SIXTIES STUDENTS: Read Me First and Comment on ‘Other Campuses’

IF YOU WERE ACTIVE IN THE STUDENT POWER MOVEMENT OF THE 1960s AT SIMON FRASER or McGILL, you are welcome to read one or more of the six SFU posts or the eight McGill posts, and then post Comments within those posts if you have something to add.

I will eventually post notes (or maybe I will just jump to a chapter draft based on the notes) for Toronto and Dalhousie/King’s and Regina. I will also post SFU and McGill chapter drafts eventually.

IF YOU WERE ACTIVE at SFU or McGill or Toronto or Dalhousie/King’s or Regina, please use Contact to tell me how I can contact you to send you a draft of a chapter on your campus later or to interview you. Or just to re-connect after all these years! Feel free to comment on any of the SFU or McGill posts too.

IF YOU WERE ACTIVE ON ANY CAMPUS OTHER THAN THESE FIVE, please post a comment at the bottom of this post. And/Or, if you read one or more of the Simon Fraser or McGill or other subsequent posts on the five campuses, you can also Post Comments there. And you use Contact to tell me how to send drafts to you or interview you or just reconnect with you personally.

The SIXTIES STUDENTS posts are excerpted from notes for what will hopefully become a book on the student power movement in English Canada from 1965 to 1970.  (I don’t have a publisher yet – if you have an idea of who might be interested in such a book, please Contact me.)

****TO LOCATE, READ and/or COMMENT on any of the specific posts about events on the five featured campuses, go back to the home page and click on ARCHIVE. They will be titled something like ‘SIXTIES STUDENTS Simon Fraser (1): Experimental University’. The six posts about Simon Fraser are about the major events on that campus in six time periods, presented in chronological order. Ditto the eight posts on McGill.****

The notes are written as narratives that tell a story of change over time.  Nevertheless they are data not chapter drafts — they are structured as answers to a set of questions (see below). Hence they are detailed summaries of major events plus interpretative comments that are my answers to the standard set of questions. Here is where you can give me your additions and corrections on the facts or additions and corrections on my analytic comments.

The ‘notes data’ will be used to do two things: (1) write narrative chapters on each of the five campuses; and (2) compare and contrast the cases in order to write analysis chapters. But you need not make comments to contribute to the eventual book. I hope you will find what I post here interesting as stories, if nothing else.  We need to tell our stories and share them with others.

WHY THE ‘SIXTIES STUDENTS’ POSTS ARE STRUCTURED THE WAY THEY ARE

The book will be a qualitative historical analysis of the changes that activists went through in (a) social understandings and political goals;  and (b) issues and interests organized around; and (c) strategy and tactics, in the six academic years from 1964-65 to 1969-70.  This is different from the more typical choice to do a quantitative analysis based on counting protest events. 

Nevertheless, the analysis is centered partly on major protest events.  I will be systematically comparing and contrasting everything about the patterns in the events on the five campuses.  To do this, I have structured my notes based on answering the same set of questions for a given time period on a particular campus. The notes talk specifically to major conflict events, and somewhat to some important second order events that are treated as leading up to or following from the major event(s).

My data is based on a close reading of the student newspaper for each campus and a few interviews with leading activists.  Hence the 6 digit number in brackets, such as (650622) refers to the year-month-day of the student paper for that campus that is a source for that point (1965, June 22).

The questions that structure the notes in every Sixties Students post are these:

MAJOR CONFLICT:  Description of the key actions and actors. 

CONTEXT:  Selective description of minor conflicts on campus as well as major events off campus in that period that provide context for the thinking and actions of the actors in the major conflicts.

CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND ACTION:   

(1)  What did the radical(izing) students see as the issues and interests at stake in the major conflict that motivated their actions? 

(2)  What were the radical(izing) students trying to do strategically and tactically that explains the level and type of actions that they led? 

(3) What changes in social understandings and political goals were expressed by radical(izing) students before and during the major conflict?

A NOTE ON THE ISSUES WITH AN AGENCY ORIENTED ANALYSIS:  Social and political conflicts are mass phenomena.  They are the resultants of thousands of intersecting vectors, where even the vectors that we can label as the conscious choices of individuals are anything but – they are not the rational and ‘freely willed in a vacuum’ (uncaused causes) that we like to pretend they are.  Most of the vectors are much more like conflicting structures and processes and interests and semi-rational contradictory submerged emotions that generate a conjuncture – a constellation of forces, and a set of possibilities for acting or thinking in this or that way. 

How do you accurately describe the agency of both individuals and groups of individuals, when you analyze a social movement like the 1960s student power movement in English Canada?  How do you do it without ascribing some kind of unanimity of a collective mind to the actors who act as a group?  How do you respect the fact that the causal chain that produces a mobilization, that is ostensibly initiated and led by a handful of self-described ‘new left’ actors, was not actually their pure invention?  How do you recognize that many of the individuals and subgroups who played a role in those mobilizations did not share the ways of thinking of the visible ‘leaders’, whose words we have access to because they are the ones who get quoted or who publish articles and texts? There is no perfect solution other than to recognize the limitations of your sources and to balance analyses in terms of actors (and their words and actions) on the one hand and analyses of structures, processes and mechanisms on the other. 

My analysis here stresses agency.  As a result, the story is often told as if there are two, and only two, actors in every conflict event and that everything begins and ends with freely-willed and conscious agency.  There is the new left leading the students and/or faculty on one side and their opponents, mostly the university administration and senior faculty and moderate students on the other.  This is entirely accurate as far as it goes, but it distorts and hides the role of other actors and other forces.  I try to provide context and to mention the role of other actors, but the story always comes across as the simple two-sides conscious-agent one.

TO SUM UP

IF YOU WERE A PARTICIPANT IN THE 1960s English Canada student movement on any campus please post comments in the Comments box below. And/Or do so within any of the other SIXTIES STUDENTS posts. And Contact me!

Needless to say, IF YOU WERE IN THE FRANCOPHONE QUEBECOIS 1960s STUDENT MOVEMENT, or in the 1960s student movement in any other country, you are welcome to read any of the SIXTIES STUDENTS posts and make comments and contact me (I am especially interested to hear about any books or material available online on other 1960s student movements that I may not know about).