May 1968 to August 1968: Student Power Council Wins Parity in CAUT Censure Crisis

MAJOR CONFLICT: 

Thursday May 30, 1968 was the last day of voting for the summer 1968 Student Council.  The election was a contest between a radical Student Power slate headed by PSA graduate student Martin Loney and “moderates”, organized in the elections for the second set of seats into the Students to Avert Revolutionary Tactics (START).  The student power slate was quite explicit that it wanted to take the platform advanced in the previous semester by the Students for a Democratic University (SDU) and use the legitimacy and resources of Student Council to mobilize the student body as a whole.  It would do so by regularly bringing all important decisions made by Council, or issues that it had not yet decided, to mall meetings for debate, modification and acceptance or rejection.  It would be radical but accountable.  The student power slate won ten of the thirteen seats (680531).

The newly elected Student Power council was thrust into action right away.  Only the night before,  word had spread around campus that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) had officially censured the SFU Board and President McTaggart Cowan for failing to address the issues of academic freedom protections and academic self-government raised in the February 8 CAUT report.  A leaflet circulated on the Thursday May 30 morning declared that “[s]tudents must work together for the dismissal of the Board of Governors and the Administration to stop the threat to the quality of our education and our future as graduates of a blacklisted university” and “[t]he university must be restructured under democratic student and faculty control”.   Later that day Martin Loney told the over 1000 students at a mall student body meeting that “[t]o re-establish our name we must become the most democratic university in North America” by adopting eight demands for radical democratization that would be presented to the SFU Board (680531).  The students voted near unanimously to support the eight demands.

(( Footnote 1:

1 “Abolition of the Board of Governors as presently structured to be totally restructured giving the students and faculty majority control”. 

2  “Restructuring of the Senate so that it is totally representative of the students and faculty only.  This would then become the major decision-making and legislative body of the university”. 

3  “Abolition of the office of the president and chancellor as presently constituted and re-establishment of such offices as are necessary on an elective basis by students , faculty and staff”. 

4 “All administrative officials appointed will be ratified by Senate as structured”. 

5.   “Automatic due process in matters of hiring and firing must be instituted immediately.  This involves academic tenure, open hearings on alleged inconsistencies and infractions of person’s rights etc”. 

6 “Democratization of the department structure along the lines of the CAUT report instituting the principle of rotating chairman with term appointments”. 

7  “Public representation on the Board of Governors to be appointed either by community organizations such as the BC Federation of Labour, BC Federation of Teachers, BC Council of Churches, Canadian Council of Arts and Science and/or by the public”. 

8  “Striking of a committee composed equally of students and faculty chaired by a CAUT appointee to supervise the implementation of these reforms”. ))

Joint Faculty was convened later the same day by university president McTaggart-Cowan.  Faculty voted to close the meeting to students, even teaching assistants.  They adopted a motion by Faculty Association president Kenji Okuda to endorse the CAUT censure and to demand that McTaggart-Cowan resign.  He refused, but said he would forward the motions to the Board (680605).  Faculty had not called for the resignation of the censured Board even though it was clear in the CAUT statement that Chancellor Shrum and the current SFU Board were the problem.  Nor did faculty call for changes to the Universities Act to democratize the Senate and Board.  Hence students met again on Friday May 31 and put two motions to a secret ballot with voting extended to the Monday morning.  The first motion called for a “week-long moratorium on regular classes” in support of the eight demands.  The moratorium would stop earlier if the provincial government established an all-party committee to study changes to the Universities Act.  The second motion demanded that the Board resign and let the university be operated in the interim by an exclusively student and faculty committee (680605). 

Chancellor Shrum responded to the student motions by telling the mass media that “[t]he moratorium is illegal” and that “[e]ither the situation will remain in control or the university will be closed” (690605).  He also announced that an emergency Board meeting on Friday May 31 had responded to the faculty motions by putting McTaggart-Cowan on “extended leave”.  They had also named Education dean John Ellis as a supposedly temporary replacement.  But then they agreed to the proposal of Faculty Association president Okuda that Joint Faculty be allowed to propose another candidate to take the place of Ellis.  Hence Joint Faculty met again, this time open to student observers and even speakers, over three days from Monday June 3 through Wednesday June 5, 1968.  Ellis presented the first meeting with seven points that the Board had adopted that weekend.  Among other things the carefully worded points stated that the Board “will accept in the long or short term the UBC or CAUT statement on academic freedom and tenure” and that the Board “recognizes the need to re-examine the Universities Act with all parties being consulted” (680606).

At Monday noon June 3, a student body meeting voted to accept a motion by “moderate” ombudsman Rob Walsh that it would take a two-thirds majority for the moratorium motion to pass.  Then the vote was announced, eighty-nine percent (1361 to 289) for the Board to resign but only fifty-eight percent (967 to 706) for a week-long moratorium.  The student body and the approach spelled out in the eight demands -- which put academic freedom in the context of a wholesale democratization of the university, that also sought to make the Board representative of the general public, instead of just corporate and political interests – were sidelined.  All that remained was for students to be spectators at meetings of faculty.  Would faculty engage with the student approach?  Or would they seek their narrow professional interests at the expense of both students and the general public?  At first, left faculty won support for a series of resolutions aligning significantly with the student approach.  But later in the summer, faculty would change direction, and provide an education in the realities of social hierarchy to many students. 

On Tuesday afternoon June 4, a group of students, who were not led by either the student power councillors or SDU, started a “non-obstructive sit-in” in the Board meeting room. They did so to maintain pressure on the Board and, more to the point, on Joint Faculty who up to that point had not agreed to any of the various motions that would have given students an equal role and/or veto in both choosing a new (acting) president and proposing changes to the Universities Act (680606).  On Wednesday June 5 Joint Faculty finally agreed that the faculty committee to search for a new acting president would meet with a parallel student committee and would present only those candidates acceptable to both. 

A second faculty committee was also established to meet with a parallel student committee to generate proposals for restructuring university government consistent with four motions that Joint Faculty had adopted on Monday June 3.  The first three, proposed by left-wing Economics professor and Faculty Union leader Michael Lebowitz, called for short term appointment by democratic procedures of all academic administration, an exclusively academic Senate and an end to Board interference in academic affairs.  The fourth, proposed by conservative Physics professor Klaus Rieckhoff to replace Lebowitz’s original motion to reconstitute the Board to give faculty and students a majority, expressed support for “all legitimate activities aimed at the elimination of the Board as a ruling body and the transfer of its powers to other existing bodies” and “for a student-faculty committee to advise the Board until then” (680606).

The initial crisis had passed.  The two sets of parallel committees would meet separately, and mostly fail to coordinate or cooperate, until late July.  The Student  Power Council did get student body meeting authorization to take the case for radical democratization of the university to Members of the BC’s Legislative Assembly (many individual MLAs, from all parties, were sympathetic) and to meetings of labour unions and various community groups.  It also called for students in all departments to form committees to negotiate with faculty to achieve “student-faculty parity in decision-making” within their departments (680606). This met with an enthusiastic response among students, and faculty did begin to negotiate changes in many departments. 

The biggest changes were to come in PSA where the PSA Student Union adopted a series of motions by John Cleveland to create a research committee to generate proposals for changes in both decision-making structures and substantive areas like grading and teaching methods.  PSA students demanded, and PSA faculty granted, interim changes including student-faculty parity on all departmental committees and a continuation of the already established policy of allowing students equal speaking rights at PSA faculty plenary meetings (680619).  PSA had created what would soon become a model widely favoured by progressive students across Canada – independent parallel student and faculty plenaries, student-faculty parity on all committees and mutual veto.

SFU students in general, including more than a few of the radical student power advocates, began to imagine that SFU faculty had accepted the idea of a restructured university controlled jointly by students and faculty.  But on Monday July 29 and Tuesday July 30, Joint Faculty voted to propose to the Board their own committee’s candidate for acting president, Economics professor and pro-management labour relations expert Kenneth Strand.  They did so without even considering the student committee candidate or allowing the Student Society to organize a student referendum to ratify the Joint Faculty candidate.  The proposals for changing the structures of university government fell by the wayside (680731, 680802). 

Faculty had a deal.  The CAUT censure would be lifted in November 1968.  The Board had promised in its seven points that it would agree to either the UBC or CAUT academic freedom and tenure procedures, albeit “in the long or short term” (the long term would prove to be coded language for “after we have purged the troublemakers”).  Faculty had one of their own as acting president.  While many left and liberal faculty remained open to significant student power, the view of the large majority of faculty clearly was that there was no further need of student power of any kind to provide a left flank for their own movement for faculty power. 

CONTEXT 

External environment:  The summer 1968 semester opened on Saturday May 11 with the unfurling of a banner above and behind the convocation ceremony: “Internationale for Student Power – Berkeley, Prague, Warsaw, Paris, Tokyo, SFU”.  An SDU leaflet stressed the parallel between the struggles of students and workers, and condemned the provincial government’s Bill 33 which allowed the government to prevent or end a strike by imposing compulsory arbitration (680515).   The Peak editorial, titled “Just Like Them?”, highlighted the fact that students were protesting against authoritarian rule and lack of sufficient liberalization and democratization in communist states as well as capitalist states (680522).  The Prague Spring had begun in January.  The May-June events in France were just beginning. 

Closer to home, Pierre Elliott Trudeau had become leader of the federal Liberal party on April 6 on a platform of continuing and expanding the Lester Pearson government’s left-leaning social policies.  A wave of “Trudeaumania” would win him a strong majority government on June 25.  In the United States, Lyndon Johnson had, since taking over from the assassinated president John Fitzgerald Kennedy in November 1963,  simultaneously aroused hopes for an era of liberal change with his Great Society domestic policies and undermined belief in America’s supposed mission of spreading freedom and democracy abroad with his escalation of the war in Vietnam.  Peace candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in the Democratic primary vote in New Hampshire raised liberal hopes.  On March 31 1968, Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election because of the greatly increased opposition to the Vietnam War in the aftermath of the first Tet offensive in February 1968.  But then Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4.  Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 6.  The hopes of many Americans, young as well as old, that peaceful and gradual liberalization could be achieved within the mainstream political system were repeatedly challenged throughout 1968.

Other on-campus events:  The summer 1968 semester was dominated from beginning to end by the activism of the Student Power student council.  The overriding issue was winning student-faculty parity in decision-making.  But in the interlude between the first Joint Faculty meetings of June 3 to June 5 and what the Peak described as a shocking betrayal of students in the Joint Faculty meetings of July 29 and July 30, several other issues emerged that tested the limits of the progressive consensus in the student body. 

Already in April 1968, a majority of PSA Department professors had petitioned the SFU Senate to consider its claims that the University Committee was repeatedly rejecting its proposed new hires because of their (left-wing) political views (680522).  Senate met on April 8 but, instead of addressing the PSA’s complaints, Dean of Science Funt read out a list of nine vague charges, with little or no factual evidence, that many PSA faculty were creating an atmosphere of political intimidation in their classes and in departmental meetings.  The charges were later rejected as baseless by Senate but warning flags of a possible future purge of PSA faculty on political grounds were up (680410). 

On June 4, the left and liberal majority in PSA got a stronger handle on legitimated decision-making authority when David Bettison resigned and Mordecai Briemberg was elected as PSA chair (680606).  PSA faculty were quick to respond favourably to the initial proposals by PSA students for student-faculty parity in departmental decision-making.  This had a major impact in encouraging students in other departments to believe that they could win similar changes (680619, 680626, 680703).  As Peak editor Alan Bell had foreseen in January 1968, the mass of students were ready to support a New Left led movement for radical democratization of the university without necessarily being New Left on other issues,  because “you don’t need to be New Left to be for democracy” (680117).

One of those other issues was racism and Canada’s history of genocidal colonization of Native peoples.  PSA PhD students and Student Power Council members Jim Harding and John Conway had both been active, when they were students in Saskatchewan, in promoting awareness of the extreme poverty and racial discrimination facing First Nations people.  On June 24, the Student Power student council adopted Jim Harding’s motion to get a mall student meeting to vote to change the name of the university to Louis Riel University to honour the 19th century Metis leader in place of the colonizer Simon Fraser.  The motion also called for “a system of awards, scholarships and bursaries for the sole use of Canadians of Indian ancestry” (680703).  The motion provoked a frenzy of mostly negative commentary in the mass media. 

Conservative students were out in force for the July 10 mall meeting to support Robert Danielson’s motion to express non-confidence in the Student Power Council.  That motion was deferred to the end of the meeting, by which time the quorum had been lost, and would be overwhelmingly rejected at the July 18 mall meeting (680724).  But students at the July 10 meeting insisted that the Louis Riel University proposal be put to an immediate vote and proceeded to vote it down.  A student council motion to donate twenty-five dollars to the Black Panther Party defence fund was also defeated.  Chastened, and still facing a motion of non-confidence, the Student Council decided at its July 15 meeting to reject a proposal to help fund a speech on campus by Saskatchewan Metis leader and professor Howard Adams.  They did however respond positively to the president of the newly-formed Indian Education club, Henry Jack, who said that the club would “push for the establishment of courses dealing with Indian history and culture” and “for the establishment of an Indian Studies Centre”.  Council voted to finance the publication of a brochure by the Indian Education club “to attract Indian and Metis students to Simon Fraser” (680718).

Another issue that was different from student power that emerged in summer 1968 was women’s liberation.  Some of the female students in the Board sit-in were parents of young children.  When the Board sit-in ended on June 11, they led both male and female students in occupying one end of the student lounge to establish a parent-run “day nursery”.  The occupiers demanded, and were eventually successful in winning, university funding for a properly resourced on-campus parent-controlled daycare cooperative (680619).  The response to this feminist issue was mostly tacit support, bordering perhaps on disinterest for the vast majority of (male) students who were childless.  But the response to the formation of the Feminist Action League (later Women’s Caucus and then the Working Women’s Association),  one of the earliest second-wave feminist groups in Canada, was quite different. 

The front page of the July 3 Peak carried a photo of Marcy Toms, Patty Harding and three other female students sitting around a table.  The cutline declared “Pussy Power Strikes at SFU…  The ladies, pictured above, are made up, in part, by the women of council members and sundry hangers on… Their ultimate goal is as yet undecided but they announced that all their meetings would be restricted to women”.  The letter signed by Toms and Harding in the next issue of the Peak was framed by images of naked female breasts and headlined “Pussy Power Strikes Back”.  Toms and Harding wrote: “The reference to us as ‘women of council members and sundry hangers-on’ only serves to perpetuate the traditionally ascribed role of the parasitic, subservient female owned by the male.  We demand rather that we be known as ourselves, as people”.  The letter cited socialist feminist Juliet Mitchell’s view that the cutting edge of challenge and change in male-female relations currently was in the area of sexual behaviour, and more precisely in a questioning of the idea that women should orient their lives to preparing to serve men in a patriarchal family marriage (680710). 

Peak columnist Ed Wong tried to be humorous, but mostly channelled the unease that many male students likely were expressing privately: “No the recently formed Feminine (sic) Action League is not a social club for the bored, confused, neglected mates of student activists…   Reliable sources has it that their militancy so far has produced no results other than threatening a couple of marriages but the women assure us that the issues are more serious than that…  Meanwhile, rumour has it that there is a Men’s Self-Defence League being formed”.   In contrast, Peak editor Jan Pill wrote that “the total emancipation of women demands a drastic restructuring of the assumptive worlds of both sexes…  The double standard is dying.  Increasing numbers of girls show themselves as capable of enjoying sex as males – and with as many partners” (680710).

Issues such as racist colonization (by us Canadians, not those Americans) and sexism (by us males personally) were new to most students.  Many people were threatened, and some were outright dismissive or hostile.  For all males and all non-Natives it meant confronting their own sexism and racism.  These were not issues that the student power council was ready or able to mobilize students around.  But the genie was out of the bottle.

CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND ACTION

Perception of issues and interests at stake:  The contradictions in the understandings of leftist students about what the student movement was about are expressed in the banner they unfurled at the spring 1968 convocation: “Internationale for Student Power”.  What social groups were to be mobilized to be part of the Internationale?  And what was student power for?  In some of the places mentioned by the protesters, like the United States and West Germany and Japan, student protests were increasingly directly about the Vietnam war, and, in the US, also about institutionalized racism against African Americans.  In other places, like France and Italy, students were trying to build alliances with workers that in both countries led to militant factory occupations and strikes around issues that included worker control.  The leaflet circulated at the convocation protest stressed the parallels between worker and student struggles for control internationally. 

If SFU student power advocates were going to emulate these examples, they would have to know that they were aiming to use student power to fight for social interests that might not rally the support of most students, at least initially, and even more likely, not most faculty.  But the day the Student Power Council got elected they were saddled with the responsibility of getting the CAUT censure lifted. That meant stressing the alignment of interests of most students and most faculty, not just those interested in building a wider societal change movement, and putting almost all energies into replacing a business-dominated Board with a student-faculty controlled Senate and Board.  This made perfect sense.  But in doing so they lost sight of the fact that the Board and its allies in faculty and the student body were under no illusions about what granting student and faculty control would mean.  The majority might just possibly be somewhat open to an experimental university and social mixing between faculty and students in a face to face “university community”.  But student and faculty control would lead to much more radical conflicts with the government and business establishment.  New Left students should not have been shocked and surprised when Joint Faculty voted to shut the door on student power at the level of the Senate and the Board, but many were.

Strategy and tactics:  Student Power slate candidate Martin Loney told voters : “It is our hope in the summer semester to start the work of building a coherent student movement which is linked with off-campus groups, both educational and labour”.  John Conway saw things developing step by step.  The first step was to elect a student power Council that would “build a truly democratic, participatory student union”; the second was “to begin utilizing that power base to transform SFU”; the third step, perhaps simultaneous with the second, would be to make links with off-campus issues to work for both off-campus and on-campus change (680522).  This is what happened, but both the radicals on Council and those not on it failed to plan what to do when these initiatives stimulated a counter-movement by those who wanted to cut off, at step one,  the step by step strategy for using the university to change society.

Changes in social understandings and political goals:  Both Loney and Conway were typical of New Left students at SFU in mid-1968.  They were socialists who shared an analysis of the US war against Vietnam as imperialist and of racism in the US and elsewhere as institutionalized.  They hoped that building a student power movement would somehow contribute to a wider movement that would win radical changes in the society.  But they had not really even begun to think through what this would mean in practice.  This was apparent in the vagueness of all the references in the Peak to what student power supporters could and should do to build alliances with off-campus groups.  The vague idea was that students would organize on campuses to win student power and would later use that power to help groups off-campus in their struggles.  Of course, in the meantime they would also encourage students to go off-campus and participate in progressive movements.  But the main idea was that everyone would organize their own movements where they were and would somehow link up later in an overall social and political change movement – the nature of that movement TBA later.  REWRITE THIS section.