to serve the short-term needs of francophone college graduates, still less should it change itself more fundamentally to facilitate the ending of the separate English and French school systems in Quebec that had been a central prop of English economic dominance. The immediate response of the McGill student council was equally clearcut. They voted unanimously to support the CEGEP Lionel-Groulx strike and its demands. They declared that education was a right, that governments must guarantee universal accessibility to university education and that the government must ensure that a second French-language university in Montreal (which would be one campus among many in a new Universite du Quebec) would be ready by September 1969 (p35).
By Thursday October 10 1968 six more CEGEPs were occupied (p38) and by Monday October 15 11 of 23 colleges were on occupation-strike (p44 most of the rest were classical colleges, who did not face the same obstacles to having their credits accepted by universities, who mostly confined themselves with solidarity actions or weakly organized boycotts p44 and p38 ). On Thursday October 10, the central council (CCN) of UGEQ voted verbal support for the local actions but failed to provide any tactical leadership or resources or initiatives to win active support of potential allies. They merely called on member campuses to hold local general meetings in support by a week later, Thursday October 17, by which time the isolated strikes were predictably weakening in the face of the Education minister Guy Cardinal’s Tuesday October 15 threat to cancel the school semester (p44) and government-backed threats by local CEGEP administrations of “retaliation”, i.e. expulsions (p51).
Hajaly called an Emergency student body meeting for Tuesday October 15 but, as was also the case at Sir George Williams (p44), turnout was low. The meeting voted to restate support for CEGEP university accessibility demands, this time adding support for democratization of CEGEP governance structures and major changes to their curriculums that the strikers themselves had added once the strikes had begun. The meeting also voted to participate in a solidarity march in the downtown the next day (Wednesday October 16) but the march was only 1,000 strong, of which an estimated 300 were from McGill (p44 p46). On Wednesday October 16, the HFH Council called upon Senate to vote support for the CEGEP striker accessibility demands, to encourage CEGEP administrations to accept the goal of democratization, to “call for year-round utilization of all existing University facilities” including at McGill and “to use McGill’s influence to persuade other universities to adopt similar positions” (p46). Senate met on Friday October 18 and opened its meeting. The outcome was, in the words of Daily journalist Danny Roden, “what can best be described as a rejection of everything students had asked for” smothered in liberal rhetoric (p54 pp 88-89).
On Thursday October 17, the UGEQ central council voted to hold demonstrations in Montreal and the provincial capital Quebec City on Monday October 21 “in coordination with other groups in Quebec society”. They also called for the creation of Action Committees on all campuses that would continue to mobilize whether or not the strike continued, and proposed “that the formula of occupation be [henceforth] supported as a means of establishing the [unspecified] new social order to which we all aspire” (p49). All but one of the striking CEGEPs voted the next day (Friday October 18) to end their occupation-strikes. The downtown Montreal CEGEP Maisonneuve held out until Monday October 21, when it also voted to end the strike after an all-day eight-hour meeting of 1500 students (p58). An estimated 10,000 people marched through the streets of Montreal [alone?] the same day (pp57-58). The Ecole des Beaux Arts, a fine arts college which did not lead to university, had begun a much more radical occupation-strike of its own starting Friday October 11, in which it not only demanded “auto-gestion” whereby student artists in training would hire their own teachers, but then actually put this into practice. They continued their occupation for 39 days until government emissary (and future PQ minister) Bernard Landry came to the occupation to promise reforms (p45 p74 p81 p120).
The struggle was not over for CEGEP students as local CEGEP administrations, backed politically by the provincial government, banned on-campus meetings, required students to sign will-not-protest loyalty pledges in order to be readmitted to their courses, expelled individual student leaders and engaged in other like repressive acts for the remainder of 1968-69. Students fought back, even reoccupying in some cases, and mostly enabled all students who stayed in school to eventually get their course credits. Student Action Committees, that had to operate in a quasi-underground manner, took the place of the inoperative student associations in leading this resistance. (For stories on the repression and resistance in the CEGEPS, see:
F68 p44 p51 p58. p107 and p109 UGEQ pres resigns as others blame him for failure to lead.
p107 CEGEP Chicoutimi expulsions lead to re-occupations etc in solidarity elsewhere.
p111 Police invade four CEGEPs, loyalty pledges.
p111 List of restrictions on freedom of speech and association at CEGEP Maisonneuve.
p121 CEGEP Maisonneuve defies rules and holds off-campus meeting to demand reversal of measures.
pp130-134 Sandra Schecter and Martine Eloy history of UGEQ 1964-68.
p164 and p169 unrelated to CEGEPs organizationally but linked on an issue level, MIS occupation of McGill building, Admin calls police who are brutal.
p179 Review of student activism on campuses across Canada in 1968.
W69 p7 p8 march to protest continuing repression in CEGEPs, police called to remove students from campus rally.
p17 600 sit in at CEGEP Maisonneuve to protest ongoing repression.
p39 UGEQ votes to cancel on campus plebiscites on Quebec independence with educationals leading to a vote at the March UGEQ conference.
p55 pp91-92 The UGEQ central council votes support for independence prior to the conference.
p55 300 CEGEP Maisonneuve prevented from writing final exams.
p95 Hyman criticizes decentralized participation line of UGEQ central council.
p102 Hyman on how McGill reps got UGEQ to modify its proposed motion on independence.
p107 UdeM students vote to dissolve their student society AGEUM and to decentralize into separate faculty and departmental associations. p on the first days of the UGEQ conference. )
DEPARTMENTAL ORGANIZING AND THE POLITICAL SCIENCE STRIKE:
Organizing to win student power in decision-making started with the formation of departmental associations in multiple departments, mostly but not exclusively undergraduates in Arts disciplines, in early fall 1968. Most of these departments made significant progress on paper during Fall 1968 and early 1969 by simply entering negotiations with their faculty and generating critiques of the present curriculum and teaching methods and proposals to make things better. At the very least, students raised their own critical awareness when they held study sessions and meetings with faculty and with one another. They almost certainly found intellectual stimulation and insight into the subject matter of their disciplines and teaching process and how both could be made more ‘relevant’ to change in society and change in themselves (see History F68 p 8 pp91-91; English Literature F68 p106; Social Work F68 p75 p79 p91; Sociology F68 p24 p29 pp73-75 p87; Architecture F68 p29; Engineering F68 pp152-154 W69 p10 p74; French F68 p50 p119 p126; Philosophy F68 p36 pp60-61 and brief mentions of Education W69 p43; Psychology F68 p125 W69 p8; Economics F68 p119; Physics F68 p177; Anthropology F68 p29 p41; and see Law and Medicine below. ADD more from W69).
One discipline, Sociology, even won agreement on some form of equal power for students in all areas including hiring, albeit only on condition of deploying a decision rule of consensus (p125). English was promised parity in a general student-faculty assembly very late in the game in Winter 1969 (W69 p112). Political Science won a promise of some students on the Appointments committee that would give students some input into hiring of new faculty (p167 p168 p175). The 1968-69 year also saw efforts by McGill employees to unionize (F68 p10 p22 p49 ADD W69). Not coincidentally, this led left students to pay more attention to university employees, more specifically it led them to talk about including employees as a separate group from “administration” in decision-making bodies (F68 p73; see English faculty rejection of student proposal to include employees in departmental general assemblies W69 p34 before granting parity in those meetings to students W69 p112). Only one departmental student association, the Political Science Association (PSA), actually got into a conflict with their faculty and used student syndicalist tactics to pressure for concessions. The November 25 to December 4/5 1968 PSA occupation-strike, was the first on-campus pivotal conflict of 1968-69. It centered on the issue of winning significant student power in hiring new faculty, as a necessary precondition to being able to win changes in the content of the curriculum.
-- POLITICAL SCIENCE:
The Political Science Association (PSA) was created in the summer of 1968 (p138). It hit the ground running with a well thought out critique of the department and set of demands for change, at its first public meeting on Friday September 13 1968. The students at that meeting “demand[ed] that all committee meetings be open and that students be represented on all committees on a basis of parity with faculty. They are also demanding the inauguration of a critical and socially relevant approach to political science. The expansion of courses into areas concerned with contemporary political problems and addition of courses critical of the status quo are prominent aims of the Association… According to the Association, the department tends to accept only the ‘American school’ of political thought and analysis which by necessity excludes such critical schools as Marxism” (p17). Two weeks later one hundred students adopted a PSA manifesto that elaborated further on these points (p19).
Political Science faculty got around to discussing the PSA demands on Friday October 11, three days into the CEGEP strike. They more or less ignored two of the three sets of demands (to change the content of the curriculum and departmental specialization areas through new hirings and to change classroom teaching-learning processes) and chose to develop a stand on democratization only. On Monday October 28, they announced that they rejected student-faculty parity on any committee, offered ‘not more than one-third’ representation on the curriculum committee, and categorically rejected any student representation whatsoever on “staffing [hiring], tenure-promotion and certification committees” (p81 p85). The next day 225 students attended a PSA meeting which eventually voted 164 to 6 to reject the faculty counter offer and called for Friday November 1 student-faculty study sessions (p85), which were eventually held after initial faculty rejection (p88). The day after the PSA meeting, three students “made the rounds of Political Science classes sharply criticizing the PSA… they charged the PSA was a vocal minority using ‘Marxist terminology’ which was trying to railroad its democracy proposals through the PSA. In virtually every class they were coldly received and their interpretation challenged” (p88). A Starowicz editorial regretted that Political Science faculty had thusfar taken “a position of intransigence” and seemed intent on creating a confrontation. “Departmental reform – students participating in students participating in the formulation of the curriculum, in the hiring of professors, in the determination of priorities – has become a widely accepted idea. At Simon Fraser University, it is already in wide practice… The key committee involved here is ‘appointments’ – the hiring and firing of professors” (p88).
A commission proposed by junior professor Janice Stein to investigate student grievances and demands was eventually formed, after faculty initially rejected student parity on the committee and agreement to report back within 10 days (p96 p104). After hearing that faculty were still refusing to modify their counteroffer, students voted 50 to 2 “that their demand for parity on… hiring and section committees was flexible” (p103) on Monday November 11. The faculty-student investigation commission agreed on November 12 to recommend two students, one teaching assistant and one graduate student, on the staff hiring committee and one-third students on the section [steering?] committee that would approve the decision. The proposal also opened participation in hiring to all faculty, not just full professors as was the part practice (p105). Separate student and faculty meetings were called to take a vote on the commission compromise proposal. The faculty rejected the compromise proposal, replacing it with two PhD students on an eight person Appointments committee which excluded faculty below the rank of associate and no role for the section committee in hiring (pp113-4).
PSA executive Harry Edel said the rejection “came as a complete surprise”. Even future federal Liberal top strategist Eddie Goldenberg, who would actively oppose “the tactic of a strike” while acknowledging the “legitimacy” of majority support for the strike (pp151-2), said that he was “extremely shocked at the rejection of what I thought would have been an acceptable compromise” (p114). Faculty met again and reaffirmed their position (pp124-5 pp127-8 p128). Several faculty took time in their lectures to denounce the PSSA (p128). A Leslie Waxman editorial noted that faculty had “not allowed the PSA to save face even if it wanted to capitulate to faculty intransigence. They have deliberately left the students with no way out” (pp128-9). A Robert Chodos and Leslie Waxman editorial reviewed the history of negotiation in Political Science and argued why the issues at stake were crucial. “It is the department that is responsible for the hiring and firing of staff and consequently for the general political-intellectual orientation of the professoriate… Students have absolutely no control over what happens in the classroom. If they did, very many professors might very quickly be out of jobs. Because professors, with exceptions, can’t teach. They’re not there to teach, primarily. They’re there to do research that benefits the corporate establishment and government” (pp138-9).
On Monday November 25, Political Science students voted by 319 to 179 to engage in a boycott of classes and what would soon become an around-the-clock occupation of the area near faculty offices on the fourth floor of the Leacock building, starting immediately after the meeting (pp142-3 and pp143-44 accounts of day one and day two). By day two there was “a complete boycott of political science classes, enforced by Political Science Association pickets”, a complete program of seminars had been arranged, the occupiers met regularly to “make decisions in plenary meeting” and they had “elect[ed] a committee to negotiate with faculty -- Arnold August, Martine Eloy, Harry Cowan, John Hoffman and Chris Nelson” (p144). Committees were created to organize the occupation internally. Two of the committees, [on campus] publicity and media liaison, were directed externally, but there appears to have been no attempt to directly mobilize students or others outside the department. The occupation did not attempt to keep faculty out of their offices, and was declared to be open to anyone who “did not pose a physical threat to the occupiers” (p140). Organizers stressed that the occupation was mostly a “teach-in” which would “take the form of seminars, study sessions and debates… [that would] cover alternative views and theories of political science, alternative learning methods and departmental reform” (pp140-141).
Nothing had been conceded yet but already, the day after Political Science students voted to strike, many faculty at McGill appear to have panicked, holding a faculty association (MAUT) meeting where “numerous Administration members... were advocating an eventual MAUT recommendation that would… establish a university-wide policy preventing departments from allowing students on their appointment committees” (pp 146-147). Meanwhile, Political Science faculty created one hurdle after another to serious negotiations – first insisting on closed negotiations they knew PSA negotiators could not accept, then accepting mediation in closed session, then accepting mediation where the student side of the mediation was televised and the faculty side was closed, finally sending four representatives to the first mediated student meeting without a mandate to negotiate anything, then mandating representatives but subsequently voting to reject what the representatives negotiated (pp 147-8 p150 p160 pp166-7).
Stan Gray wrote that faculty were mindful that it was very late in the semester when students would be worried about exams and assignments. They assumed that the harsh criticisms of everything from the (low) quality of their teaching and the narrow and biased (dogmatically U.S. State Department worldview) course content were the views of an unrepresentative minority. “But after the November 1 teach-in, where they saw some 250 students vociferously criticizing them and demanding parity, all talk of the supposed minority status of the PSA disappeared. From that point onwards, the majority of faculty took a hard line and thought only in power terms”. The word was spread to faculty outside Political Science that the PSA majority were “a monolithic bloc of hardline Bolsheviks bent upon destroying the university… If Political Science fell, no part of the university would be safe” (pp142-143). There was a deliberate attempt to stretch out negotiations “until the occupation and strike either started to collapse or was being opposed by a large number of moderate students. At that point… [students] would be forced to accept the faculty’s proposals” (p146).
In the event, it was faculty who folded on the tenth day of the strike, Wednesday December 4. They voted to accept a strengthened version of the commission’s compromise proposal – two students on an appointments committee with students controlling the criteria and process for choosing their representatives, final decision by section on which students had one-third representation and changes to the section constitution requiring only a majority vote (p167). Students voted near unanimously the following day to accept, although there were many speeches asserting the need to continue the struggle to eventually win parity (p173). Separate articles by Harry Cowan (pp168-169) and Chodos and Waxman (pp 176-177) declared victory, and analyzed how and why the PSA had won.
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(The Political Science strike was probably influenced by the recent successful example of the student power movement at Simon Fraser University that won a full-scale parity and mutual veto decision-making system in all areas including hiring, promotion and firing in the Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology (PSA) department in summer 1968. The success of the PSA student Martin Loney led student power council and subsequent PSA student union in summer 1968 was made widely known by the CUS national office publications and student newspaper accounts of the election of Loney as CUS president and adoption of the SFU approach as a model at the end of summer 1968 CUS Congress [Slocock summarizes PSA gains F68 p86]. The Political Science students were also likely influenced by the earlier, less successful, Universite de Montreal Social Sciences student February 14 1968 sit-in supporting CEGEP student demands (W68 p43); the solidarity sit-in was extended into a week long occupation-strike in their faculty February 19-26 1968 that raised demands for democratization and changes to the curriculum based on their own manifesto W68 p38 p53. And to a lesser extent by the more recent one-day occupation by UdeM Political Science students on Thursday October 10 to express solidarity with the CEGEP strikers (p39) and the Tuesday October 22 UdeM Sociology-led Social Sciences student occupation delayed until after the CEGEP strike around the issues of autogestion of the department and a reversal of the reduction in monies available for loans and bursaries (p64). )
^^^
Having said that, as will be discussed below, very little real change was ever won. Little or none of whatever was won in 1968-69 carried over to subsequent academic years (after the student left had been effectively defeated by the firing of Stan Gray and the election of the Julius Grey Council executive and the subsequent purge of the Daily editor Mark Wilson and Grey’s non-implementation of the rep by pop Council that students voted for in Winter 1969). There were no situations in 1968-69 where students had different views than faculty on some issue and then used whatever power they had won to change the ultimate decision made. This is not surprising because the only real example of student power won anywhere in Canada was what was won in PSA at SFU and that was won as a byproduct of leverage won at the university-wide level. That power was granted by a left-wing faculty in PSA without any struggle required by the PSA students, just a brief negotiation. In retrospect it was not really student power but the power of left-wing faculty who chose to make an alliance with the student power left in order to confront what they could see was a coming purge by choosing, instead of backing down to save their own skins, to expand their radical democratizing reforms within PSA. To win real student power on the level of faculties, departments or specific courses and classrooms the opposition by the central university-wide bodies (Board and Senate and committees, the central MAUT faculty association, the Principal and vice-presidents and deans) to the granting of any such power had to be overcome first and it never was.
It will be argued below that a major reason for putting time into organizing at the departmental level is because part of the left had a sense that little could be won at the university-wide level because the Principal and administration had always responded to the mildest protest tactic with repression and that the student right did the same thing and the student left at its very best could only get slightly over 50% support for any issue of significance. The thinking may have been – “Let us try to see what we can achieve if we deal only directly with faculty (not admin) and deal just with faculty in our own department (who we share more in common with in terms of commitment to the discipline)”. It was worth trying. Students certainly deepened their understanding of the obstacles to changing the university by doing so. They would learn from experience that most faculty were dead set against any change that would threaten their professional interests and that meant that publish or perish rules, that research came ahead of teaching and that a professionalized hierarchy needed to be streamline among faculty and all of this was incompatible with a democratization that included students in more than token voice or vote.
The department and faculty level organizing was a widening of the student left (students not previously active became active at that level) and in some respects also a deepening of the critique of the status quo of the university (because it focussed on the content of their learning at least in their own major discipline and on the teaching-learning process and above all on the ends served by both). However, it was not possible to escape the basic political realities of the stance of administration and faculty towards the kinds of reforms the student left was seeking at any level. The departments and faculties at best adopted a ‘bend but do not break’ approach to entering into “collective bargaining” (p ) with their students. The perceived victory of the Political Science strike was true about the success of the strike as a mobilization of a majority of Political Science students but it was an illusion if what was meant was that faculty had ceded any real power and had any intention of allowing students to have real leverage on issues of importance.
It is not obvious from the written record that Political Science students were better organized or had more student support than some other departments as of early fall 1968. Yet it was in Political Science, and only Political Science, that a conflict developed whereby negotiations ramped up the conflict over the fall semester in ways that broadened and deepened support for taking strike action to push for the winning of significant change. An historian interested in department and faculty level student movements in Canada, that mostly only emerged in 1968 and was over by 1969, might look more closely at the movements in departments outside Political Science. My goal in this book is to look at changes in the action and consciousness of leftward moving students from 1964-65 to 1969-70 by highlighting the pivotal conflicts. At McGill, that means looking at the dynamics of the Political Science strike.
###
ADDENDUM and Long NOTE on department and faculty organizing:
A different book might devote more space to what went on in the other departments and faculties but our methodology of analyzing consciousness changes in relation to pivotal conflicts leads us to look more narrowly at Political Science.
See the following sources on departmental and faculty organizing outside Political Science:
-- OVERVIEWS OF ORGANIZING IN MORE THAN ONE DEPARTMENT AND/OR HISTORIES of past struggles:
F68: pp19-21 Ten years of struggles for democratization since 1959 Cohen proposals to MAUT for Senate to have more power relative to the Board and for increased decision-making power for faculty.
pp25-27 on emergence of departmental associations.
p26 Q edito argues that key issues are parity in decision-making and open meetings.
p30 Low turnouts to DA meetings common.
p33 Hajaly warns that Tripartite Commission unable to agree on core recommendations [in any of three areas?] Interim report on the University and Society written by David Ticoll provoked a violent reaction when presented to the full TC on Aug 23 1968? see also p .
p36 Edito why honorary degree for Noranda ceo? p34 Statements by various departmental chairs about DA organizing and demands.
p36 SC votes to demand that details of all research on campus be public and that the academic calendars of any faculty include “detailed course information… and the degree of control that [the professor] is willing to give to the class”. See p91.
p41 Anth joins the “collective bargaining bandwagon” of DA organizing.
p51?no First time that several DAs call for reconstituting the Student Society as a decentralized body made up of D and F associations.
p70 Examples of Critical Universities elsewhere accompanies Gray’s Oct 24 Critical University article. p70-1 Who Rules McGill? (unsigned). Cohen‘s Ivy League quote and 7 ways McGill nevertheless resembles an American multiversity with e.g.’s of research done for military, M’s impact on B and B Commission, quotes from Clark Kerr and Claude Bissell.
p78 Two McGills: open to new Quebec versus men who speak publicly for M who “still see this university as an English bastion They are unwilling to integrate McGill into Quebec society or do anything that will damage its position in the English North America orbit”.”
p88 Major edito previews the issues in Political Science that appear to be about to lead to a PSSA strike in context of overall DA organizing.
p91 Senate committee rejects SC request to make public funding sources of all research. p35 ?
pp93-95 pp98-100 Chodos-Gray-Starowicz-Wilson History of evolution of McGill administration going back decades parts one and two. New admin promotes “intellectual prostitutes” and is “in fundamental structural conflict with the aspirations of the people of Quebec outside [and] with the aspirations of its students inside”.
p96 UdeM SC AGEUM votes to withdraw from all committees above level of departments and faculties after UdeM admin (Univ Council?) rejects AGEUM request that they make changes supportive of CEGEP student demands. UdeM students have zero reps on their Univ Council.
p98 Today’s student movements differ from past ones in being movements with a real mass base driving them.
p138 Waxman: why department organizing is important – student role in hiring is way to change content of courses.
W69: p2 Edel motion to set up committee on pass-fail grading etc rejected by Senate.
p4 SC Educ cttee created to coordinate DAs.
p56 Gray on The Rape of Quebec.
p64 Hajaly on why parity on dean selection committee(s) crucial.
p81 Six student senators on futility of student reps on current Senate. [see earlier Chodos quote on impossibility of reform in current univ structures p ]
p84 Chris Hoffman favours a decentralized Student Society.
p90 Sam Boskey responds on why a central SC and SS bodies are indispensable for DAs to have power [see Hyman argument to UGEQ p on similar point].
-- POLITICAL SCIENCE:
F68: p17 PSSA formed.
p19 PSSA manifesto.
p39 Thursday Oct 10 UdeM Political Science one day strike to support CEGEP strikers.
p41 Friday Oct 11 PSSA meets faculty re first of three demands, democratization. Other two are Course and Faculty Expansion and Reform of Teaching Methods.
p64 Sociology at UdeM lead what might become 8 day occupation Tues Oct 22 that had been delayed until end of CEGEP strike.
pp 67-70 Oct 24 Stan Gray on Critical University, also Who Rules McGill unsigned.
pp72-3 Gray article on how open meetings demystify admin and profs who he ridicules e.g. at open TC mtg.
p81 Mon Oct 28 PS faculty mtg rejects parity on all committees, make counterproposals for ‘not more than one-third’ representation on curriculum committee and zero on “staffing [hiring], tenure-promotion and certification committees plus five seats on general faculty body [p85 says “one-quarter representation in the Section”].
p85 Tuesday October 29 [or 30?] PSSA mtg of 225 votes 164 to 6 to reject counter offer, call for Friday November 1 student-faculty study sessions.
p86 Slocock on SFU PSA in same Thurs Oct 31 issue.
p88 Right wing students get cold reception when they denounce PSSA in multiple lectures see p and p below for change in approach by some right wingers after massive strike vote p p )
p88 Nov 1 issue edito Holier Than Thou reviews PS negotiations where conflict is “a battle declared by the faculty not by the students” since their Oct 29 stance “clearly took a position of intransigence”. See quotes on top issues, key is hiring and firing in order to change curriculum and change department’s priorities [specializations].
[pp93-95 Part one on history of admin includes p93 revelation that the decision to call the police to clear the admin building in the Realist action was called for in a secret Senate meeting on Wednesday November 8, the day before the non-obstructive sit-in was pre-empted by the occupation of the Principal’s office. Article repeats instances of where faculty and admin said liberal things to students while preparing to do repressive things, lied about Gray’s alleged attack on police officer etc.]
[p96 AGEUM withdraws from all univ wide cttees when its demands re CEGEP issues rejected c Tues Nov 5.]
p96 PS faculty vote Friday November 1 to reject all three conditions (parity, new faculty proposal as input given student massive rejection of counterproposal, agenda be concrete proposals) proposed by PSSA for a commission of investigation to address student demands and grievances to report back on specific reform proposals within 7 to 10 days.
p103 Monday November 11 PSSA mtg hears that it is clear that faculty will not modify their proposals, rejects motion to accept one-third representation on the section and curriculum committees, then votes 50 to 2 to declare “that their demand for parity on… hiring and section committees was flexible”.
p104 PSSA exec Frank Furedi proposes to PS student-faculty commission Tues Nov 12 one-third students on section and one TA and a postgraduate on the staff hiring committee, also that all faculty not just full profs as in past be eligible for hiring cttee. Commission agrees and PSSA calls Friday Nov 15 mtg while faculty is to put it to a faculty meeting. [p106 Chodos on Senate Thursday October 31 where student senators made notice of motions on student discipline, housing and grading system. Not quite 8 student senators to 54 others on all votes, more like 11 to 51 with allies varying depending on the issue. If goal is implementation of a whole series of specific reforms then student representation on Senate is “doomed to failure” but they can at least “elicit clear statements of position” and “when Senate acts against the interests of students they can make sure everyone knows it”. ]
[p113-4 Thursday November 14 faculty meeting modifies proposals coming out of student-faculty commission. Instead of students having one-third in section meeting that decides on appointments, faculty vote for an Appointments Committee with 2 PhD students on a committee of eight. p114 Even Eddie Goldenberg is “extremely shocked etc”.
p116 Arnold August says c Mon Nov 18 rejection causes more and more students to become militant “since we’ve found a common issue in which all students are willing to act”, namely “the appointments procedure”.
pp124-5 Faculty are to meet in closed meeting Thursday November 21 after a secret meeting that they denied took place the previous day. August makes idle threat to have students walkin to open mtg.
[p125 Sociology offered parity on all bodies including hiring and firing Wednesday November 20 if decisions are made by consensus.
p127-8 Faculty statement Thursday November 21 text printed. No change from offer a week earlier.
p128 Waxman edito After five weeks of “make-believe negotiations” and “all the milky utterances about the need for trust and compromise” “it’s come to this”. Rejection of PSSA compromise, still “the issues have not had the substantive debate they deserve”. Faculty has actually worsened their proposal “by specifying that structural changes will now require a two-thirds majority vote”. Their claim that their offer goes ‘beyond what has been offered in comparable universities’ is no surprise since “duplicity is an established method of procedure for Political Science faculty”. “Professors Jackson, Noble and Steinberg… have taken to denouncing the PSA in their classes”.
p137 PSSA mtg Monday November 25 will consider what direct action to take given faculty rejection of PSSA Monday November 18 compromise offer.
p138-9 Waxman and Chodos on Conflict in the Departments recaps negotiations in PS. “[T]he power of Senate to affect the lives of students is limited” but departments can hire and fire faculty and this sets the “general political-intellectual orientation”. Most faculty cannot teach and many “might very quickly be out of jobs” if students had a say but “Students have absolutely no control over what happens in the classroom”. Faculty are “not here to teach, primarily. They’re there to do research that benefits the corporate establishment and government” and they were hired by professors who “are also lousy teachers and who also couldn’t care less about teaching critical social theory”. PSA formed in summer 1968, held its first meeting September 27.
pp 140-1 PSA votes Nov 25 to occupy 319 to 179 etc
pp141-2 Blow by blow account by Starowicz on day one with schedule of speakers.
p142-3, p146 Gray on mood of faculty, what they really think about conspiracy. Wait them out strategy.
p143 Quotes from faculty incl Mallory “parity will never be granted”, Noumoff on why most faculty against.
p144 second day of strike events, names of five named to student negotiating committee.
p145 Chodos on Aptheker seminar. Neg cttee mandated to hold firm on one-third representation on section, curriculum and appointments. Demands not radical nor tactics where occupation does not deny access to anyone to occupation itself except “the most blatantly hostile”.
p146-7 At 2.5 hour Tuesday November 26 MAUT meeting “a committee to study student-staff relations has been set up”. Admin members in attendance. “They were advocating and eventual recommendation that staff apointments be made by staff alone. This would help to establish a university-wide policy preventing departments from allowing students on their appointment committees”.
p147, p150 Students reject closed session negotiation, then accept mediator meeting publicly with student negotiators (but meeting with and by faculty only closed).
p160 Friday November 29 Four faculty sent to first student-side mediation have no mandate. Faculty agree to have televised mediation on Monday December 2.
pp166-7 Faculty refuse student proposals (see details) on appointments committee at Tuesday December 3 televised.
p167-8 Mallory announces faculty new position on appointments (see details). Chodos says strike will likely end.
p168-9 Harry Cowen on victory won through direct action, “confrontation politics”. Shattering of myth of ‘competence gap’ between faculty and students.
p173 Near unanimous vote at Thursday December 5 [not 4th!] PSA meeting to accept settlement and end 10 day strike. Speakers say parity still goal.
pp176-77 Chodos-Waxman on PSA strike, how they won, divisions within faculty.
ARTS AND SCIENCE (ASUS):
F68: p16 p18 p24 p28 accept Bindra cttee on representation.
p98 p100 p104 accept Bindra student representation if meetings open.
p104 Bindra sees student role as restricted to consultation, complains about idea that student interests conflict with faculty.
p117 HF lead walkin to November 19 meeting, propose open meeting but FC adjourns instead. p118 Chodos edito “There will be no more closed meetings”. p A and S dean Woods will propose disciplinary action for ‘disruption’.
W69: p6 p11 ASUS shifts to seeking student reps in new dean selection.
p74 p75 p82 Candidates participate in ASUS straw poll, Theall wins.
UNIVERSITY EMPLOYEE UNIONIZATION:
F68: Weryho organizes in library.
p22 Boskey on admin refusal to even meet with porters and cleaners.
p49 Boskey on history of admin anti-union stance.
p73 Univ is not just students, faculty and admin. Admin subdivides into admin/management and employees and the latter deserve representation. Ooops nothing on Winter 1969…
EDUCATION
W69 p43 and Marg Verrall later?
SOCIOLOGY:
F68: p24 p29 also Anth. pp73-75 manifesto and demands. p87 text of manifesto. p125 parity on all committees granted if decisions require consensus. Nothing in W69… Others missed see PS.
PSYCHOLOGY:
F68: p125 won’t make demands like PSSA.
W69: p8 p50 p55 Win open meetings, some reps.
FRENCH (ACEF):
p24 p29 p35 p50 seek less than parity, priority is changing teaching techniques. p88?
p119 Faculty meets ACEF.
p126 Courses on lit are mediocre.
p152 right student petition claims ACEF is unrepresentative.
PHILOSOPHY:
F68: p36 demand parity in hiring.
p60-61 p88 p104 p118
SOCIAL WORK:
F68: p75 grad students study session.
p79 Study session generates proposals.
p91 Proposals seek changes in teaching methods, faculty agree to all-day study session.
ENGLISH LITERATURE:
F68: p81 parity on minor cttee granted.
p106 Nine faculty, nine students on steering committee, discussion of student say in books to be read in English 100.
W69: p34 Faculty reject including employees in general meetings.
p112 Faculty grant full parity in gen assembly.
ECONOMICS: F68: p119
ARCHITECTURE: F68: p124 Tuesday November 19 boycott classes.
p129 Accept open study session on curriculum.
PHYSICS: F68 p177.
ENGINEERING (EUS): Note history going back to early 1966 Kingsbury related committee with Hajaly and Wilson and Nigel Hamer Ken Clowes lookalike in Realist affair etc. Why so many progressives at M?
F68: pp152-154 Mark Wilson on how engineers can become revolutionary when they demand that their ‘information handling’ job serve society’s benefit not profit. Excerpt from Gene Marine article in Ramparts on greenhouse effect and need to preserve species.
p154 Garewal from EUS exec critiques mentality of those who want to withdraw from SS. Lots of engineers active in SS, Hajaly is pres.
W69: p10 Faculty initially rejected recommendations from cttee of five profs and two students for 14 students on the 120 member faculty. They cut 14 to 7 and tried to dictate who can run from what areas etc. Petition gets 750 names in one day.
p15 Hamer edito EUS exec annoyed at Dean d’Ombrain attempt to go around exec to get student reps picked via class [year/speciality?] presidents, it fails. Lists key issues incl teaching must be priority over research, engineers must be able to take non-technical courses in other faculties, need changes to the technical paper.
p18 p38 EUS exec refuse faculty offers. p74 Congress of Engineering Students Sunday Feb 16 votes “the working language of Quebec is French”, non-francophones must be compelled to learn working French.
ADD p on why Med students are unwilling to organize.
W69 p and p on walkout of first year Law class and lack of enthusiasm for endorsing Dean Cohen after Cohen is satirized as a sellout pretend radical in the Daily. Note conservatives use of Commerce association to hyper-aggressively demand support for Faculty of Management building in response to X calling for pro-worker faculty. Use of Engineering US to consider withdrawing from SS.