SIXTIES STUDENTS McGill (5C): Firing of Stan Gray Prompts McGill Francais March
1968-69 PIVOTAL EVENT #3: the McGill Francais march
A third pivotal conflict of 1968-69 – the march on McGill, initiated by francophone CEGEP students and McGill radical left students supporting CEGEP student demands, by an off-campus coalition of Quebec nationalists, unilingualists and trade unionists (plus many others who were not necessarily particularly left or activist) to demand a “McGill Francais” – took place on Friday March 21 1969. It was prompted by the McGill administration’s move to fire Stan Gray, which was seen, even by the mainstream French language media, as motivated by the McGill administration’s desire to repress those at McGill who had tried and failed to get McGill to take real measures to expand the number of places in university open to graduating CEGEP students. The McGill Francais action is still a pivotal event for the on-campus McGill student left movement because it was initiated in part by McGill left students. However, the 1960s new left student movement at McGill was effectively over by mid-February 1969, and would not recover in 1969-70. The content and form of the eventual McGill Francais action was determined by the shifting politics of the off-campus coalition, not the McGill (or even francophone CEGEP student) left.
The McGill student left was decisively defeated by mid February 1969 because of two sets of events, one on-campus set and one off-campus set.
ON CAMPUS, between November 1968 and mid-February 1969, Senate rejected all significant reform proposals made by the Hajaly Council aligned student senators. They did so on issues ranging from changing McGill to make the new CEGEP- to-university system work (see Ernie Caron review W69 p104), to seriously investigating Kingsbury type reforms of classroom teaching and grading-evaluation methods (see vote on Edel grading motion W69 p2 and XX’s review of faculty obstruction over several years of all student proposals in the Educational Procedures committee W69 p 112), to even good faith measures indicating support for the principle of democratization and accountable representation like the opening of meetings of Board, Senate and committees (see references above in Pivotal Event #2 Walk-Ins). The message was loud and clear.
**Any student movement seeking reform within channels was a non-starter (see statement by 6 student senators on futility of student representation W69 p81 and earlier Chodos? statement ; see also HFH review of their record W69 p101 p104 incl text their June 1968 brief p104; Starowicz edito on how Gray firing shatters all myths about McGill admin being open to reform and about their actual interests that explain this W69 p86; Ticoll paper presented to Senate and letters expose 1950s research aiding nuclear bomb W69 p p94 p105).
**Any student movement seeking reform even a little bit outside channels, by mixing in some non-violent disobedience or other moderate protest tactics, would be repressed (see W69 History of admin strategy for defeating student left since summer 1968 from Bissell-AUCC F68 p14 to Woods’ new hard line W69 pp71-73; Julius Grey says student reps not accountable to student society W69 p76 and Judicial Council law student ruling backs this up p83)
Put simply, there were two incompatible movements at McGill, one based on faculty professional power (in exchange for a knowledge factory university more closely attuned to the needs of business and government) and the other based on democratization (which meant student power in hiring in order to influence both the content and form of their education). While faculty in several departments conceded significant student participation (virtually all of it taken back by the 1969-70 academic year, after the student left had been defeated?), faculty simultaneously took a hard line everywhere else.
Eventually they got a single student ally on Senate, law student Julius Grey, who opted for faculty power. He did so in the language of defending a pluralist university against the allegedly totalitarian Critical University championed by the Hajaly radical reform student executive and student senators, the Stan Gray led neo-Marxist student left and the left-leaning liberal Mark Starowicz edited Daily (F68 p123 Senate rejects Hajaly CU motion; Grey denounces CU concept p129 and is criticized as opportunist ingratiating himself with faculty-admin and the student right before running for student council president p130 p139; W69 Grey article Against CU p33 p39 p40; Grey and Goldenberg attack totalitarian student left and Young replies p48; Charles Taylor attacks CU concept as totalitarian etc see below ).
Key events of collapse/defeat of McGill student left (coinciding with beginnings of a much more radical off-campus post 1968 new left that ‘goes out to meet and organize the working class’):
(F68 p123 Senate rejects Hajaly CU motion; Self-styled leftist NDPer Grey denounces CU concept p129 and is criticized as opportunist ingratiating himself with faculty-admin and the student right before running for student council president p130 p139; W69 Grey article Against CU p33 p39 p40; Grey and Goldenberg attack totalitarian student left and Young replies p48;
W69 p61 Admin announces that they will fire Stan Gray on same day as computer burning at Sir George; Poli Sci accepts NDPer prof Charles Taylor motion to allow Stan Gray firing to go ahead while formally opposing firing W69 pp70-71; NDPer Social Work? prof Charles Gifford denounces “self-appointed messiahs” pp79-80;
[repeat] Julius Grey says student reps not accountable to student society W69 p76 and Judicial Council law student ruling backs this up p83;
Faculty and admin close ranks on mass level to purge Gray without ceremony led often by self-proclaimed NDP leftists: Bio and ltr re Stan Gray at Oxford p81; Senate refuses to hear Gray’s request to intervene on his behalf p81;
Withdrawal of UdeM and UGEQ activists from centralized, Quebec-wide optimistic left reform-seeking student syndicalism; this is evidently due to the inability of UGEQ CCN to lead the CEGEP strike (see off-campus citations below for both collapse of UGEQ and before that of the AGEUM). Also, at UdeM, a revived student right, emboldened by the end of the CEGEP strike and especially by the repression that followed it and by an admin and government categorically rejecting even token democratization at UdeM, acted through professional faculty student associations to withdraw from and thereby destroy student councils (soon to be rebuilt as the elitist political career stepping stone bastions they used to be before the 1960s): Internal vp Hoffman proposes reconstituting SS based on decentralization into base units p84 and Boskey replies saying this is giving up on student syndicalism since students have to deal with centralized admin p90;
After student rally and march to Board meeting, Board refuses to hear student delegation presenting case for their dropping charges against Gray W69 p85; Chancellor Ross and Principal Robertson reiterate in meeting with SC that they will fire Gray and there will be no dropping of charges p89; Humanities Division adjourns in order to avoid voting on Gray firing p89; MAUT condemns ‘disruption’ p92, most faculty at meeting hoot down attempt to present motion supporting Gray p92; 100 faculty sign pro-Gray petition p93 then 600 faculty sign opposing petition against ‘disruption’ p98 breakdown by department p99; Charles Taylor versus Gray on CU etc at PSA teach-in p100 p105; progressive faculty decide not to form faculty union [which might ally with student left] W69 p99;
Nominating Committee proposes no students on any dean selection committee p101;
UdeM faculty union SPUM supports Gray, SPUM pres Prevost explains that very similar pattern of events occurred at UdeM p104;
Julius Grey elected SC pres with lower vote than others running for ext and int vp March 5 day before McGill Francais march after weeks of hysteria in mainstream media p104-5; rep by pop constitutional amendments finally pass on same day p106 but in 1969-70 Grey will not implement the changes;
New admin vp Shaw says Gray was “violent” p107?; UGEQ Congress split p114; SEE off-campus below for more on UGEQ
Most of the OFF-CAMPUS events that led to the defeat of the McGill student left and its Critical University project were thematically related to either Black Power or (as English Quebeckers might label it) French Power. The events polarized student opinion. Many liberal and left students had their consciences pricked, and were stimulated to serious examination of their privileged status as Whites and as English Quebeckers. A much larger proportion of students might eventually move at least some way in the same direction years later, but in the short term responded to both with a sense of threat. The crunch point came in mid-February 1969. On February 11, police broke down the doors to the occupation of the Sir George Williams University computer centre by mostly West Indies Black students and soon the computer room was burning (p58 p60). Here was the event that administrators and faculty had been warning about semi hysterically for years – the student left was an extremist movement bound to end up in violent conflict that would destroy the liberal university. Only Faculty Power could defend it. Student Power would destroy it. (Black or French Power would destroy it violently). On the same day, Stan Gray was handed a letter from Principal Robertson and Arts and Science dean Woods: “Please be advised that we are satisfied that there is adequate cause to justify our recommending that you should be dismissed from the University”. ASUS president Paul Wong told the Daily that Woods had informed him “that the dismissal proceedings were in no way related to Mr Gray’s academic activities but specifically to his participation in the disruption of the Board of Governors meetings” on January 27 1969 (p61).
[[Like pretty much everywhere else in the world, at the very least in all relatively rich countries, 1968-69 was a year of major leftward shift in culture and politics in all popular movements and in all social classes on a mass level in Quebec. It was a period of sharp POLARIZATION in all movements (or is it better characterized as a split or divide between those who want a new social system and those who want to liberalize the existing one?), a necessary precondition to old paradigms being broken with. Because the polarization was a leftward one, i.e. one growing out of an optimistic culturally/socially liberal and politically left-critical period that would extend from at least the mid 1950s until the end of the 1970s (and not a rightward one of contracting political opportunity and rising perceived economic and cultural/social threat), two simultaneous trends define the polarization: first there is a hyper-radicalization of thinking among those who are generally the most activist and who are anyway the most left of the early to mid 1960s new left – they are determined to carry on with the agenda of radical reform despite the closing of the window of favourable political opportunity as the political and military counter-revolution begins at the level of the ruling class, and quickly recognize that this means seeking a political revolution to dislodge the existing ruling class; second, there is the beginning of a mainstreaming of some left ideas in versions which do not threaten the rule of the ruling class or their social system, led mostly by liberal defectors from the establishment – with the opportunity for radical political reform within existing channels closing, this means some variation on the Rudi Dutschke ‘long march through the institutions’ approach of working simultaneously within liberal or social-democratic parties and in the less politically radical/confrontational and more gradual culture change oriented parts of the extra-parliamentary social movement left that starts post 1968. Both of these factions emerging from the new left persist until the end of the 1970s when the counter-revolution on the ruling class level moves from short-term repression of the radical wing of the new left to a new paradigm of New Right hegemony. That paradigm is the Thatcher-Reagan neo-liberal market fundamentalist economic counter-revolution. It is also the persistent if somewhat less successful social and cultural counter-movement, that mostly ends up confined within the structures of the political right (defend the heterosexual family, male domination, ethnic/religious/racial hegemony) while the overall society liberalizes, not least as an unintended consequence of the infusion of the cost-and-benefit-for-me calculating capitalist logic into all institutions resulting from neo-liberalism.]]
Here are some of the polarization/radicalization events that we know most McGill students were aware of, because there were multiple articles about them in the Daily. Some students responded to these events by radicalizing their sense of the need for progressive social changes to correct historic injustices that they were beginning to more fully understand. Others may have felt some of this, but mostly responded with a sense of increasing threat to themselves personally as Whites, males, English language Quebeckers, future members of the business or professional or managerial classes etc:
** FRENCH POWER: (a) rising movement to make Quebec unilingual French in government, business-work, schools etc (St Leonard school board and the MIS F68 p1 p64 p66; the Tuesday December 3 1968 MIS breakaway group that briefly occupied the McGill computer building and was routed by police who beat people in the street afterward p1 p164 p169). (b) the emergence of a Quebec separatist party, the Parti Quebecois, which operates entirely within the established political system and which is therefore all the more threatening because, in contrast to the leftist and ‘terrorist’ FLQ and the more moderate social democratic RIN which is still perceived as militant and aligned with the FLQ and has a radical left wing inside it and mostly in its periphery, the PQ has a realistic chance of achieving political separation (F68 p52 pp82-83 p87 p95). (c) See same page numbers for the beginnings of the post 1968 radical new left for “independence and socialism” after the RIN is dissolved so that the majority can join the PQ. The RIN left refuses this option and creates radical left groupings of various kinds, most relevantly for the McGill student left the FLP.
[[The emergent radical left -- which by 1969-70 is mostly a matter of left intellectuals going ‘out to the working class’ by setting up ‘serve the people’ community social service delivering social animation organizations in working class communities, by working as permanent staffers in trade unions and by creating Marxism study circles that eventually fuse into Marxist-Leninist pre-party organizations -- is distinguished from the PQ (W69 p39 Francois Bachand of CIS; see p and p for involvement of Peter Foster and others in CIS related off-campus activism). The PQ is actually remarkably incapable of recruiting more than a handful of left intellectuals or activists – the Quebecois left is almost 100% in the extraparliamentary sphere throughout the 1970s, including most of the non-Marxist but radical socialist ‘independent left’ people in and around the unions. The PQ sotte voce promises the left to be for “independence and then, after independence, Scandinavian style state capitalism or social democracy” (W69 Levesque speech p101). The radical pro-independence left is rooted in an extra-parliamentary strategy for winning power (the ideology of syndicalism that was prevalent within UGEQ, and in more anarchist form in the FLQ, and in a more contradictorily would-be parliamentary party form in the RIN leadership, continues to predominate within the unions, especially within the CSN which remains non-aligned to any political party including the PQ and supportive instead of the Second Front project of creating the conditions for a true worker-controlled labour party adopted in fall 1968 on the same weekend that the PQ is launched).
The radical left seeks independence as a means to achieve radical economic and cultural and social institution change i.e. a radical decolonization of the people of the emergent Quebecois nation. It is this [independence and socialism, ex-RIN plus ex-CEGEP striker plus political action Second Front CSN led by Montreal CSN council president Michel Chartrand elected in December 1968] left that Stan Gray and other McGill student leftists will participate in increasingly directly throughout 1968-69, but especially after the collapse of prospects for winning mass student support for any kind of left-wing activity on McGill (or indeed any other) campus. That collapse occurred as the Sir George Williams computer centre burned on February 11 1969 and the announcement was made on the same day that Stan Gray would be fired (with the unmistakable message that anyone else who ‘disrupted’ after this announcement could be expelled or fired too; they would be treated the same way that the “violent” Black Power Sir George student occupiers were being treated).
See also all the feature articles and editorials on Noranda Mines, Domtar, Matagami etc which are both critiques of McGill’s subservient serving of capitalist business interests and critiques of American and English-Canadian business for their colonialist policies that force francophone Quebec people to work in English etc. These articles are threatening because they have clear radical implications. The MIS and the PQ are threatening on the grounds of allegedly being purely ‘narrow or ethnic nationalist’. The Daily articles by Chodos, Starowicz, Wilson, Gray and others are threatening because they imply the need for radical change in the entire social system because issues of language and decolonization and capitalist exploitation are treated as if they were inseparably intertwined (unilingualism, independence, socilaism). The NDPers who helped purge Gray (Grey, Taylor, Gifford, Oliver) did so while claiming to be leftists in the same way that right-wing social democrats had been doing in Western rich countries since at least the end of the Second World War: those who called openly for social movement militancy and/or radical political changes like socialism were anti-democratic totalitarians and ultra-leftists threatening the chances of social democrats coming to power and winning leftward change; they needed to be purged to save the left. Mostly the NDPers were defending faculty professional power in the UnCritical University but they were also hiding their ultramontane reaction against unilingualism, the PQ and the emergent off-campus radical left movements to the left of the NDP, namely all the actually progressive forces that were pushing for a new Quebec that would, at the very least, achieve some degree of French Power.]]
** BLACK POWER: The story of the Sir George movement and McGill left support actions are covered in many many articles. But see the recap article W69 p115. Prior to the sharpening of the Sir George conflict there were two major international conferences held in Montreal that the Daily covered. The first was the Black Writers Congress where many Black Power advocates from the US and elsewhere spoke in very provocative language about the racism of (all) white people and the need for violent revolution, socialism and self-defence to protect against the violence of the police (F68 report on BWC p43; McGill white students talk about how observing the BWC moved them to profound reflection and educated them more in a weekend than they had been educated in school over a much longer period p55 p56 p60; article on Racism against Blacks in Canada by Norman Cook; Rosie Douglas bio p171; ignorant Ugly American speech by BPP rep at a later date p180). The second was the Hemispheric Conference focused on the Vietnam war that attracted Third World country and US Black power leaders as delegates who both talked about the need for an international mobilization to get the US to negotiate a peace and made speeches in support of winning national liberation through armed struggle like the Vietnamese were doing (F68 p110 p11X p149 p158 p160). See also brief mentions of Kahn Tineta-Horn speech but it is not really connected with the Red Power movement that is emergent (F68 p29 and p ). Radical anti-racism and radical anti imperialism are challenging/threatening to both those who respond sympathetically and query their own racial and imperialist country privilege and those who react mostly to the fact that “these people are violent”.
** FEMINIST ANALYSES OF SEXISM: See p89 p134 p173 and others. Women’s Liberation (let alone “radical feminism”) in Montreal is not yet threatening in the same way as French Power and Black Power are, as an organized movement challenging male domination and chauvinism everywhere, including within the institutions and organizations dominated by male faculty, students and administration. But it is almost certainly beginning to be a challenge to a number of leftist McGill student heterosexual males in their personal relationships. There is little or no indication of this though in the Daily beyond the theoretical articles about sexism. [[Note: There is little (more but still little) indication of an impact of the youth counterculture on McGill students in the Daily either although it was definitely important for many. ]]
** COLLAPSE/DEFEAT OF STUDENT SYNDICALISM AMONG FRANCOPHONE QUEBEC STUDENTS: The failure of the UGEQ CCN to lead the CEGEP strike, i.e. to win support for it from outside led immediately to the forced resignation (and non-replacement) of UGEQ president Bourbeau (F68 p107 p109) and eventually to the falling apart of UGEQ as a whole at its third and final conference in March 1969 (W69 p114 does not cover the final collapse but only opening day of conference). In between the UdeM AGEUM – the UdeM always dominated the UGEQ CCN -- dissolved itself (W69 p107). Also UGEQ was clearly unable to figure out how to deal with the issue of Quebec independence, backing away from its original plan to hold a referendum among its entire membership, then deciding to hold a vote at its March 1969 Congress, then changing the wording of the question to be put to the conference and then (I think) never agreeing on a motion at the conference (W69 p39 p55 pp91-92 p95 p102). The UGEQ CCN voted to indicate its support of independence prior to the Congress (W69 p39 and this is likely the tactic of people on the CCN who later became prominent within the PQ, i.e. not radical lefties for the most part). See earlier Schecter and Eloy history of UGEQ including some critique about its inability to mobilize its mass base F68 pp130-134. See SPUM president statement that what happened with Gray and the student left at McGill was very similar to what happened at UdeM in exactly the same time period – things were not really all that more left-wing on francophone campuses, not even at UdeM.
THE EVENTS OF THE MCGILL FRANCAIS MOBILIZATION ITSELF:
-- From W69 p111: Ooops Demo is not day after Grey election? “A coalition of student, worker and radical groups is organizing a demonstration [Friday] March 28 [1969] focused on the role of McGill University in Quebec society. The demonstrators will protest inequalities in quebec higher education epitomized by the position of McGill University. Although 83% of Quebec is French some 42% of university places are English and English universities get 30% of the grants”. The demands of the McGill Francais march are those of the RSA [five demands] that are related to francization: three year program to make McGill French, admit most of 10,000 francophone CEGEP students who are without a place in the French universities, abolish French Canada Studies program, open MacLennan library to public, drop fees by $200 to the level of the average for universities [in Quebec]. The sponsors of the McGill Francais march include workers committees, action committees in the CEGEPs and at U de M, the Mouvement de l'integration scolaire MIS, the FLP [which Gray and much of the McGill radical pro-francophone left may by now belong to and center its activity around], the CIS [which I think Foster and maybe Hyman and others that ended up in CPCML joined instead of FLP]. “Some McGill students who hold socialist and independantiste views have also participated in its organization. The demonstration will take the form of a march from St Louis Square to the McGill campus beginning at eight on the evening of [Friday] March 28 [1969]. Publicity for ‘Operation McGill’ has included stickers saying ‘McGill’ on the background of a target and more recently ‘McGill francais’ and a pamphlet outlining the ways in which McGill acts as an oppressor in Quebec and presenting the demands”…
“In the meantime, McGill students who support the aims of the demonstration plan to publish several thousand copies of a French paper to be circulated to CEGEPs and l’Universite de Montreal to discuss McGill’s role in Quebec. Ten days ago [hence cerca Tues March 4 1969] Students’ Council barred the McGill Daily from publishing 100,000 copies of a French issue, also to be distributed to CEGEPs, until after [Fri] March 28 [1969], fearing that its publication now would aggravate the tension of the situation. Some of these students have participated in meetings of CEGEPs in which they cautioned that ‘the English student at McGill is not your enemy. He is as oppressed as you’ and urged that any possibility of violent confrontation between French and English groups of students on [Fri] March 28 [1969] be condemned immediately. The response of the audiences was to agree. They also argued that the slogan ‘McGill Francais’ is misleading because it suggests linguistic rather than social transformation and urged the slogan ‘McGill aux Quebecois’”.
-- W69 pp116-117: p2 Edito by Mark Wilson ‘Twilight of the Gods’ “Operation McGill brought to light two important points. First, in spite of the atmosphere of impending carnage and violence which [McGill admin vp]Shaw, [police chief] Gilbert and allies took every opportunity to create, the marchers did turn out in strength. This is not quite to say that repression doesn’t work: it does. Large numbers who supported Operation McGill stayed home simply because they were afraid of getting their heads smashed in by police. But this time such tactics did not work well enough. Second, it forced into the open the tru line-up of forces in quebec at this time. On one side there was the McGill Administration, several police forces, the Union Nationale government, French editorial writers, Levesque’s Parti Quebecois. On the other side: students from CEGEPs and universities, a few sympathetic journalists, workers groups (including such negligible fringe organizations as the 65,000 member Montreal Council of the CSN). As it turned out the true division of forces was not on lines of language or race; there were English and French on both sides. It was a division between oppressors and oppressed. One side has people, the other has money and guns… the Quebec government made arrangement[s] for federal troops a few days before the march… Take the Oliver proposals. They have been represented everywhere in the press as a shining new policy which McGill has decided to adopt… it has not even been considered by the academic Policy Committee… Now that the danger of ‘external’ attack has subsided, it will be quickly emasculated and consigned to a lingering oblivion. ETC
The reformists [like Julius Grey et al] who think McGill can be dragged into the real world without making anybody too unhappy have a very tough job facing them in the months ahead. At the very least they have to figure out how to get rid of the Board of Governors, how to give foreign students passing through here some sense that Quebec exists, how to justify the fact that over half of McGill’s tax-supported students leave quebec when they graduate, how to make Quebecois-oriented studies and research more than a ridiculous token supported on a budget less than the McGill Reporter’s, how to make an effective functional French program available to thousands of students, how to throw McGill’s institutional weight behind the necessary reforms in the rest of what is now the English-language school system: in short, they have to integrate McGill into Quebec…
-- W69 pp117-119: ELSE p4 Robert Chodos writes description of march. At 8:15 pm the march got under way from Carre St Louis. The marchers chant McGill Francais, McGill aux Quebecois, McGill aux travailleurs, McGill aux indigenes, Vallieres, Gagnon -- prisonniers politiques, Pierre-Paul Geoffroy -- prisonnier politique. Four types of flags were carried -- red, black, fleurs de lys and Patriote. "Mostly students but workers, professionals and whole families there too". Lysiane Gagnon journalist for LaPresse notes the presence of a PQ constituency president despite fact that the PQ officially disassociated itself from the protest, a well-known lawyer and his wife, union leader [FTQ ecty gen] Fernand Daoust and an official with the St Jean Baptiste Society although the Society has also disassociated itself from the demo. “At about 9:30pm it [the march] reached the gates of McGill University. The police were visible here in greater numbers… The atmosphere grew tense again as the crowd – that by now had grown to 10,000 and filled the entire section of Sherbrook Street in front of the campus – shouted ‘Nous sommes chez nous’ and ‘On veut visiter’ but no ‘invasion’ of the campus was seriously contemplated – there were too many cops. Raymond Lemieux’s appeal to the crowd to disperse and a speech by Stanley Gray could be heard by only a small section of the crowd… The demonstration’s service d’ordre issued appeals to the crowd to move on westward. But it had been there nearly an hour when the police first began to move in with motorcycles. They divided the crowd in two, then in four, then in eight. When the crowd continued to sit or stand in the streets they waded in with clubs… There were a few street fires, beatings, arrests. But there was no riot”.
ELSE p4 and p5 Robert Chodos writes ‘Hitting a Sore Spot’. “On October 21, 1968, ten thousand CEGEP students massed on the McGill campus as they prepared to march through the streets of the city to l’Universite de Montreal. They had been occupying their schools for the last two weeks protesting the lack of university places for the class that would graduate that June [1969] and, more fundamentally, the lack of place for them in the Quebec economy. For many members of the McGill community – students, faculty and administrators alike – it was the first time they had seen that many French Quebecois that close up. But little by little some sort of consciousness that there was a Quebec outside the Roddick Gates was being forced on McGill. On the student level it had led to affiliation with UGEQ a year and a half earlier. On the administrative level, Maxwell Cohen’s brief to the Tripartite Commission had expressed the realization that deeper involvement in Quebec was an option McGill had to consider and the prevailing belief that it should be rejected in favour of McGill’s ‘international’ commitments. At the same time consciousness of McGill University and what it represented was growing among French Quebecois. The first to do something about it were a small group of militants from the Mouvement pour L’Integration Scolaire… On December 3 [1968] eleven MIS members conducted a commando occupation of McGill’s data centre and stayed there for several hours until they were cleared out by police. On the McGill campus, no one understood what they were trying to say. But the response in the French community made it clear that a major sore spot had been hit. Soon afterward, representatives from CEGEP action committees, the Comite Independence-Socialisme, the Front de Liberation Populaire and McGill’s Socialist Action Committee got together to plan a full-scale educational campaign and demonstration on McGill, ‘Operation McGill’. The MIS, the Confederation des Syndicats Nationaux and other groups later gave their support.
WM** The involvement of McGill radicals in the campaign was significant. They had come to the conclusion that the time for organizing around purely student power issues had passed and that it was necessary to participate in the struggle for Quebec independence and socialism. Over the next two months, they helped bring Quebec issues and McGill’s relation to them to the attention of the campus [hence this is a major motivating factor for SAC-RSA at least in doing the ‘disruption’ at the Board meeting and reading the 5 RSA demands to Senate if not necessarily the Senate Nominating Committee and it is clear that this alienates the radical left from the large majority of student opinion, to a significant degree it is because the issues attack them as privileged in the name of the interests of French Quebecois and the working class even though what is presented in public discourse is a backlash against ‘disruption’ as a method of achieving student power changes; perhaps the biggest failure of Gray and SAC and the off-campus groups like FLP and CIS and the CEGEP action committees is that they failed to make the issue of English Quebecois ‘racism’ front and ceter even though they still would have been demonized and isolated and repressed] and provide information for Operation McGill… ‘McGill Francais’ stickers appeared all over the city. Gray, LIS head Raymond Lemieux and CSN leader Michel Chartrand addressed large and sympathetic audiences in the CEGEPs, at l’Universite de Montreal and in other Quebec cities. At these assemblies, not a single person opposed the program of Operation McGill; the only dissenting voices came from people who were adverse to the demonstration because of the possibility of police repression. A group of McGill radicals published a French language newspaper called ‘Bienvenue a McGill’ dealing with McGill’s role in Quebec and distributed 100,000 copies of it in CEGEPs, factories and metro stations. Meanwhile a worried English community began to mount a counter-campaign. The McGill Administration installed loudspeakers… and high-powered lights on buildings... It also invited editorial writers from all the Montreal papers, French and English, out to dinner and gave them its version of McGill’s role, after which they all obliged with editorials condemning the demonstration. The police got into the act as well. They arrested people distributing ‘Bienveue a McGill’. They kept close watch on the houses of demonstration organizers. They arrested organizer Francois Bachand [of CIS, later mysteriously killed in Paris] and two other people after police agents were discovered at an organizational meeting and their equipment confiscated. They called on McGill radical John Fekete with a warrant to search for explosives and evidence of conspiracy, found half a gram of marijuana instead, and arrested him for that… And at the height of the atmosphere of fear provoked by the saturation press coverage (after an initial attempt in the English papers to play it down) the warnings to avoid the violence, and the police harassment tactics, federal Justice Minister John Turner revealed in the House of Commons the day before the demonstration that the quebec government had made a request for troops”.
-- W69 pp119-120: -- ELSE GC A R
OLD: ELSE SEE WR* page 5 for statement by organizers about police harassment and surveillance in the period leading up to the march.
For example there was blatant surveillance, tailing of organizers, searches of the home of Bernard Mataigne, Yannick Chuit and Francois Bachand.
There were 15 arrests of people distributing newspapers announcing the demo. Diane de Sylva, Yves Brunelle, Clement Loranger.
Sabotage of cars.
There was an arrest of several people returning from the March 18 1969 Tuesday meeting of the Montreal Council of the CSN that discussed Operation McGill. They were all released after being in a cell for two hours without being charged -- Stanley Gray, Louis-Bernard Robitaille reporter for LaPresse, Mark Starowicz, Robert Chodos, Serge Corriveau taxi driver, Jean-Pierre Pellerin civil servant, Gilles Dostaler Professor, Clement Roy unemployed, Lise Coupal CSN official.
SEE more details on the police caught bugging a meeting at Montreal Technological Institute Fri March 21 1969. Arrest of Francois Bachand and Daniel Waterlot for alleged ‘theft’ the next day [presumably for the confiscation of the police bugging equipment]. Bachand was beaten in prison. Arrest of Yannick Chuit as he was about to testify in the trial of Bachand and Waterlut. Four police in plainclothes at the first meeting of the arbitration committee hearing the Gray case. Search of five buses coming to Montreal with demonstrators from Quebec City. Police on Prince Arthur Street outside a co-op house of McGill students known to be sympathetic to the demo “obviously for the purpose of creating dossiers on these students”. Five to ten police in the Students Union Building at McGill who followed students. Police in civilian clothes were among the marchers. “Counter demonstrators… were present on the demonstration ground… these counter-demonstrators provoked skirmishes and as a body were an obstacle preventing the march from advancing on its pre-arranged route. They thus served as a pretext for the police to charge the crowd… The police removed their badges… As long as our marshals had control of the demonstration, everything proceeded normally. The intervention of the police provoked any violence which followed. Several policemen in civilian dress wore the red armbands that identified our marshals as a tactic for creating confusion. We have further documented numerous acts of violence and brutality on the part of the police: Dispersing a group of demonstrators e.g. near a parking lot at Morgan’s with liberal use of nightsticks (these people were doing nothing illegal). Several journalists were struck with nightsticks… Motorcycles charged crowds at full speed on streets, sidewalks, alleys, parking areas, vacant lots etc… Systematic nightstick beating of fallen demonstrators (one poor fellow was beaten by six officers for 15 minutes)”.
-- W69 pp120-122: ELSE p6 and p7 Mark Starowicz writes ‘Terrorism in the Press; An Analysis of the Press Coverage of ‘Operation McGill’’. “last June [1968], in the wake of the St Jean Baptiste Day riot, The Toronto Daily Star, reporting on Trudeau’s remaining on the grandstand though objects were being hurled at him, proclaimed on 9 columns ‘Trudeau Defies Separatists’ [3 in caps]. The vening of the 25th, a Toronto NDP candidate waiting for the election returns to come in commented to a Toronto Star reporter; ‘I read your paper’s story about how Trudeau defied the separatists. Sounded more to me like the separatists defied Trudeau’. Nothing convinces me more about the impossibility of English Canada and Quebec understanding each other than reading the English press’ coverage of events in Quebec. Never in the last ten years has a single event received as much publicity before it even took place, and rarely has so much hysteria been self-generated (the organizers never talked about violence, the spectre was raised and knocked down by the counter propaganda). Sampling the national press of the last ten days brings out very interesting lessons about the ideological content of the press, the technique of journalistic terrorism and the attitudes of those who control our press towards Quebec. It is also an object lesson in how to cover a story without explaining what was really taking place. Just as in 1963, with the first FLQ bombings, the national press discovered that Quebec had been dissatisfied for 200 years… [McGill admin vp] Robert Shaw delivered his famous Iron Curtain and Stop-the-Francos-at-the-Roddick-Gates speech before the Bar Association and [cerca Tues March 18 1969] the Gazette blew the headline on him announcing McGill’s very existence is threatened. On page three, Wilder Penfield, the renowned neurologist picked by the Board of Governors to be its spokesman (he’s the only Board member who isn’t a capitalist) was cutting malignant tumours out of mankind’s brain before the Canadian Club warning about dangerous anarchists and revolutionaries. The morning The Gazette appeared, all the papers in Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Regina, Calgary and Vancouver rallied to the flag. Phase one of the program of journalistic terrorism was in operation. Robert Shaw’s speech was the vehicle. the Canadian public was being inured to expect hordes of rabid separatists burn McGill to the ground. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday [March 19-20-21 1969] McGill captured most of the headlines across the country. The press decided, along with Robert Shaw… that violence was almost inevitable. This was no accident, no duped press. This was conscious. This was as important a part of the counter attack as the police show of force during that week and the arbitrary arrests of activists. The press is geared to panic anyway. When that predisposition is combined with the spectre of separatists, the press will do anything to prove there will be violence. It’s an ideological thing. The organizers stressed it would be a peaceful demonstration. That was irrelevant. It was to be violent. A spectre was being raised for a very good reason – if there was violence, the groundwork for hysterical reaction is laid (a la Sir George), the seeds of Marxism and anarchy are revealed. If the demonstration is non-violent, then obviously it was a flop. Two alternate news stories could have been written a week before the march: 1) Mob destroy McGill property, or 2) McGill March Fizzles Out. As it turned out, the second pre-programmed story was written. The day after the Shaw speech and the spectre of McGill the innocent virgin standing naked before thousands of sexually depraved separatists was raised, came the glorification of the forces of order. Turner announces Quebec requested troops on standby. Almost every headline in the country stands to attention. The Globe and Mail blows eight columns on the troops-on-alert story and discusses when the army is permitted to fire on a crowd with tear gas or light machine guns [he lists headlines in other papers]… To an English language reader anywhere outside Montreal this was the picture: Thousands of separatists, anarchists, Marxists and hoods are going to attack one of the greatest institutions in the world. They want to destroy it. Why? Because they are separatists, anarchists, Marxists and hoods. But the police and army will protect McGill. Now everyone waits in fear”. [Starowicz shows techniques of labeling activists, then describes stories on the morning of the Fri March 28 1969 march. A story by Claude Henault in the Toronto Telegram cites RCMP sources saying that they have believed for months that “the demonstration is not student-originated but rather a Communist front” and that “not a single French Canadian or single student” was present at the first organizing meeting two months ago] “The Southam News Service told us ‘English and French here await tonight with fear… The explosive combination of student radicalism and extremist separatism is about to meet three police forces – and possibly the army – in the hear of this bomb-ridden metropolis, at historic McGill University’… When the demonstration turned out peaceful, the press had problems. Quick resolution. If a demonstration doesn’t destroy everything in it’s wake then obviously it’s a failure. Headline Winnipeg Free Press Saturday [March 29 1969]: ‘McGill March Fizzles Out’… ‘The march on McGill University that was ‘to bring down the Bastille’ sputtered out early today in a spree of window-smashing and trash-basket arson by gangs of roving teenagers… The leaders of the demonstration […] took refuge behind police lines. And: ‘The planned alliance of students and workers never came off’. The subhead reads: ‘8,000 demonstrators fail to rile police although 41 arrested and 18 slightly injured’”.
-- W69 p122: p3 The arbitration committee on Stan Gray’s dismissal decided to open its meetings against vigorous admin opposition and has held two gearings to date. “James Hugessen and Peter Laing of a Montreal English corporation law firm are representing the Administration whiles Jacques Desmarais and Robert Burns of the Confederation of National Trade Unions are acting as Gray’s lawyers. Burns and Desmarais speak French at the hearings [which is fine for two of the arbitrators who teach at UdeM but maybe not for Walter Taranpolsky]”. The admin lawyers said that will try to prove that Gray disrupted three university meetings and disobeyed lawful orders. Gray present a lengthy outline of the arguments he intends to make. His direct actions had to be seen as not just physical motions but as justified by their serving political programs and aims. He attacked “the ‘police mentality’ of the administration spokesmen who presented a straight ‘law and order’ line: what exists is right and those in power have to be obeyed simply because they are in power. But, Gray claimed, reasons had to be given as to why one should respect the status quo or the rules established by those in power… He referred to Principal Robertson’s defence of the legitimacy of the South African Legislature and said that people like that don’t belong in any decent university. Referring to the duty to use the established channels, Gray stated that one was bound to respect them only if the official bodies responsibly discussed the relevant issues and either were democratically constituted or acted in the interests of the university community and the public. He claimed that none of these conditions held at McGill: the Senate and Board of Governors were undemocratically chosen and were incapable of serious discussion on the important issues. Furthermore, and this constitutes the core of his case, the Administration was frustrating student demands for educational reform and participatory democracy and occupied a colonialist and reactionary position in Quebec society. He claimed that the Administration was allied with and served the most repressive and decadent elements in Quebec society, namely the English ruling class and the Anglo-American corporations and that it was the duty of all Quebec citizens to take action to transform McGill into a French university serving the majority of workers and oppressed. Therefore, Gray claimed, his actions actually contributed to the well-being of the university, [since] the Administration’s definition of the university’s well-being [was] an incorrect one. As for the three charges themselves, Gray stated that the Nominating Committee meeting hadn’t been disrupted but met and agreed with the protesters that its meetings should be open; he hadn’t been a participant in the Senate ‘disruption’; and that he had participated in the action at the Board of Governors meeting and that he would politically justify this… The Administration should try to substantively respond through intellectual debate and action to articulated reform proposals and real problems. The disruptions were minor actions, and outside the hysteria of the administration circles, they would never be considered a serious cause for dismissal of a faculty member. Gray said he thought the firing attempt was more politically motivated than anything else – a rationally planned pre-emptive strike against the student radicals and an extreme reaction to the demands about making McGill responsive to the demands of Quebec society”.
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Some key ON-CAMPUS rejections of reform proposals include:
** the refusal by both administration and faculty representatives on the Tripartite Commission on university governance to concede significant ground on democratization or the idea of making McGill serve progressive ends with its research and teaching (F68 p32 p34 p37 p91; categorical rejection of the Ticoll-Noumoff draft position on p );
** Senate rejects all of the proposals related to the idea of a democratized Critical University promoting progressive teaching and research, and especially refuses to respond supportively to the issues of the CEGEP occupation-strikes by changing McGill’s policies so that students from either English or French tuition-free CEGEPs will have their credits recognized and be admitted to McGill to get a university degree (F68 article on refusal of McGill to mesh with English CEGEPs p45 p47 p52; Council brief text explaining CEGEP student situation and demands pp48-49; Council demands to Senate for policy changes p46; Senate rejects all of the Council’s demands p54; Council executive statement condemning Senate response p54; W69 Revised motion addressing Council demands is vague rhetoric p1; rejection of Council request to make public the funding sources of all research being done at McGill p91;student senators propose student reps on search committees for new deans p104 ; Senate rejects Hajaly amendment declaring McGill goal of becoming a Critical University p123; Woods proposes a committee to consider criteria for disciplining student senators for participation in “disruptions” such as in the Nominating Committee meeting considering composition of dean selection committees p124 Senate does so p124; Julius Grey article denounces the Critical University concept p129 and is criticized as an opportunist seeking to ingratiate himself with faculty and administration and to win support of conservative students for a projected run for Council president in March 1969 p130 p139; MAUT meeting considers seeking a university-wide ban on any faculty or department allowing any student participation in hiring committees pp146-7; W69 Senate refuses Edel motion to set up committee to review grading-evaluation methods p2; quote dean Cohen saying he wants to be in U.S. Ivy League and not be dragged down by integrating into the Quebec education system; satires about opening MacLennan to the Quebec general public p13 p14; SC requests that Senate hear leader of one of three striking teacher unions p14 Senate tables student motion to express support for striking teachers p16 and then teacher leader refuses to address Senate and makes public his dismay; Starowicz editorial argues that Board members are mostly ignorant about both Quebec and important issues within McGill and the real power is increasingly exercized by Senate W69 pp27-28; Senate holds emergency Feb 1 meeting to vote to declare the walk-in to the January 24 Nominating Committee a disruption and Julius Grey supports the motion publishing Against the Critical University in the January 30 Daily the day before p33 p39 p40; Julius Grey and Eddie Goldenberg attack totalitarian student left p48 and David Young replies p48; Hajaly et al on why parity on departmental/faculty hiring committees and dean selection committees are crucial p64; Gray’s own department of Political Science says there is no academic reason to fire Gray but accepts Charles Taylor’s proposal to not call for ending the firing procedure and then adopts a motion to condemn the disruptions of university meetings that are the basis of the charges against Gray pp70-71; NDPer Charles Gifford says McGill must defend itself against disruption by self-appointed messiahs pp79-80; history of admin stance on student left since summer 1968 from the Bissell line F68 p14 to Woods’s new hard line W69 pp71-73; Julius Grey declares that student reps on Senate are not accountable to the student society p76 and Judicial Council backs this up with its ruling p83; student senator statement on futility of having students on Senate W69 p81 and Chodos earlier ; Wilson on why CAUT procedure for deciding Gray firing is inappropriate and why the Board should drop the charges p83; Board refuses to hear delegation seeking to get it to drop the charges p85; Starowicz editorial on how firing of Gray shatters all the myths that legitimate the power of the university administration p86; Council votes for Hajaly motion to have students on dean selection committees p89 and both chancellor Ross and Principal tell that Feb 25 mtg they will fire Gray p89; MAUT votes Thurs Feb 27 to condemn disruption, hoot down attempt to introduce motion in support of Gray p92; 600 faculty sign anti-disruption hence ‘go ahead and fire Gray’ petition in response to pro-Gray petition signed by 100 faculty p93 p98 SEE how many faculty in what departments signed the two petitions p99; Senate special meeting on taking stands where Ticoll paper exposes secret research done at McGill in the 1950s contributing to the development of nuclear weapons p91 and open letter by Ticoll detailing charge denied by participant in research and current chemistry chair Leo Jaffe p94 subsequent Yaffe and Ticoll letters p105; Gray versus Charles Taylor at PSA sponsored teach-in on Gray firing and Harry Cowan on how faculty in universities across North America use the language of due process and moderate reform to support the repression of the student left p 100 p105; p101 Nominating Committee meeting proposes no students on dean selection committees p101; Review of the fate of the HFH reform agenda p101 p104 and excerpts from the June 3 1968 HFH brief p104; Michel Chartrand on Gray firing as insult to Quebec p100 and UdeM SPUM faculty union head Charles Prevost on why they oppose Gray firing and how the situation is very similar to what happened at UdeM p103; Ernie Caron on HISTORY of McGill’s response to demands of CEGEP strikers p104; outgoing SC votes Tues March 4 to publish French language Daily to distribute at Operation McGill march on March 6; Julius Grey elected SC pres day before march pp105-107; rep by pop constitutional amendments pass on same day in referendum p106 that Grey will violate; Senate declares Feingold’s reading of RSA demands to have been a disruption p107; Robert Shaw declares that Gray was “violent” when he disrupted p108
** Daily articles presenting histories of McGill’s rejecting democratization, unionization and the interests of Quebec francophones and Quebec workers (F68 Opposition to unionization by employees p47; “administration” is not just managers but also employees who deserve democratic powers too p73; efforts to get student co-op housing F68 p3 p76 p77 W69 p2 Board blocks any coop housing where student society and/or co-op residents exercize managerial control p2; Stan Gray on Critical University pp67-70 and examples of critical universities elsewhere p70; Who Rules McGill? p70; Starowicz on the Two McGills p78; history of the McGill administration power structure with faculty power rising in recent years and a continuing stance of opposing the interests of a rising francophone new Quebec pp93-95 and p98; reveal of secret meeting during Realist crisis where faculty voted to support calling the police to remove student sitiners well before the sit-in moved into Principal’s office p93; Danny Roden’s Review of on campus events F68 p180; Review of events on campuses across Canada F68 p178; Stan Gray McGill and the Rape of Quebec on colonial role p56; ETC
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Most of the off-campus events that led to the defeat of the McGill student left and its Critical University project were thematically related to either Black Power or (as English Quebeckers might label it) French Power. The events polarized student opinion. Many liberal and left students had their consciences pricked, and were stimulated to serious examination of their privileged status as Whites and as English Quebeckers. A much larger proportion of students might eventually move at least some way in the same direction years later, but in the short term responded to both with a sense of threat. The crunch point came in mid-February 1969. On February 11, police broke down the doors to the occupation of the Sir George Williams University computer centre by mostly West Indies Black students and soon the computer room was burning (p58 p60). Here was the event that administrators and faculty had been warning about semi hysterically for years – the student left was an extremist movement bound to end up in violent conflict that would destroy the liberal university. Only Faculty Power could defend it. Student Power would destroy it. (Black or French Power would destroy it violently). On the same day, Stan Gray was handed a letter from Principal Robertson and Arts and Science dean Woods: “Please be advised that we are satisfied that there is adequate cause to justify our recommending that you should be dismissed from the University”. ASUS president Paul Wong told the Daily that Woods had informed him “that the dismissal proceedings were in no way related to Mr Gray’s academic activities but specifically to his participation in the disruption of the Board of Governors meetings” on January 27 1969 (p61).
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The second event, the February 11 1969 burning of computers in the Sir George Williams computer centre by occupying West Indies Black students when the police were battering down the doors to the occupied computer room. The burning of computers engendered an immediate groupthink negative response to the reactive violence against property, that treated the computer burning as the same as proactive violence against people, and blamed the students instead of police or university administration. Over 3,000 McGill students signed a petition That response was fundamentally anti-foreign (“We peaceful white Anglo Canadians and/or francophone Quebecois are not like them”) and anti-Black (“The black power activists in the U.S. and everywhere are violent anti-White racists who want to seize power undemocratically by ‘offing the pig’”), i.e. racist, in the city and on McGill campus.
From January 1969 NDPer Julius Grey, allied with NDP socialist faculty like Charles Taylor and liberals like law dean Maxwell Cohen, led a counter-revolution that carried into the 1969-70 academic year. By mid February 1969 most of the student left radicals at McGill had shifted their main participation in movement building to participation in the emerging off-campus extra-parliamentary “independence and socialism” left.
UGEQ fell apart at its March 1969 conference. There were irreconcilable differences between former CEGEP strikers (whose slogan was ‘From Protest to Resistance’) and the former UGEQ central leadership over the way forward, including what the relationship should be between struggles for independence and struggle for a kind of third-way socialism (W69 p114).
The bottom line was that no one in UGEQ had any coherent ideas about how a campus-based student movement could continue and everyone felt that the way to bring about social change was to build a movement anchored in off-campus mainly working class spaces and places (i.e. workplaces-unions and neighbourhoods) but also, decisively, through new political organizations. This would lead to the creation of radical electoral municipal politics groups FRAP in 1969-70 and then RCM through the 1970s, to political committees in and around the union centrals with a vague project of creating a Quebecois labour party based in the unions that culminated in the 1972 Common Front general strike, and to the efforts of former students from the post-1968 extra-parliamentary working class neighbourhood political action committees (CAPs) to build a new revolutionary communist party in the 1970s (which really got going after the October Crisis of 1970 led to the collapse of the revolutionary nationalist underground FLQ followed by the 1972 working class upsurge in the 1972 Common Front).
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CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS
[[ Gray’s speech is quite possibly the best distillation of Canadian SDU-type left student thinking as of summer 1968 that exists anywhere.
Gray makes seven distinct points about how and why the Canadian student left shared certain common features with new left student movements worldwide, notably within East European Marxist states not just Western capitalist ones. First, elite universities with restricted access that existed to replicate an upper middle class to aid capital [or state capital] were being replaced by a wide access corporate multiversity that UCalifornia president Clark Kerr described forthrightly in The Uses of the University. The multiversities were knowledge factories that produced two types of knowledge product useful to capital in the knowledge economy type neo-capitalism that was emerging – a trained and obedient new working class and faculty research that was increasingly merged with industry research. Second, since 1964 students had engaged in acts of rebellion because they were “alienated from the process and product of their work” which they found “individually stifling”, because they wanted to collectively “actively participate in developing for themselves a meaningful and integrated education” and because they were “socially idealistic” and “empathiz[ed] with the poor and oppressed” and hence wanted to see their universities play a positive role in “creating a new social order”. Third, the student revolt was also in part a “generational revolt”. Gray does not advance a youth as class or a student radicals are just politicized ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ hippies (Yippies) theory. Rather he aligns with Andre Gorz’s analysis in A Strategy for Labour. “A higher level of material satisfaction, a more permissive upbringing and better educational levels have led to a higher level of expectations and a better ability to articulate them… Contrary to some popular myths, greater affluence and freedom from insecurity doesn’t lead to satisfaction, complacency or ‘embourgeoisement’ but rather to a higher level of expectations and demands – a concern for the qualitative character of human needs rather than simply their quantitative character; and demands for freedom, creativity and self-realization in all spheres of life…”. [Note that this is one theorization of a basis for optimism in student movements everywhere in 1968-69 that there could be a student-worker alliance bridged by the shared desire of young workers for ‘freedom, creativity and self-realization’ in their workplaces and outside work.] Fourth, the student movement was an international movement in part because local movements everywhere were “often inspired by and assimilate[d] the lessons and experience of other movements, [then] add[ed] their own improvisations and experience to come up with a new and higher level theory and form of struggle which itself gets picked up elsewhere etc”.
Fifth, the new left everywhere was developing common practical approaches to university and societal change because “Marxism is coming more and more to be the common denominator of all student movements in North America and Western Europe, even so in the New Left SDS in the United States”. Why? Because Marxism was “the most developed, refined and coherent revolutionary philosophy or world-view today” that made sense of the emerging neo-capitalist society and demonstrated the outlines of why and how the student new left could build a winning strategy when they “ally themselves with the working class”. Sixth, student movements shared common features because university administrations around the world shared common features. There were “similar reactions by Administrations when their authoritarian power on campuses is challenged”. More specifically administrations everywhere in 1967-68 censored student newspapers, used in loco parentis powers designed to discipline students for academic infractions to repress students for non-academic protest infractions and repressed protests against the recruiters for war-supplying companies like Dow Chemical that they welcomed to campus. Seventh, “[T]owards the end of the [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. I think 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 the campus – and I look to more of this type of strategy in the coming year”.