SFU Period Two:  January 1967 to May 1967 --  The TA Incident

MAJOR CONFLICT:  On Friday March 17 1967 the Simon Fraser Student Council voted to organize a student strike unless the SFU Board of Governors rescinded the firing of five teaching assistants for off-campus political activity that allegedly hurt the reputation of the university.  At 12:20am Tuesday March 21, the Board rescinded the firings, producing a total student victory in what came to be known as the TA Incident.

The TA incident began on a Friday morning March 10, 1967 when five MA students (Martin Loney, Chris Huxley, Geoff Mercer and Phil Stanworth from Sociology PSA and John Edmund from English) circulated an open letter to students at the mostly working class Templeton High School in East Vancouver.  The letter urged students to take strike action to defend fellow grade 12 student Peter Haines who had been suspended indefinitely for publishing a parody of his teacher’s poetry.  On Monday March 13, the TAs leafleted again to call students to a public meeting during lunch hour in the park across from the school.  Over 600 Templeton students attended.  Members of the school football team led in starting fights in the crowd.  The RCMP arrived and ordered the SFU students to leave.  Later, Martin Loney and Tom Tyre were charged with creating a disturbance and released on $100 bail. 

The next day Loney, Tyre and about forty other SFU students returned to the park near the high school to conduct a “silent vigil”.  When they got up from a sitting position to “walk around the sidewalk”, the police grabbed Martin Loney.  They put him in a police car with the media snapping pictures.  Loney and one other protestor were charged with creating a disturbance.  This launched a frenzy in all forms of the mass media – radio, television and newspapers.  Loney and others were denounced as drug-using communists and foreign born outside agitators.  Four of the five TAs, including Loney, had come to SFU from northern England to follow Tom Bottomore, the well-respected British sociologist who had written books on elites and social class that combined the theories of Karl Marx and Max Weber.  In media reports Bottomore was simply a “Marxist”.  

On Thursday, March 16, the SFU Faculty Council made the Templeton incident into a campus issue when they voted to suspend the five students from their MA programs for one semester.   The SFU Student Council organized a student forum closed to media and non-students on the issue “Does Faculty Council Have the Right to Take Any Disciplinary Action Against Martin Loney?.  Later that day, five members of the SFU Board of Governors met.  Ignoring the Faculty Council decision on the same issue, the Board issued a press release announcing that the five TAs would be fired as teaching assistants.  This changed the framing of the issue again.  Now it was not just an issue about on-campus discipline instead of an issue about off-campus activism, it was also an issue about the firing of teachers by the Board instead an issue of the disciplining of students by faculty.  PSA chair Tom Bottomore announced his immediate resignation from his position as Dean of Arts in protest.  Early the next morning the Student Council met and voted unanimously to launch a student strike unless the Board backed down.

Strictly speaking, the SFU Student Council and the Strike Committee created to organize a strike never had to carry through with a formally declared strike.  However, most faculty and students ceased holding and attending classes starting on that Friday and especially all day and evening on Monday March 20.  Instead, they attended all day open forum debate/rallies in the outdoors Athenian democracy mall where students and faculty, including some senior faculty like Dean of Arts Bottomore, took turns giving their views on what was wrong with the Board decision and what was right with the actions of the TAs at Templeton high school. 

In and around the mall rallies, various groups met in their clubs or associations.  On Friday afternoon, after the Student Council strike call, faculty met in closed session as the SFU Faculty Association and voted unanimously to deplore the Board’s firings of the five TAs .  They also voted to piggyback on the TA issue by asking that the Board accept their Academic Freedom and Tenure brief.   All six student political clubs, including the right-wing Social Credit and Progressive Conservative clubs, signed a joint public letter unconditionally endorsing the Student Council call for a student strike.  A  meeting of the TA association voted to call for unconditional reinstatement of the five TAs, created a committee to draft a TA brief on academic freedom protections, and declared that they would consider “any action we deem suitable” if the Board failed to do the right thing.  The Graduate Student Association Executive did not call a membership meeting.  They issued a statement disassociating themselves from the stance of the TA association but still urged the Board to reverse its “ill-timed” decision.  Meeting most of the day on campus on Monday March 20 with the sound of the mall rallies outside the door, the Board interviewed a few faculty and administration people, debated and then rescinded the firings. 

CONTEXT: 

The year of 1967 was a period of rapid radicalization in student and other left movements globally, in large part because there was a second wave of radicalization in opposition to the draft and the war in Vietnam in the US.  The first radicalization had taken place in early 1965 after the bombing of North Vietnam.  The number of young men being drafted was rising sharply.  In January 1967, the Peak reported that SDS in the United States had called upon students “to leave the campus and organize a movement of resistance to the draft and the war with its base in working class communities”.  Only a few did so right away.  Leaving college made young males immediately eligible for the draft.  Those who did had to be willing to go underground or become draft dodgers.  But by the fall of 1967, the draft resistance demonstrations were morphing into a campaign to actively sabotage the war effort so the US side would lose the war. 

For the authorities, and for most members of the general public who expressed their opinions by writing letters to the editor or phoning in to radio shows, this was treasonous and siding with the communists.  Helping draft dodgers was thus still seen by governments and security police in Canada as aiding and abetting pro-communist treachery.  The Peak was filled with articles about Vietnam.  A few months earlier, many faculty and graduate students had spoken of their sympathy with Third World revolutions in Vietnam and elsewhere in the local campus discussion that followed the audio broadcast of the International Teach-in at the University of Toronto.  More ominously, PSA  Sociology professor Mordecai Briemberg, a Rhodes Scholar, Marxist and graduate of UC Berkeley, who openly supported Third World revolution, was instrumental in setting up the Vancouver Committee to Aid American Objectors off campus in late January.

The Peak also published multiple articles about the radicalization of the US civil rights movement.   The movement to end segregation in the US South had preached non-violence and was open to whites.   The fast growing Black Power organizations rooted in Black ghettoes all over the US were formally open to African Americans only.  Some, like the Black Panther Party and SNCC, were now ready to use “any means necessary” to win their freedom.  They appealed to white activists to remain engaged in fighting racism.  Indeed they made much stronger demands on whites for active support and asked them to do anti-racist organizing in white communities.  They asked all non-Blacks to form organizations that gave priority to fighting the oppression of colonized “Third World peoples” at home and abroad.  Thus anyone who was serious about fighting racism had to do something to support Third World revolution.  

In early January 1967, a chapter of the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) was formed at SFU.  SUPA chair Sharon Yandle told the Peak that SUPA would “direct student attention to on and off campus developments which are incompatible with the concepts and working of democracy” including the war in Vietnam.  This was the first organized new left student activist group at SFU, although it did not act as such in the TA incident.  The new SFU student council was led by Stan Wong, a moderate conservative who was a top academic achiever and astute political tactician, but much of the council had been elected on a left-leaning slate.  At least one of the members of the student slate was known to police as a member of the Communist Party of Canada – not part of the radicalizing new left, yet still left-wing and a member of a “subversive” organization.  

Parallel with these political trends there was the slow rise of a visible hippie movement, on the campuses and notably in the west side Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano, near to the beaches and half way between UBC and the downtown.  The spread of communal houses and hippie shops and hippie dress and recreational soft drug use would take off exponentially after the 1967 Summer of Love.  There was a growing social panic in the power structure, but also among many parents at all social levels, about two trends that seemed to overlap.  The first was the long established problem of working class and poor juvenile delinquents who were perceived as socially rebellious and sexually promiscuous.  The second was the trend of erstwhile law-abiding middle class kids to listen to music from Black and British working class musicians that seemed to promote the same rebellious and promiscuous attitudes and behaviours.  This panic was likely an important factor in the hysterical response to the Templeton high school agitation that was seen by many as “corrupting our youth”.

The government and police, both the drug squads and the Red squad security police, were certainly paranoid.  The February 22 issue of the Peak reported that PSA mature student and former prison guard Peter Morley had been approached in the parking lot by four undercover RCMP security police and asked to inform on the “communists” in the PSA department and elsewhere (he refused).  Later another ‘student’ admitted to the Peak that he had infiltrated the SUPA chapter looking for evidence of communist subversion.  Most dramatically, in mid February, the 23 year-old PSA MA student and TA Martin Loney was interrogated by US immigration authorities on his return from visiting a personal friend in Bellingham, Washington.  He was asked “whether or not he was a communist and whether there were a lot of communists at SFU”.  Loney told the Peak that when he reached the Canadian side of the border “the customs check consisted of being stripped naked and having my car and personal possessions searched, my letters read and all addresses I carried taken”.  Loney was then handed over to the Vancouver narcotics squad who followed him to his home and searched it.  They told him “it would be in all our interests if he left Canada”. 

The stage was well and truly set for the hysterical social and political panic reaction in the mass media sparked by the activism of Martin Loney and others at Templeton high school.

ISSUES THAT MOTIVATED ACTIONS: 

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

 Strike Committee and SUPA chair Sharon Yandle wrote a Post-Mortem in the Peak arguing that the core issues at stake in the TA incident were freedom of speech and academic freedom, the right not to be dismissed except for academic incompetence.  More specifically “the issue for which they [the students] were prepared to strike was, at least in the immediate sense, a faculty issue”.  This is only partially true, even on the level of the mass of students and even on the level of the immediate stakes.

The TA Incident strike was a militant and visceral response by an entire community to what amounted to the expulsion of five students/teachers.  The expulsions sent the unmistakable message to everyone in the SFU community that, if they got out of line, the Board would get rid of them too.  It took place in the context of a media, security police and drug squad induced frenzy about SFU being a haven for “foreign communists” and “drug-using hippies”.  Some of those foreigners were supposedly acting like “outside agitators” by trying to manipulate teenage youth into social rebellion at a local working class high school.  The Board firings were immediately seen by most students and faculty as McCarthyite in the sense that they themselves could be targeted next for the crime of being either socially or politically “deviant”. 

English professor John Mills wrote that “the response among faculty was immediate and heartening” because “academics are united on one thing.  They do not like to be fired.  They saw that what had happened to the TAs could happen to them”.  The TA incident was an attack on left-wing students that was intended as the first salvo in a coming purge of both graduate student TAs and faculty.  Left students and faculty got that message loud and clear immediately and mobilized accordingly.  The massive rallying of support across political and social status lines that forced the Board to rescind the firings set the purge plans back.  The plan to clean up SFU was not to be finally completed until the firing of the majority of faculty in the PSA department in the Fall of 1969.

Of course the formal argument made by the Student Council brief to the Board was about double jeopardy and the failure to respect the due process of law in the firings.  The self-declared right of center student Donn Korbin wrote in the Peak that the “student strike for academic freedom is above politics” and that the core issue was one of “individual freedom”, the right of any student or faculty to individually hold any political views and to engage in any political activity on their own time. 

But in fact the overriding thrust of the majority response to the firings was every bit as much a desire to protect something collective that they saw themselves as having built slowly in the eighteen months since SFU had opened – a progressive university, not a business-serving bureaucratic “multiversity”.   They wanted to protect a university committed to being “experimental” in debating ideas and in pioneering approaches both in and out of the classroom (e.g. in the Theatre).  They wanted to preserve a genuinely egalitarian community where faculty and students mixed socially as well as academically as partners in a quasi-utopian exercise of freedom to debate and experiment.

STUDENT RADICAL STRATEGY and TACTICS: 

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

Strategy:  The strategic goal for radical students was twofold.  The minimum goal was to save five left-leaning students like themselves from expulsion and to uphold academic freedom.  The more fundamental goal was to thwart an attempt to crush a budding left-leaning university community.   It was to demonstrate to the Board that any future attempts to get rid of people for social or political deviance might well be met by a strong pushback by a united university community.  

The resounding victory of the TA Incident strike succeeded in forging a much more organized alliance between a left-led student movement and a left-led faculty movement centered in but by no means confined to the PSA department.  That alliance would endure and would successfully resist repeated attempts to purge the left from SFU over the next three years.  In the TA incident, the left students both on and off the Student Council took the initiative to call a student strike.  Left and liberal faculty quickly set up a legal defence committee. The Faculty Association responded to the strike call by joining the call for a rescinding of the firings and by sneaking in its own demand for acceptance of its academic freedom and tenure brief.  Faculty were as visible as students in the long hours of debate in the open air rallies.   But the students led and faculty followed.

Tactics:  Why a strike?  Two reasons.  First the Board was clearly not going to reverse its decision just because some left-wing and liberal students and faculty opposed the decision and demonstrated this by some kind of minority protest action.  The price of rescinding the decision would be too high – it would mean publicly losing face and emboldening the radicals instead of intimidating them.  The Board would only back down if they were persuaded that the large majority of students and especially most faculty would not stand for it.   Mostly the Board had to be forced to recognize that some faculty would leave SFU and other faculty would refuse to come to SFU unless the Board was seen to be supporting academic freedom.

Second, radical students could see right away that the TA incident was one of those very rare situations in which the actions of authorities immediately angered the large majority of a community across lines of political views and social rank.  In such a situation, there was no need for a campaign that had built up support gradually before risking something that required considerable active support, like a strike.  The iron was already hot and the time to strike was now.  Further, getting the student council to formally vote for a strike made it “legal” in the eyes of students.  Since faculty were generally in a more vulnerable position when it came to speaking out and taking actions to protest decisions by university authorities, the students had to be front and center in putting on the pressure. Issuing a strike call, and then actually organizing a strike committee to carry it out, accomplished that.  

The risk of choosing the strike tactic was not that the radicals would fail to gain immediate visible support from a large number of people who would come to the debate/rallies.  The risk was that it would take too long for the Board to change course and they would have to actively shut down all classes to have an effective strike.  That risk was deemed by left students to be worth taking because the opportunity cost of doing nothing, or not enough, was much higher than any costs that might ensue from a failed strike. 

As well, the potential rewards of winning were also high.  In practice, it bought the student and faculty left and other progressives three more years in which they built the most openly progressive and radically democratic university in the history of Canada.  SFU was at least on a par in that respect with any of the more famous radical campuses in other countries like Columbia or Nanterre or Turin.

CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS: 

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

Two weeks before he was strip-searched and interrogated at the U.S border and five weeks before the intervention at Templeton high school, Martin Loney wrote an article on student activism in the Peak.  He listed multiple grievances that had not been resolved at SFU because “successive student councils interested in personal prestige and bureaucratic gamesmanship have consistently failed to develop any mass base of support by carrying a discussion of the university’s structure and goals right down to the students”.  Student apathy existed because “university is a stage on the ladder to individual success” for most middle class students and “competition, not group solidarity, is the ethic of the rising middle classes”. 

But Loney also expressed optimism at what middle class students could do in response to the major social injustices and social change struggles going on around the world.  “We are [also] human beings with social consciences, a high degree of education and a capacity for action”.  Students could use their knowledge and follow their consciences by “get[ting] out on the streets to protest against Vietnam” and by being willing “to strike until the university gives us Student Power”.   This meant being willing “to destroy the [old kind of] university if necessary in order to create a new one”.  If students were ready “to devote essential time to a discussion of the nature of our university and of our society” then they could “find new and meaningful values which would lead to a society we could be fully proud to live in”.  Above all, students must “pose the fundamental question of ‘Education for What and for Whom?’.  Was SFU going to be a university that continued to support and help reproduce the status quo or would it become an institution and a community that served the cause of progressive social change?

In the United States, new left students were increasingly bringing the main social and political issues of the wider society (racism and the imperialistic Vietnam war) onto the campus.  In other countries such as France and Italy, radical students would eventually link up with workers off campus to take on both university and wider societal issues.  In English Canada, new left students would do things like that occasionally, but mostly they would pursue a goal of changing the university from within to support social change outside the university.  New Left students at SFU had not yet reached the point of setting that as their overriding goal, but they were heading in that direction.  The action by Martin Loney and the other SFU TAs at Templeton high school was a bold attempt to use the “capacity for action” that middle class university students enjoyed to do something concrete to promote social change and to thereby shift the on-campus conversation.