May 1967 to April 1968: SDU and the Board Walk-In

MAJOR CONFLICT: the March 1 1968 Board Walk-In:

On March 1 1968, a delegation of eight [check?] students elected earlier that day at a general student body meeting ‘walked in’ to the SFU Board meeting with two briefs and a petition demanding that all future Board meetings be open.  The Board had not invited the student delegation but had decided to avoid a confrontation by letting them enter the meeting and present their proposals and arguments.  After a brief attempt by some in the student delegation to get the Board to open that meeting to the eighty or so students maintaining a silent vigil outside, Board chair Gordon Shrum agreed to admit eight of them and no more. 

The student delegation had been consciously selected to include individuals representing the full range of student views on the many issues at hand.  Hence differing views were presented to the Board.  There was some argument back and forth between individual students and individual Board members. The meeting ended with a quick Board decision to set up a Board committee to consider the student proposals.  This was a rejection of the main student proposal that a non-Board committee be created. 

The student proposal was for a non-Board committee made up of a cross-section of representatives of the outside community plus representatives of the “university community” of students and faculty.  The non-Board committee would be mandated above all to generate proposals on how to change the formal decision-making structures at SFU and to get them written into a revised Universities Act.  The thinly-veiled goal was to end the situation where all final decisions on everything, but especially decisions about hiring and firing and tenure of faculty, were made by the right-wing Social Credit government-appointed and businessmen-dominated SFU Board.  In its place, students sought control by students and faculty plus a Board that was representative of the whole outside community -- not just, and not primarily, business.

The March 1 1968 Board walk-in was the culmination of a long series of conflicts and events dating back to the aftermath of the March 1967 TA Incident.  For Shrum and the SFU Board, the TA Incident was the defeat of its first attempt to purge Simon Fraser of its graduate student and faculty leftists.  Not a single faculty member at SFU had tenure.  In the Fall of 1967, many faculty were starting to come up for renewal.  The Board had rejected the initial Faculty Association proposals for an Academic Freedom and Tenure system on September 12, 1966.  As the newest Board member Jack Diamond told the student newspaper in January 1968, there would be no new system until some faculty deadwood were “weeded out” (680124). 

In October 1967, the non-left Psychology professor Ken Burstein had his one year renewal voided by the Board.  An emergency meeting of the Faculty Association on October 18 1967 voted to ask the CAUT, the national association of university teachers, to investigate the Burstein case and the breakdown in the negotiation between faculty and the Board over academic freedom and tenure provisions. The CAUT accepted and came to campus on February 8 1968 to complete its investigation.   On February 14 1968, the CAUT Report was released, censuring the Board and calling upon it to adopt some variation of the standard CAUT-recommended academic freedom and tenure procedures. This produced what the Peak termed “The CAUT Crisis” (680121). 

The Board walk-in was originally termed a “break-in” when it was proposed by the left and left-liberal students in the newly created Students for a Democratic University (SDU) two days before the CAUT Report was released.  It was still called a break-in when Student Council member Bill Engelson told the February 19 1968 Council meeting that he would resign and join the SDU action.  What happened instead was that Student Council voted to join the break-in but also appealed to the Board to avoid a confrontation by enabling some students to walk in while others maintained a vigil outside. 

The Student Council decision led to a counter mobilization by conservative students.  On February 29, the day before the proposed walk-in, they won the support of 53% of the students at a non-quorate student body meeting to impeach the Student Council.  All Student Council members resigned except the “moderate” ombudsman Rob Walsh.  As a result, there was no Student Council to redirect the action of the SDU into safer channels.  On March 1, a mass student meeting elected the student delegation to walk in to the Board meeting. 

In the absence of a Student Council, there were a series of mass meetings lasting over several weeks to debate how to reorganize the student society to make it more of a participatory democracy.   The Burstein case and winning academic freedom and tenure protection for faculty was a major motivation for the SDU’s proposal for the Board break-in, but it was not the only one.  Since the March 1967 TA Incident, students had been waging their own battles to win what would soon be labelled “student power”.  When an election for a new summer semester student council was finally held in May 1968, it would elect an overwhelming majority of candidates running on the radical “student power” slate, headed by the much-demonized figurehead of the TA Incident student strike, Martin Loney. 

CONTEXT: 

External environment:  The summer of 1967 is typically remembered for the “Summer of Love” where young people from across North America travelled to the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco – or emulated it locally -- to “make love, not war” in the increasingly visible hippie counterculture.  In Vancouver, the Georgia Straight, a self-described hippie Underground newspaper was created.  It was soon in trouble with city authorities for publishing “obscene” articles that also criticized police and other symbols of authority (670614).  The New Westminister Co-op opened to mostly SFU left and countercultural students in July 1967 (670705). 

But the summer of 1967 was not just the summer of hippies “making love” it was also the summer  of “not war”.  Opposition to the Vietnam war was becoming more widespread and more militant as the number of American soldiers sent to Vietnam, and thus the number of young men drafted, spiked upwards.  More and more draft-age men sought to evade the draft, either by leaving the United States or by hiding from authorities within the US.  SDS called upon students to leave the campus (thereby making the male leavers immediately eligible for the draft) to “organize a movement of resistance to the draft and the war with its base in poor working class and middle class communities” (670201).

Unlike most active campuses in the United States, there were only a few actions on the SFU campus that were explicitly about the Vietnam war.  Nevertheless, as early as Fall 1966, PSA professor Mordecai Briemberg and several other faculty had helped set up the off-campus Vancouver Committee to Aid American War Objectors (661026).  Many left students and faculty had expressed antiwar and even anti-imperialist views at the campus meeting organized to follow up the broadcast of the international China Teach-In held at the University of Toronto (661109).  This reflected an important fact about SFU:  many of the political science and sociology and anthropology faculty in the combined PSA department were thematically focused on the Third World; and many of them included books and readings in their teaching materials that were critical of the imperialism of the US and other Western countries.  The PSA department attracted more students to its courses than any other department at SFU. 

From early 1966 on there were frequent campus meetings with invited speakers who spoke against the war and many articles and letters to the editor in the student newspaper arguing for and mostly against.  There were sit-in protests involving SFU students in the fall of 1967, first at UBC and then at SFU, to protest recruiters from Dow Chemical, which manufactured napalm in its Canadian plants for use in Vietnam (671115).  The Student Council voted to send a telegram of support for students at UC Berkeley who had been suspended for their militant protests in Stop the Draft Week (671122).  In January 1968, SFU students voted by a margin of 6 to 1 to declare their opposition to the Vietnam war (680131).  Hence, while the Vietnam war was only rarely the explicit focus of on-campus protests, it had a significant impact on student and faculty political views and almost certainly on the pace and degree of radicalization of many.

Campus events leading up to major conflict:  The March 1967 TA Incident was a wake-up call for left students and most faculty.  Shrum and the Board had the power to make all decisions and they were willing to use it to get rid of students or teachers who “embarrassed the university” with the expression of left-wing ideas.  By the Fall of 1967, the left caucus within the Faculty Association had transformed itself into a Faculty Union and subsequently signed up a substantial minority of faculty to dues-paying membership (671018, 671129).  Overcoming an administration supported push by “gradualists” in Graduate Student Association executive to have the GSA break away from the Student Society, teaching assistants (who were also graduate students) sought recognition of a TA union and won support from the Student Council in doing so (670927, 680131).

The creation of these two unions established well-organized alliances between left and liberal faculty and left and liberal graduate student TAs that significantly increased the effective leverage of the progressive forces in both constituencies in the many conflicts that followed from the Fall of 1967 through to the Fall of 1969.  In this respect the realignment was parallel to what was happening in the student body.  The creation of the SDS-style Students for a Democratic University in January 1968 is correctly seen as an expression of a radicalization of thinking and intensification of willingness to engage in civil disobedience actions among new left students.  But what can easily be missed is that this was simultaneously the formation of an effective working alliance between new left and liberal students and even many “thinking conservatives”.  Why?  Because the shift to the left in 1967-68 was impacting young people who were not (yet) left as much as it was those who were consciously leftist.  

Young Liberal and Peak journalist Gordon Hardy explained the Student Council support for the SDU proposed March 1 1968 Board break-in thus:  the SDU and Student Council had the same goals with respect to the radical democratization of the university but played different yet potentially complementary roles – the SDU generated ideas and forced the issue with proposed actions and, as long as the SDU remained a broad alliance focused on the shared goals and open to all,  the Student Council could use its legitimacy as elected representatives to bring a wider set of students to support those initiatives (680214).  Alan Bell, the self-described conservative editor of the Peak, argued that the mass media had it wrong when it claimed that the student power movement was a radical New Left movement only.  Yes, the leaders were New Left but the majority of student supporters were not, because “you don’t need to be New Left to be for democracy” (680117).

The March 1967 TA Incident also led the university administration to do things that had the unintended effect of stimulating a much stronger movement for “student power”.  The AUCC, the national association of university administrations, had recognized by 1965 that it needed to come up with a set of reforms if it wanted to co-opt and moderate the unrest brewing among both faculty and students across the country.  The Duff-Berdahl Report of March 1966, jointly commissioned by the AUCC and the national faculty association CAUT, mostly made proposals for empowering faculty in cooperation with administration.  But it also warned that “student rebellions are possible if students are not given a voice in university government” (660323, 660928).  

SFU president McTaggart-Cowan had already adopted this approach from the beginning of SFU.  His typical response to student challenges was to create opportunities for students to voice their complaints, to cool out protests and to head off demands for actual student decision-making power.  The TA Incident stimulated a closer alliance between left faculty activists and left student activists, as well as between leftist students and liberal students, and between leftist faculty and liberal faculty.  It also encouraged McTaggart-Cowan and others in the SFU administration to go further in seeking to co-opt “responsible students” into university government.  SFU became the first university in Canada to admit (three) elected student representatives to full voting membership in the Senate (670405, 670607).

The moves to co-opt and moderate student pressure to be included in university government backfired for two reasons.  First, while McTaggart-Cowan progressively expanded the number and range of advisory committees with both faculty and student participation, virtually every recommendation that these committees came up with that would require any revisiting of a Board decision or any ceding of the Board’s absolute decision-making power was categorically rejected by the Board or Faculty Council.  This was not just the case in relation to hiring, firing and tenure for faculty but also for hardly revolutionary issues like considering changing the company contracted to provide on-campus food services (671015, 680228, 680327).  The Board also rejected McTaggart-Cowan’s proposal, developed by students and faculty in advisory committees over two years, to replace the Faculty Council (and in practice the Board) as the tribunal to mete out discipline for violations of university regulations with a student-faculty University Council (671122, 680214, 680327, 680403).  Conservative, liberal and leftist students all learned from experience over several years that the path of “voice” without real decision-making power – and more precisely a Universities Act that gave the Board and senior faculty administrators all the formal decision-making power -- was a charade that led to no change at all, not even moderate change.

Second, the opening of the Senate to three elected student representatives, that might have led in different circumstances to the creation of a new strata of pro-administration student leaders motivated by careerism, led instead to a protracted debate in meetings and student newspaper articles about the need to prevent this from happening.  Furthermore, the idea of empowering students was no longer just about whether students had standing, were legitimate members of a university community where students joined faculty in making the actual decisions.  Full membership in Senate with status equal to all other members conceded that point.  The debate among students shifted upwards to the issues of how to expand student decision-making power and how to ensure that student representatives were controlled by the students who elected them as representatives. 

How can student representatives avoid being co-opted?  New Left student senator Sharon Yandle gave a clearcut answer that focused on control from below (670927).  First, student reps must apply a single overriding yardstick in all their votes -- how does this decision move things forward towards the wider goal of equality in society and not just the university?  Second, representatives must be made subordinate to a vigorous participatory democracy in the student body, something that required ceaseless learning for all individual students to become caring, informed and active citizens instead of self-absorbed and passive subjects.  And one essential precondition of student reps being effectively subordinate to, and accountable to,  a student body participatory democracy was that all decision-making meetings in Senate and elsewhere be open.

CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND ACTION

What radical(izing) students saw as issues and interests at stake:

The Board walk-in drew clear lines between the interests of the government-appointed and business-dominated Board on the one hand and the “university community” on the other.  On its face, this pitted the same forces against one another as the TA Incident and did so over the same issue (academic freedom).  But the March 1968 Board walk-in was significantly different from the March 1967 TA Incident because this time students were not just reacting and seeking the reversal of a particular violation of academic freedom.  This time they were initiating a confrontation through a proposed act of civil disobedience and they were proactively raising demands for a major restructuring of decision-making powers which included demands for student power.  The issue at stake was not just academic freedom for faculty. It was whether or not SFU would become a democracy, a “self-governing community” (Gordon Hardy 680214), for students as much as for faculty.  As Peak editor Alan Bell put it “A university is not a business, a government or an army.  It is a democratic community” (680221).  At this point even New Left students did not really see that the interests in conflict would eventually put the majority of faculty on the other side, opposing radical democratization and supporting professional self-control for faculty instead.  But they did see what left faculty told an SDU meeting in January 1968, that left faculty were in too much of a minority within faculty to win on their own and that students would have to take the lead (680131).

Strategy and tactics: 

The strategy was to create an SDS-style SDU that would use a range of tactics from educationals to sit-ins to “educate” students in general to support the idea of a democratized university that included significant student decision-making power.  As its name expressed, the SDU was open to all students who agreed with the broad goal of a democratic university.  It modelled the ideal of participatory democracy internally.  The tactic of a Board break-in was a response to the Burstein case and the emerging CAUT crisis, but it was also very much the implementation of a new proactive strategy of consciousness raising. 

New social understandings and political goals:

In fall 1967, New Left student senator Sharon Yandle told the national meeting of university administrations (AUCC) that an article in the weekly newsmagazine Maclean’s was wrong in thinking that students were turning away from a concern with issues of injustice and inequality in the wider society and from the use of protest tactics to trying to win educational reform on campus through participation in university government (671122).  The new movement for student power was instead a new understanding of what means were necessary to achieve the same societal change goals. 

For instance, students in the civil rights movement in the United States that had begun over ten years earlier had learned from experience that Black people could not win enforceable rights and an end to discrimination until they won bottom-up control over the social and political institutions that ruled over them.  They had learned that civil rights required the winning of Black power first and that this would be won through a broader Movement of allied movements that sought various forms of power to the people.  And they had learned that this required first and foremost that Black people change their consciousness from that of “Negroes” accepting the inevitability of their subaltern status to that of proud Black Afro-Americans.  

In January 1968, the Peak joined student newspapers across Canada in reprinting Jerry Farber’s article “Student as Nigger”, originally published by the Berkeley Barb in November 1967.  Farber made an extensive and detailed analysis of the status of students by arguing that it was directly comparable to the situation of Afro-Americans.  Students were being brainwashed into a submissive “slave mentality” by an educational process that used exams and grades to  create an authoritarian relationship between teachers and students in the classroom.  If students wanted change they must first recognize “what Mr Charlie has done to your mind” (680131).