September 1968 to December 1968: The Occupation and the 114

MAJOR CONFLICT 

In the aftermath of the summer 1968 semester Student Power Council mobilization of students to support radical democratization of the university in response to the CAUT censure, “moderate” students won an average two-thirds voting mandate on October 1 1968 to take over the Student Council (680925, 681002).  It looked to many like the student body had decisively rejected the radicals and the troubles would be over. 

But student power radicals in the Students for a Democratic University had also been changed by the summer of 1968, in the opposite direction.  In the Fall of 1968, the actions of the SDU changed in two important ways that reflected lessons drawn from experience.  First, they sought to build a movement of radicals and progressives that went beyond just the SFU campus.  And second, they tried to be proactive in developing non-violent but disruptive “confrontations” that would pose the question of the university’s role in society, of “Knowledge for Whom?”. 

On Friday October 4 1968, members of SDU type groupings and radical individuals from several colleges across BC met at UBC and quickly identified an issue relevant to all of their campuses – the difficulty that students from the less prestigious colleges, and most glaringly American males of draft age, had in getting acceptance of their transfer credits and hence gaining admission to the two main universities of UBC and SFU.  They decided to begin researching the issue and to gather individual case histories from rejected and dissatisfied applicants.

((FOOTNOTE 1:

SDU member Guy Pocklington and Ombudsman Ace Hollibaugh revealed the first results of the research into problems of discriminatory admissions in the October 23 issue of the Peak: 500 American draft dodgers had been knowingly refused admission to SFU and students from other universities and especially from BC junior colleges had been refused entry because their course credits were not recognized as equivalent.  Associate registrar Myers confirmed that he did routinely ask American applicants to SFU if they were draft dodgers and that transfer credits were regularly denied.  After the 114 occupation, many letters and internal memoes from the SFU administration files showed that the SFU administration had got the RCMP to provide information on the political backgrounds of both faculty seeking to be hired at SFU and students seeking admission as students (681125, 681128)  ))

Within six weeks, on Thursday November 14, student radicals carried out the first of several planned actions, this one on SFU campus, to highlight the issue and to present their “Four Demands” (681120).

((FOOTNOTE 2:

(1)  Freedom of transfer and automatic acceptance of credits within the BC public educational system.  (2) An elected parity student-faculty Admissions Board.  (3) The opening of all administration files.  (4)  More money for education as a whole, equitable financing within post-secondary education and an immediate end to the current school construction freeze. ))

The action was a rally, where 500 students voted support for the four demands, and a mill-in outside the registrar’s office to demand that the registrar deal in person with the cases of multiple individuals.  This led to a two hour face to face meeting with both the registrar and acting university president Strand, who rejected the four demands but told students “you have a good issue”.  He suggested that they bring their demands to the meeting of the Senate committee on Undergraduate Admissions that was meeting that night.  The committee said the four demands were outside their terms of reference.  Student senators Stan Wong and Donn Korbin and sympathetic faculty successfully petitioned for a November 20 emergency meeting of Senate on the issue.

The positive response of students had greatly exceeded expectations and the dismissive and negative response of the Senate, which categorically rejected the four demands, quickly polarized matters.   On Wednesday evening, November 20, several hundred students occupied the administration building (681121).  At 2am on Saturday morning, November 23, the RCMP, called onto campus by acting president Kenneth Strand, cleared the building peacefully and took 114 students to jail (64 others had taken up the RCMP’s offer to leave the occupation without being arrested).  The “114” were initially charged with “mischief against private property”, an indictable offence with penalties ranging from two to fourteen years in prison (681125).

The Moderate-dominated Student Council met at 4:40am Saturday morning and again on the Sunday afternoon.  On Saturday they condemned Strand for calling the RCMP on campus instead of seeking to “resolve the conflict internally in the university through rational debate” and announced that they would call a student assembly on Monday to consider a motion demanding that Strand resign.  On Sunday, they adopted five points to be put before the student assembly, including a motion that a student general student strike be considered and that Strand be asked to resign if he failed to respond favourably to the first four points by Tuesday November 26, i.e. within 24 hours of the Monday meeting.  Those points were: first, reconvene Senate to reconsider the four demands (renamed the four proposals); second, get Senate to create a student-parity committee to investigate all administration files, to search for further evidence of political discrimination in admissions as evidenced by several shocking documents from the files that had just been published in UBC’s student newspaper; third, urge the Attorney-General not to add more charges and to drop the existing charges against the 114;  fourth, assure the university community that the RCMP would not operate any longer on campus (681125).

(( FOOTNOTE 3:

SFU faculty responded very differently than students to the RCMP being called on campus by president Strand to arrest the 114.  The Faculty Association executive (not to be confused with the Faculty Union, which was in quick decline as a vehicle for action now that faculty had been promised future tenure protection) issued a press release on Saturday November 23 expressing full support for Strand’s actions.  They claimed that 150 of the 169 faculty who had been phoned agreed with their stand.  Of course, these numbers are an exaggeration, because few of the faculty known to favour student power were phoned.  But supportive faculty were in the minority, and mostly could only give support as individuals. ))

There was no leadership from Student Council president Rob Walsh, for the simple reason that he was silently on the side of Strand and shared with him the agenda of crushing the SDU.  On Monday November 25, Walsh revealed his hand by going against the Council’s proposed points.  He tried to get the student assembly to vote on a substitute motion that condemned the SDU for the occupation while also criticizing Strand for calling the cops on campus.  The effort failed and a version of the four points was adopted and sent to Strand.

On Tuesday, Strand replied by rejecting three of the four points, while asking for more arguments before he would respond on the issue of getting the charges dropped against the 114.  The motion to go on a general strike was put to a secret ballot.  On Wednesday, Attorney-General Les Peterson announced that he would not drop the charges.  Student senator Stan Wong persuaded the student assembly to annul the strike vote in order to debate the new circumstances.  It was now certain that the 114 would face the possibility of  permanent criminal records and time spent in a federal penitentiary.  A new strike motion was put to a secret ballot on Thursday and the results were announced to the fifth consecutive student assembly of over 2000 students on Friday November 29 1968.  It was the end of the semester, and many students had already lost a full week of classes in practice.  A student strike might mean losing the semester or, more realistically, having exams and assignments put off until after Christmas.  The vote was a decisive 2,428 to 1,181 to reject the strike motion (681128, 681202).

CONTEXT

External environment:  Socially and politically, the second half of 1968 was the beginning of what would be a dozen (more) years of liberalization of social attitudes and the emergence of left-leaning social movements addressing issues of class, ethnicity-race, gender, sexuality and other types of social injustice and inequality in Canada, the United States and around the world.  This trend contrasted sharply with what was happening at the level of social, economic and political elites – the intensification of a conservative counter-movement.   

In the United States, Richard Nixon was elected president on a policy of law and order that was perceived by white suburbanites as a coded message that urban working class Blacks would be repressed.  In Canada, the newly-elected prime minister Trudeau continued the left-leaning reformist policy orientation of his predecessor Lester B. Pearson while promising to be a hard-liner in dealing with the Quebec independence movement.  The predominant trend everywhere was the simultaneous rise of protest and social movements and the increased willingness of governments to selectively and often brutally repress the most militant and left elements of those movements.

The annual Canadian Union of Students Congress of August 28 to September 4th 1968 committed the majority of student councils across English Canada to emulating the demands and the tactics of the Simon Fraser student power council.  Martin Loney was drafted and acclaimed to be the next national CUS president, starting in the following 1969-70 academic year.  In the meantime, Loney was frequently invited by local councils to speak across the country in 1968-69.  CUS hired many regional fieldworkers to provide detailed support and advice to local councils.  The mass media took the phrase “Burn, Baby Burn” in the Congress opening speech of 1968-69 CUS president Peter Warrian out of context (Warrian was a long-term pacifist).  It ran repeated articles about supposed conspiracies by CUS and local SDUs to promote violent confrontations on local campuses (680904, 680911).

Minor events providing context to the major conflict:  The Fall 1968 semester began with newly appointed university president Strand speaking to a mostly appreciative mall meeting of 2500 students.  He counterposed his idea of a university based on Reason and Debate to the student power approach of Power and Confrontation (680911).  Student Moderate leader Rob Walsh talked periodically with Strand and the administration behind the scenes as he had been doing since the period before and after the CAUT report and the March 1 1968 Board Walk-In.

((FOOTNOTE 4:

The Peak reported (and Walsh never disputed) that in March and April 1968, when everyone on the Student Council resigned except Walsh, he met secretly with university president McTaggart-Cowan.  Walsh advised him on how to maneuver against the actions of the student body voted for in student meetings that Walsh chaired (681030). ))

Walsh also organized anti-radical students in secret meetings starting from that period, when he organized “independents” in the first round and then an openly moderate slate Students to Avert Revolutionary Tactics Now in the second round in the summer 1968 student council elections.  Walsh did the same thing again in September, running alongside several others purporting to be unlinked independents in the first round, and declaring that he was for “student power through reason” (680918). 

After winning election as Council president, Walsh championed the Moderates for Student Progress and came out strongly against a continuation of the SDU and summer 1968 Council policy of bringing major Student Council decisions to student body meetings for approval.  Walsh claimed that he favoured student-faculty parity in some areas, notably in the selection of the university president and vice-presidents, until after the MSP swept to second round victory.  Science dean Klaus Rieckhoff declared that students would be granted only token representation on such committees since students had just demonstrated, by electing moderates, that they were against student power.  Walsh immediately changed course and told the Peak that students should accept token representation because they were less competent than faculty (681002).

One of Walsh’s earliest initiatives was to call a quick referendum to withdraw SFU from the Canadian Union of Students.  This alienated him from three of the MSPers on Council.  Science rep Scott Primrose explained that he supported CUS as a national union because it was the logical extension of student unions on the departmental and local university level.  Students voted overwhelmingly (1123 to 685) to remain in CUS and also voted to require that Student Council bring all major decisions to student body meetings (681023, 681106). 

The six hardliner moderates began to caucus in secret and to exclude the unreliable moderates.  When an emergency Senate meeting was called to consider the Four Demands, the six hard-liners met secretly with faculty and administration on the Senate committee on Undergraduate Admissions. They came up with 11 points to counter the SDU four demands and falsely claimed that Student Council had adopted them (681121).  All of this duplicity and secret maneuvering was revealed in the Peak.  Walsh and the Moderates had won an anti-radical mandate in early October.  Walsh and most Moderates worked behind the scenes with the university president and the Faculty Association to defeat the Four Demands mobilization.  But by the end of November a large number of students had supported the SDU’s radical four demands and several militant actions in support of them.   The Four Demands mobilization was a leap in the level of social interests being championed.  The call for an unlimited strike in the last weeks of the semester was a leap in sacrifice being demanded of supporters.  It was a leap too far.

CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND ACTION

What radical(izing) students saw as the issues and interests at stake:  Up to Fall 1968, the major conflicts had pitted faculty and students seeking self-rule against a business-dominated Board that ruled from outside.  The coalition of SDUs from several campuses initiated the Four Demands mobilization because they wanted to link on campus struggles for student power with off-campus struggles for leftward social change.  They wanted to expose the fact that SFU was acting like an elite institution that denied equal access to students from relatively unprivileged backgrounds.  What they discovered from their researches was that the discrimination was more conscious and more extreme than even they had thought. 

The Four Demands conflict did not pit SFU students against the Board.  It championed the interests of students who were not at SFU or UBC or other major universities.  It raised its demands to a faculty and administration dominated Senate and to the faculty’s man as president, Kenneth Strand. When Strand called the RCMP to arrest the student occupiers he received the solid support of most SFU faculty in doing so.  When it came down to voting on a student strike to champion the interests of students excluded from SFU (as opposed to seeking student power for themselves, as had been the case in the successful vote for a week-long strike in May-June 1968), two-thirds of the students voted no.

Strategy and tactics:  The strategic goal of the Four Demands mobilization was to build a multi-campus radical student movement that would champion the interests of working people and other subordinate groups off campus as well as students and faculty on campus.  Doing so would broaden and deepen the existing movement for student power by asking what interests student power should serve. 

The tactic was to use non-violent but disruptive civil disobedience to achieve two goals: first, to proactively put the issue of what social interests the university should serve on the agenda, and thereby to go beyond the limits of mobilizing to react to the latest Board attacks on faculty professional interests; second, to “raise consciousness” by exposing the actual interests served by the university despite the liberal rhetoric of both faculty and administration leaders.   

When the coalition of SDUs carried out their first civil disobedience action, a rally and mill-in, there was good reason to feel that these tactics would not escalate to the level of confrontation and repression that they eventually did.  In all of the previous occasions when students had used disruptive tactics, there had been no use of either off-campus police or even on-campus security guards to forcibly end a civil disobedience action or de facto strike.  Nor had any student since the TA Incident actually been suspended or kicked out of school.   Rather, such actions had stimulated large meetings and debates and the adoption of motions and the implementation of reforms.  But this time president Strand,  quietly supported by most Student Council Moderates and somewhat more openly cheered on by a solid majority of faculty, decided to use the RCMP and the laying of serious criminal charges to make it clear that left-wing agitation using non-violent but disruptive tactics would no longer be tolerated at SFU.

Changes in social understandings and political goals: The SDU and the SFU student power movement continued to battle for student power in Fall 1968.  But the understandings of what student power was, and how winning it related to other progressive social change goals,  had changed.  In Fall 1967, student power meant making student representatives accountable to student body meetings and all university committees holding open meetings.  In Winter 1968, student power meant transferring the power to make final decisions on faculty employment and promotions from the Board to structures controlled by the “university community”.  In summer 1968, student power meant student-faculty parity in decision-making.  In Fall 1968, student power increasingly meant democratizing the university in order to make the university serve progressive social change.

Of course, this history of the evolution of the student power idea is a history of the lowest common denominator consensus view at each stage.  These are the views that student majorities actually voted for, and that many non-left students declared that they supported despite not holding New Left views generally.  In Fall 1968, the coalition of SDUs continued to win votes from student majorities for the changes they were seeking to accomplish with their Four Demands campaign.  The students at the post-occupation student meetings refused Walsh’s effort to get them to condemn the SDU for its tactic of occupying the administration building.  They voted massively against the laying of criminal charges against the occupiers and the increased presence of undercover police on the campus.  But nevertheless the conservative countermovement of some students, faculty and administration was increasingly aggressive.  It was having more success in polarizing opinion between ‘open-minded moderates supporting a university of rational debate’ and ‘closed-minded radicals seeking to take control of the university in order to impose their extreme leftist views’. 

The self-declared opponents of the SDU provide some insight into how the thinking of New Left students was changing by the ways in which the anti-radicals attacked those views in public in order to discredit them.  In a nutshell, the attacks were on the student left for its stand on issues of race, gender and class inequality. 

SDU members Dodie Weppler and Marcy Toms reported in the September 18 1968 issue of the Peak that women in the SDU had held their first meeting of the SDU Women’s Caucus to challenge the sexism of the male left within the SDU as well as sexism in general.  George Reamsbottom wrote an article in the same issue saying that the “sweet young mass of campus chicks” in the caucus had “a valid grievance in protesting double wage standards and social discrimination”, but added that “it won’t change their biological role”.  It was unfair when the caucus “raps us horny males for seeing the female as a sexual object” because most females “know how to use their feminine sex appeal to manipulate the stronger sex”.  He concluded that the “most dangerous trend is toward a reversal of roles – an unnatural reversal.  Somebody has to take care of the kids and home…  men must put this movement down before it gets out of hand” (680918).  Peter Knowlden wrote a satire about the student left that included a fictional story about a male student who mutters about “chicks” and “pussy power” after he is rebuffed in his attempt to attend a Women’s Caucus meeting.  Knowlden concludes with a witticism: “So men if you discriminate, remember that’s what women hate; Just make your passes equally all around; For if your oppression is too raucous, they’ll run away and caucus” (680925).

SDUer Jim Harding, who had been first vice-president on the summer 1968 student power council, wrote a Peak article to explain the campaign to rename the university after Louis Riel.  The article was expressly aimed at incoming students who were not on campus in the summer and would have only have seen alarmist mass media accounts.  Harding wrote that the purpose of the campaign was to change the identification of members of the university community, from support for the colonization of French, Indians and Metis to support for the struggles of these peoples for self-determination,  which paralleled student struggles for self-determination (680904).  Brian White wrote that the student power candidates had not lost the Student Council election because of a reactionary backlash.  Rather it was because student power was demanding ideological support for its full program of issues, “including really stupid ones” like renaming the university Louis Riel in order to support Native self-determination (681002).  Mark Czanecki wrote a letter arguing that new students like himself had heard exciting things about SFU being a place where faculty experimented with teaching methods and students were trying to change the concept of a university.  As youth of the 1960s generation, new students like him tended to prefer change over the status quo.  Nevertheless, many new students had voted for Walsh’s Moderates, and even sided with a rather “uninspiring” president Strand, because they were offended by the rhetoric of radicals like Martin Loney, who used “Third World jargon like oppression.  I’m sorry, I don’t feel oppressed” (681009). 

SDU supporter Bill Fletcher wrote that the 1968 Canadian Union of Students (CUS) Congress had adopted many anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist motions, even though at best five or six delegations (including the SFU delegation) were made up mostly of socialists.  Fletcher wrote that this made him hopeful that CUS members were ready to build a student movement that concerned itself with the problems of society as a whole, rather than being the vehicle of a self-interested group (680911).  SDUer Brian McManus wrote that radicals at SFU had actually done fairly well in keeping close to the immediate problems and realities of students.  However, they themselves had been radicalized by their experiences over the course of 1968.  They sometimes failed to notice when many students started not to understand their rhetoric and the connections that they made between issues (681009).  Brian White advised student power advocates that they should recognize that students were middle class, not proletarians, and that they should change their ideology accordingly, to stress the middle class values of individualism, spontaneity and pragmatism (681002).

In sum, by the Fall of 1968 radicals were increasingly trying to make links between the movement for student power and movements for the liberation and power of women, racial minorities, previously colonized Third World peoples and workers.  This was not because the radicals were so terribly advanced relative to non-radicals in either their thinking or their practice on these issues.  Rather they were just beginning to recognize that they personally, and their student power movement, needed to explicitly address issues of sexism, racism, imperialism, and middle class privilege in relation to working class people.