SIXTIES STUDENTS McGill (5B): Senate and Board Walk-Ins for a Critical University

1968-69 PIVOTAL EVENT #2:  Walk-Ins to Pressure for Democratization and the CEGEP striker demands and reinventing McGill as a Critical University

The Hajaly-led Council planned to work within conventional channels to the extent possible to achieve significant democratization, hoping thereby to create the conditions for later battles to win substantive changes in the content and process of teaching and research at McGill.  They anticipated progress being made at all levels of university decision-making, including at the department and faculty level.  However, the decisive arena for winning democratization was clearly in the Senate and its committees, which were replacing the Board and their committees as the main locus of decision-making (pp93-95  pp98-100            ). 

Things appeared to be starting well when the Board and then Senate (on September 24) agreed to have eight students elected to Senate (p1).  Subsequently the Hajaly slate won six of the seven Senate seats they contested (on October 30) on a radical platform (p83).  [Members of both slates – which notably both claimed to be left of centre  agreed that the biggest difference between the Hajaly slate and the moderate left slate that elected only Julius Grey “concerned the role of the student in the hiring, promotion and firing of faculty members” where the Hajaly slate was for and the Julius Grey slate was against (p83).]  The Hajaly Council and the Hajaly slate senators tried to the very end to work within channels, even after the initiation of the Stan Gray firing in February 1969.  However, from beginning to end they ran up against the same problem: faculty and/or administration refused to open meetings (which made accountable student participation impossible) and, in the cases when specific meetings were opened, they voted overwhelming to reject every proposal made by the Hajaly Council on every significant issue.  Hajaly ended up having to lead or join the student left in what I am terming a walk-in to either open a key meeting or to get the open meeting to place a crucial issue on the agenda. 

The first walk-in was by 50 students, including three recently elected student senators (Council president Robert Hajaly, external-vice president Peter Foster and PSA activist Harry Edel), into a meeting of the Arts and Sciences Faculty Council considering proposals on student participation on Tuesday November 19 1968 (p117).   The meeting was in many ways a provocation, although a faculty that had never experienced student participation or observation might not have seen it that way.  The meeting was closed, despite the fact that openness as a precondition to accountable student representation had been explicit Student Council policy going back several years.  Open meetings had been front and center in the negotiations between Senate and the Council since early summer 1968 and in the Political Science negotiations.  The Arts and Science Committee on Student Participation in Faculty Government representation report to the meeting “rejected the ‘syndicalist’ idea… [of student reps] being accountable to their constituency” (p98).  Even moderate left ASUS president Paul Wong was taken aback by the report’s view that “[s]tudents would be admitted to ‘legislative consultations’ but not ‘deliberative meetings’.  They would be excluded from participation ‘in  such vital areas as curriculum and executive decision-making’” (p100). 

The ASUS executive nevertheless agreed to work with the report and join a proposed student-faculty working group to generate specific proposals “on the proviso that it meet in open session” (p104).  The Arts and Science faculty responded to this bending over backwards by scheduling a closed meeting on an unchanged report that denied every conceivable conceptual grounding of genuine student representation.   The HFH Council executive may have felt it was necessary to do something to prevent this from becoming the baseline for its efforts to win open meetings and accountable student representation at all levels.  Council external vice-president and protester Peter Foster asked that faculty vote to open the meeting.  They refused and voted instead by 64 to 49 to adjourn (pp17-118).  The Arts and Science Dean Woods promptly submitted a report on what he termed a “disruption” to the next (Wednesday November 20) Senate meeting.  The Senate just as promptly voted “to set up a committee to determine the privileges and responsibilities of senators” (p124).  The committee’s mandate was evidently to come up with a legalistic basis that could justify imposing disciplinary punishments on student leaders like Hajaly, Foster and Edel if they tried something like a walk-in again, and thereby refused to act like a co-opted student elite.

The second, third and fourth ‘walk-ins’ occurred in relatively rapid succession between Friday January 24 and Wednesday February 5 1969 after several months in which the Senate voted repeatedly to reject student senator proposals (with all or most students plus two or three faculty on one side and everyone else on the other), or refused to allow debate and vote on them and would not even allow Senate committees to hold open meetings.  [It was also a period off-campus where there was an escalating polarization around issues of language (St Leonard, December 1968 MIS occupation p  and Bill 85 and Matagami p23) and race (at Sir George with Caribbean Black students and the speeches by pro-violence Black Power leaders from other countries at two well-publicized conferences but also with speeches by Kahn Tineta Horn and an emerging Canadian Indian ‘Red Power’) and class (the CSN Second Front, the election of pro-militancy and pro-politicization of class conflict ‘chretien politise’ Michel Chartrand as president of the Montreal CSN council, another three-unions together teacher strike in a continuing strike wave that would last and more importantly get more politically consciousness-ly i.e. strategically organized through to the 1972 public sector and beyond) were indicators of a rapid leftward radicalization twinned with a mainstreaming and rapid widening of popular support for the new nationalism of Rene Levesque and the newly created PQ (hence non-radical independence as the result of elections and a referendum becomes a realistic possibility unlike the highly unlikely separatism resulting from the violence against property symbolic terror of the FLQ).  For the student left these ‘external’ developments were the opening of political opportunity; for many white English language Montrealers, including many liberal and left faculty and students, they also inspired a sense of threat to racial, national and class based superior status.] 

[[The real powder keg was symbolized by Robert Charlebois?‘s pop song expression ‘Speak White’ that tied together issues of Vietnam and Third World neo-colonization by white European stock countries with Quebec’s combustible mix of francophone nationalism and politicized labour conflict -- especially around the language issue since workers were doubly oppressed by English bosses who made them work, and even serve francophone consumers, in English.]   

On Friday January 24, the 18-member Senate Nominating Committee, with Council president Hajaly and external vice-president Hyman as student representatives, was slated to hold a closed meeting on the fifth floor of the administration building to discuss three important issues.  First, it was “to consider the composition of selection committees which will decide on replacements for five deans and a vice-principal” (p21).  The past policy had been no students with half the selection committee members decided by Senate and half by faculty.  The stakes were very high – the committees would decide who many of the top administration officials would be in the immediate future (p25 Foster edito).  The second issue was consideration of a Hajaly Council proposal to replace the existing disciplinary code that applied only to students with “a university-wide code, applicable to and drafted by faculty as well as students”.  Such a code would almost certainly contain lots of protections against arbitrary use of discipline, for the simple reason that faculty and administrators would have a strong interest in ensuring that they themselves were protected.  The Hajaly Council might well have felt that winning this would contribute greatly to creating an environment in which radical reform proposals could gain a hearing instead of being pre-emptively repressed.  Thirdly, the committee would consider an issue highlighted by the Hajaly-backed Chris Hoffman BSc 4, who would get elected as the new student internal vice-president on Wednesday January 29, namely the creation of a library policy commission to consider changes such as “24 hours a day 7 days a week operation of a library accessible to the public” (p21).  This was one of several ideas contained in the student left’s Critical University initiative, that above all sought to make McGill a university that would “serve the people” instead of being a bastion of the mostly English elite (see Daily spoof articles about a suddenly progressive Robertson opening the main library to the public p 13 p14).  The focal point of the walk-in though was to win the precondition of effective participation in the Nominating Committee decision-making on these issues, open meetings.

Thirty-five students went to the room where the Nominating Committee was scheduled to meet before others arrived.  Academic vice-principal Michael Oliver redirected incoming members into another room reachable only by walking through Principal Robertson’s office.  He physically blocked the door to students, who then waited in the Principal’s office.  “Robertson eventually came out of the committee meeting to face the students. ‘You are interfering with the functioning of the university’ he said ‘and I order you to leave’”.  Robertson and Oliver returned to the meeting and about ten students, plus Hyman and Hajaly who were student reps on the committee, filed in after them.  Music professor Anhalt asked the students to leave, saying that many faculty were willing to vote to open the meetings.  The students left and the committee voted 6 to 4 to open future meetings and then adjourned (note that eight people, including deans Woods and Frost, were absent which likely would have led to a different vote result) (p25).  Robertson and Oliver moved immediately to propose ‘discipline’ on the students who had ‘disrupted’ the Nominating Committee to an emergency session of Senate on Saturday February 1, claiming that the vote to open meetings was illegitimate because it had been made under pressure (W69 p33 and pp39-40 for text of Senate motion on disruption of NC but also Jan 27 Board meetings and pro and con speeches).  [[See p36 Chodos edito]]

The first two walk-ins were attempts to open up conventional channels to accountable student representation, so that important issues could then have a chance of being addressed.  The actions were led by people in and around the Council executive.  The third and fourth walk-ins were attempts to bring some of the same important issues to the fore with a more radical and confrontational framing, the view that McGill should become a Critical University serving the interests of the general public, more specifically the francophone Quebec majority and working class people generally.  Left students in and around the Council publicly supported and/or participated in these walk-ins too, but the leadership came from the explicitly Marxist left associated with the leadership of Stan Gray, John Fekete and others. 

On Monday January 27 1969, the Board of Governors held its first ever open meeting and allowed for 30 observers with tickets to attend.  A coalition of students called the January 27th committee led 150 students to the meeting place.  Some of the students with attendance permits unlocked the doors on the sixth floor of the administration building meant to block the other students.  Roughly 75 students crammed in to the meeting place ahead of the scheduled starting time, with the others milling outside.  “The students carried placards and had chanted ‘Ban the Board’ and ‘Pouvoir ouvrier’ as the grey-haired double-breasted Governors came in…  [T]he students demanded that…  student housing, the [proposed new] Faculty of Management and [the recent Matagami scandal  at] Noranda mines be placed on the agenda immediately”.  The Board chair Ross said that was impossible without prior notice.    Principal Robertson declared that the “Governors have the right to clear the room” and joined vice-principal Oliver in writing down the names of the student protesters.  The Board voted to adjourn after a five minute meeting (pp26-27).The demands of the protesters were provocative – cancel the proposed new Faculty of Management building and use the money for student co-op housing (that had been effectively vetoed recently when the Board attached unacceptable conditions blocking self-management by co-op residents and the student society W69 p2); remove any governor associated with Noranda Mines and its “racist policies towards the people of Quebec” from the Board.  The McGill Daily that morning ran articles on these topics.  A feature on the “Matagami Affair” told the story of Maurice Loyer who was “currently testifying before the education committee of the Quebec National Assembly which is having hearings about Bill 85 to guarantee English language [sic] education rights”.  Matagami was a typical Quebec company town where “[t]the school board, like everything else in the town, is controlled by the company”, in this case Noranda Mines subsidiary Matagami Lake Mines.  The school board had issued a decree “that the tax proceeds for education should be divided between the English and French-speaking population on a 50-50 basis, albeit seventy-five percent of the student constituency is French speaking”.  School board member Loyer had objected and made it a public issue.  Not long after, Loyer was dismissed from his job as security guard at the mine.  An editorial by Marc Raboy titled “Das Kapital” noted that “[t]he Board of Governors open meeting this afternoon could be the first time in history that such a formidable conglomeration of capital has presented itself in public”.  He listed Notman of Canadair, Bronfman of Seagrams, Finlayson of Marconi, Molson of his namesake brewery, EP Taylor of Argus conglomerate that controlled much of Noranda and Webster and Bourke who joined Taylor as “directors of Domtar Ltd, whose workers in the Eastern Townships recently concluded a long bloody strike…  The Board seems to think the co-op [housing project initiated by the student society] is a bad investment…  [and that] it is not as good an investment as, say, construction of a home for the Faculty of Management which will train the future leaders of Canadair, Marconi, Domtar et al.” (p24).

The fourth walk-in was also into an open meeting, the Wednesday February 5 Senate meeting.  Allan Feingold of the Radical Student Alliance (RSA) tried to read out the RSA’s five demands, a set of concrete measures to begin the task of making McGill “a critical university” serving the francophone Quebec majority externally and making McGill a democracy governed by university employees as well as faculty and students internally.  He asked that the RSA proposals be debated by Senate (pp45-46 RSA demands below).  The Senate refused and closed the meeting.  In the closed meeting, they adopted a motion “declaring Feingold’s unauthorized intervention a ‘disruption’.  This means that officers of the university can take disciplinary action against him”.  They voted 20 to 9 to reject the formal request coming from the Nominating Committee to allow it to hold open meetings (p47).  Senate also decided “to declare that it may scrap plans to admit students to McGill in 1969-70 to do two years of CEGEP followed by three years of university” absent government guarantees of “academic autonomy and financial viability” (p48).  This last Senate motion was easily as big a provocation as anything attempted by student protesters at any of the four meetings where they walked in.  The issue of whether there would be places for CEGEP grads in 1969-70, and whether McGill would take steps to promote a gradual merging of the separate and highly unequal English and French language education systems, was far and away the biggest single issue for the student left and, more importantly, for the Quebec population following along via the mainstream media and within labour and Quebec nationalist movements.  When the McGill administration announced that they would fire Stan Gray for the crime of participating in the Board and Senate walk-ins that demanded that McGill change to better serve the new Quebec, it was front page news for weeks.  The scandal of the “Gray Affair” led directly to the off-campus coalition march on McGill to demand a “McGill Francais”.

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For multiple reasons, the Hajaly Council would find that it could not even begin to make real progress in achieving the goal that it identified as the precondition to achieving the others – non-token democratization of decision-making – through conventional channels (or ultimately by any means at all).  For one thing, the Board, Senate, administration and most faculty were dead set against giving real power to students that might impinge in any significant way on their corporate or professional interests.  This was especially the case since they were on the verge of reaching agreement on a new model of power-sharing between them, the publish-or-perish multiversity where faculty predominated in initial decision-making in exchange for broadly serving the goals of government and business in their teaching and research (mostly not directly except in some areas of research).  For another, students themselves were divided, although one could argue that this was not really a disagreement about the desirability of the democratization goal.  Rather the career-oriented students who provided the mass base for the student right were above all against whatever the left-wing movements in society were for -- those changes were mostly perceived as contrary to their future class interests and to their ‘English language group within Quebec’ nationalist/caste interests, not to mention the reputation of their degree as being from an elite university.  The student right usually opposed whatever the student left proposed and supported whatever the administration and faculty seemed ready to give to them.  However, in Fall 1968 major advances in winning student decision-making at the departmental level, including as the result of a student strike in Political Science, allowed a glimmer of hope to appear on the horizon that made it seem for a very brief while that progress toward real democratization would be possible through a mix of debate-negotiation and trade union type pressure.

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** insert below later (Hajaly also made explicit some of what he thought this democratization should serve.  Academic research should be conducted, not to “fill some blind spot in a particular discipline” but “in terms of the social and human needs of society”.  The university should serve the public interest not private interests.  “Government control is not an issue, it already exists…  We are trying to ensure that the voice from outside is representative” (F68 p2).

** (See history of key dates in democratization efforts at McGill since 1959 F68 p19:  In January 1959, Law dean Maxwell Cohen presents a report to the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT), the local CAUT faculty association body, which “recommended that Senate and staff [i.e. faculty] participation in University policies and appointments be increased…  and had considerable effect” such that McGill had since been moving steadily in the direction where the real power lay with Senate, and hence with faculty albeit faculty in a hierarchy of posts, instead of the Board; AUCC and CAUT establish the Duff-Berdahl Commission in            ;  the national Commission issues its report and recommendations in     1966; the McGill Board sets up a Duff-Berdahl implementation committee made up of six members each from the Board and Senate plus the Principal, but no students let alone employees, in         ;   the Student Council adopts the Ticoll Report in February 1966; the implementation committee meets twice with student reps, in December 1966 and in May 1967;  in the latter meeting, the student brief proposes open meetings of the Senate and Board and seven students on Senate (assuming a significantly smaller Senate of    instead of the Senate of    that would be established by mid-Fall 1968); in September 1967 the Wilson-Fekete External Affairs Report updates and expands the May 1967 student approach but is mostly set aside by Council; in March 1968 HFH get elected on a platform that implicitly or explicitly reasserts the full range of major reforms contained in the September 1967 External Affairs Report.)

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On Stan Gray Couchiching speech:

Those who wanted to take this to be evidence of foreign influence as well as a conspiracy to foment violent riots might do so, but it is not likely that many McGill students did so.  Viewing Gray and SAC and others as being politically extreme because they were Marxist-socialists, and therefore supporters of revolutionary changes in the wider society and in the university, is something else. The idea of making McGill a Critical University was attacked by NDPers Charles Taylor and Julius Grey by playing on the belief that all Marxists who were serious advocates of a socialist revolution were totalitarians who aimed to seize power and then allow only their own ideology to be expressed.  Unfortunately for the McGill student left, the perceived practice of all existing Marxist-controlled states made these charges about McGill leftists immediately credible to many.  The Board, Principal Robertson and others in the McGill power structure might possibly have been paranoid about foreign influence and secret plans to foment violence (as opposed to non-violent civil disobedience or a student strike as tactics of “confrontation politics”) as some kind of conscious strategy.  But this would not represent much of a change.  Robertson and Cohen and Woods and other academic administrators had been promoting such unfounded allegations in the media and in public speeches for several years (see quotes of past statements by deans Mordell and Cohen  F68 p4).  Whether they actually believed it is not clear.  Most likely they believed it in the way that anti-communists used to believe that there was a Red under every bed (i.e. hiding behind the mask of mere liberalism or social democracy), that Reds posed a threat to overthrow the social system, and that they should therefore not be allowed the freedoms that could be used to irreversibly accomplish this task.  The McGill academic administrators thought that student radicals were by their very nature illegitimate and extremist.  Therefore it followed that one day they would be violent and agents of foreign forces, even if they were not so yet.  What is relevant here is that there was a conscious decision that came out of the July 1968 secret meeting of university presidents under AUCC auspices to adopt what is described below as the Claude Bissell strategy.  That strategy is not so ironically clearly based on strategies that Bissell learned about when he was on sabbatical in the United States just before this period, more specifically the strategy implied in the Archibald Cox report on the lessons for administrators from the May 1968 Columbia University occupation, which stresses a ‘co-opt the moderates to create a legitimated student elite that can be allies against the radicals first, then selectively repress where necessary to further the isolation of the non-coopted left’ approach rather than a ‘repress every act of protest’ one.  This approach can sometimes mean allowing even a significantly disruptive protest if it is led by relative moderates, and more importantly if it is supported by enough relatively moderate students. The same kind of protest around the same issue will be selectively repressed if it is led by radicals, or more importantly if it is not actively supported by enough relatively moderate students.  The goal is to demonize and de-legitimate left students, but to do so mainly by divide and rule, not by simple across the board repression of all protests.