SIXTIES STUDENTS Simon Fraser (6): The PSA Strike
January 1969 to December 1970 – The PSA Strike
MAJOR CONFLICT:
On Thursday July 3 1969, the PSA (Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology) faculty voted to reaffirm its democratic system of operating the department. Students had parity on all committees, including committees dealing with hiring, promotions and tenure. All significant decisions had to pass through the autonomous student and faculty plena to be enacted (mutual veto). On Monday July 7, a closed Senate meeting gave the SFU administration powers necessary to impose a trusteeship on departments and to do so while conducting an investigation into “administrative” irregularities. On Friday July 11, a joint student-faculty plenum PSA meeting democratized even further by creating a process of review of its own academic and administrative practices: a nine person committee that included three support staff as well as three students and three faculty would hold weekly open hearings. On Tuesday July 15, president Strand announced that the Board of Governors had authorized a trusteeship over PSA. Strand would, and did, name individuals from outside or inside the department who would make all decisions affecting PSA. This included any and all decisions on hiring, renewal, promotion, tenure and dismissal. All decisions that had already been made by PSA committees would be nullified and replaced (690716).
PSA students and faculty met on July 15 and reaffirmed yet again their support for the parity system and adopted the PSA Statement of Principles that would provide the guidelines for PSA’s own review and re-organization process.
“Simon Fraser University is rapidly moving toward the multiversity, toward the imitation of an American model of education. We, faculty, students and staff of PSA counterpose to this spectre the vision of a Department grounded on the philosophy of participation and control from below and designed to serve the needs of the people of British Columbia.”
“Critical Social Science: We are social critics… We see within each social order the possibility of going beyond that social order. We identify, analyze, and so help to overcome obstacles to the realization of human liberation.”
“Democratic Control: Faculty power in decision-making complements faculty authoritarianism in the classroom. Parity in decision-making complements uninhibited intellectual discussion in the classroom... We encourage cooperative struggles for truth and mutual criticism instead of the manipulation of exams and the competition for grades”.
“Community Integration: The university is not neutral on social questions. The work of most social scientists serves the interests of the wealthy and powerful. We will contribute our energies to solve the problems of workers not the ‘problem with workers’, the problems of native peoples not the ‘problem with native peoples’, the problems of welfare recipients not the ‘problem with welfare recipients’, the problems of youth not the ‘problem with youth’” (690716).
Note that the PSA Statement did not claim to represent what PSA already was. It was a declaration of what PSA students, faculty and staff wanted PSA to become.
Over the remainder of the summer 1969 semester, it became unmistakably clear that the PSA trusteeship was only the beachhead of an all-out political purge of faculty in all departments who were considered to be supporters of student parity and of PSA. Time and again faculty who fit this profile were not renewed or not granted tenure. Many months later, appeal processes, many involving external professional bodies, would find that most of these decisions were not justified by the facts, but by then it was too late. In any event the SFU administration, backed strongly by the Faculty Association executive and general faculty opinion, would find pretexts to refuse to change most of them (700727, 700729).
The Board won the support of most faculty in August 1969 to release Strand from his written promise to not run for permanent president. They also arbitrarily advanced the start date for the permanent president to August 31 1969. This rendered Strand the only possible remaining candidate. The new start date also justified a Board-ordered mail ballot of students from the previous three semesters, which pre-empted a student council organized debate and vote planned for September. The only document accompanying the mailed ballot was a text recommending Strand’s release from a committee that had included some students -- 62% of students voted yes. Strand thereby stayed in office after August 31 1969 to carry the purge through to the end (690813, 690903).
The political purge had begun with the setting aside of all the renewal and tenure recommendations of the PSA tenure committee. A new trusteeship committee was named in July by Arts Dean Sullivan to make different recommendations. But even this committee failed to come up with enough of the “right” decisions and so in August 1969 those recommendations were also set aside and a third tenure committee was named. Those proposals were then rushed through all the other levels in flagrant violation of the Academic Freedom and Tenure (AFT) brief. The Fall 1969 semester opened with a large number of PSA faculty facing either dismissal or pressure to move elsewhere in order to get tenure (690903).
PSA faculty were being provoked into making a decision: Should we stand our ground with the students and support staff, and fight back collectively? Or should we abandon the parity system, and hope that the implied promise to not be radical outside our classrooms and research publications would enable many of us individually to save our jobs? To their enduring credit, in what may be the only example on record across North America in the late 1960s, a majority of PSA faculty chose their principles over their jobs, and most were rewarded with unjustified dismissal or denial of tenure.
On Monday September 22 1969, students and faculty met in a PSA General Assembly. They voted 700 to 36 with 12 abstentions to begin “a PSA Strike and Teach-In on democratizing SFU” on Wednesday September 24. The strike component would mean PSA faculty not teaching and students information picketing. It would mean outreach to potential allies to publicly declare their support for PSA’s academic freedom to experiment. The teach-in component would mean “consciousness raising” activities, including student-initiated countercourses about social injustices in the off-campus community. PSA would strike if president Strand continued to refuse to open negotiations to reach a settlement that would lift the trusteeship and allow for consideration of the original PSA renewal and tenure recommendations (690924). He didn’t, and they did.
Strand had already responded with a categorical refusal to a September 8 open letter signed by 15 PSA faculty seeking negotiations based on these conditions. He had also escalated his threats by announcing that he would seek the formation of a five-person External Committee to conduct “an examination of the academic programs and administration” of PSA. The external committee would be made up of two people named by the national association of university administrations (AUCC), two named by the national association of faculty (CAUT) and a mutually agreed chair (690917).
((FOOTNOTE 1:
The Peak published an article satirizing one of President Strand’s many open letters wherein he objected to statements that PSA professors were being fired. Strand wrote: “No one has been fired. Failure to renew a contract of limited term or a decision not to grant tenure at the end of a probationary period does not constitute ‘firing’”. The Peak parody repeated these words and then paraphrased and riffed on the rest: “Faculty members can resign, be released, join the administration team or be dismissed. Accordingly, no one has been fired. Therefore, it would help to produce an environment conducive to dispassionate discussion of the pension plan and the faculty club if those faculty members who have been released from their future obligations to the university would please leave as soon as possible without spreading falsehoods … Some have asserted that the University Tenure Committee, in recommending that the ears of the PSA members be cut off, was acting outside the terms of reference of the Academic Freedom and Tenure Statement adopted by this faculty… While it must be clear to all members of the faculty that PSA members for some time have not heard what I and others in my team have been saying to them, I must emphasize that the decision is not final. Any aggrieved member has the right to appeal to me if he feels the procedures followed in removing the ears were faulty… Today, after a review of present and future attempts to dissolve this Department, I have called for the formation of a five man External Committee to examine the tongues of PSA members. There has been much concern within the Administration about what PSA has been saying, and I ask the cooperation of the faculty of the PSA Department in permitting a resolution of this matter without emotional reaction, which benefits no one. The charge to the External Committee will specifically exclude any judgments or recommendations pertaining to ears” (690917). ))
This was obviously designed to pre-empt any possible support for PSA by the CAUT investigation team that had already visited the campus, let alone any of the Canadian or American sociology, anthropology or political science associations who might (and eventually did) follow suit – and who might investigate the actions of the president and senior faculty outside PSA and not just PSA.
The strike achieved a powerful mobilization of students inside and outside PSA in support of the threatened PSA faculty and student parity. The majority of PSA faculty stopped teaching and almost no students tried to attend those classes or complained that they were not being taught. When Strand arranged for students in PSA courses that were not being taught to transfer into PSA courses taught by non-striking PSA faculty, PSA students information picketed the non-striking PSA faculty taught “replacement courses”. When Strand also enabled students to protect their credits by transferring to non-PSA courses, the majority of affected students refused to take them, even though the PSA general assembly, confusingly, eventually urged them to do so (691015). The TA union voted to refuse to teach tutorials (and hence refused to grade) for those replacement courses, thereby indicating the view that these were “scab courses” (691008).
From beginning to end of the strike, even moderate students echoed the words of moderate Student Council president Norm Wickstrom that “we cannot surrender on the parity issue”, and that explicitly included not surrendering parity in hiring and tenure decisions (690917). Departmental unions outside PSA – History, English, Modern Languages, Geography, Philosophy, Economics and Commerce, Biological Sciences, Education -- were organized, or reorganized, to hold meetings. Most departmental union meetings heard faculty from both sides argue for or against the PSA parity system and strike. One after another, the students in non-PSA departments voted to support PSA and its parity system. Late in the strike, most departmental unions scheduled votes to go on strike in their own departments. History and English actually went on strike early, starting their picketing on Friday October 3 and Monday October 6 respectively. Only Modern Languages defeated a strike vote (691022, 691029).
The strike lasted for six weeks in the face of a continual escalation of administration threats and actual repressive actions. The trusteeship had already been there since July and it had been used to cook up crudely politically biased recommendations for non-renewals and denials of tenure that had been rushed through to Board approval before the Fall 1969 semester opened (690903). Strand’s parodied open letter stated that faculty had not yet been fired. The clear implication was that those who broke ranks and renounced the PSA parity system might be treated favourably on appeal (and this is essentially what did happen for those who refused to strike). The trustees had also been mandated to go on a witch hunt looking for violations of university regulations in PSA by the department and by individual faculty. It took little imagination to realize that the witch hunters could be persuaded to forget any complaints that they received about those faculty who saw the light and broke ranks. Strand’s response to the open letter from 15 PSA faculty ramped up the level of threat to individual PSA faculty by proposing an external AUCC-CAUT committee to investigate both academic and administrative irregularities (690917).
On Friday October 3, after requiring PSA faculty to state in writing whether they were teaching their classes during the strike, Strand announced the suspension of nine striking faculty and impending dismissal proceedings (691006). On Monday October 6, the Senate voted to declare that individual faculty who failed to teach during the PSA strike were in violation of their contractual obligations. They endorsed the call for the external AUCC-CAUT committee to investigate PSA’s academic program and told non-striking PSA faculty to set up their own department with new procedures (691008). Suspended faculty, of course, were not allowed to attend, speak at or vote in faculty meetings of any kind at any level, including Senate and Joint Faculty.
On Monday October 13, Strand circulated a statement that he was seeking an injunction from the BC Supreme Court that would empower him to decide if any individuals had ‘intimidated’ others from crossing picket lines to teach or otherwise disrupt university routines. Those people so designated would be deemed guilty of contempt of court (691015). On Tuesday October 21 a temporary injunction was issued and it was served on 14 named individuals the following day. When non-PSA and PSA students continued to picket, Strand issued statements making clear that he would apply the injunction and that this would result in “fine[s] and/or imprisonment”(691029).
The October 22 issue of the Peak announced the results of the Joint Faculty referendum. The vote to declare that the strike by PSA faculty and TAs was “in violation of their contractual obligations to Simon Fraser University” passed by 162 to 40 with 38 abstentions. The vote to approve Strand’s call for an AUCC-CAUT external committee to investigate PSA’s academic programs and administrative procedures passed 180 to 28 with 27 abstentions. Even more cynically, there were large majorities for motions that had the effect of letting Strand use amendments that had been quietly made to the Academic Freedom and Tenure agreement against the PSA faculty -- on condition that the amendments would be reconsidered and revoked immediately afterward, so that they could not be used against other faculty in the future (691022). The overwhelming majority of faculty were making it absolutely clear that they would support Strand in carrying out his political purge.
On Thursday October 23, two days after the issuance of the Supreme Court injunction, a dozen students and one PSA secretary started a hunger strike that they vowed to continue until the administration agreed to negotiate. The PSA General Assembly voted on Monday October 27 to not defy the injunctions. It was the beginning of the end for an effective strike. Despite this vote, students from inside and outside PSA, led by students from English and History, did mill-in pickets near some classes for several days longer. On Tuesday November 4, a Joint Strike Assembly of PSA students and faculty, striking English and History students, and strike-supporting students from the other departmental unions, voted to end the strike. Four of the hunger strikers were to continue their water-only fast, seeking negotiations and a reversal of punitive actions taken against PSA faculty, for a total of 15 days, until Friday November 7. Strand met them and categorically rejected their requests (691112).
The PSA strike had been defeated. Although even the external AUCC-CAUT (Palmer) committee would eventually exonerate the PSA faculty and call for their reinstatement, it would be too little too late – Strand simply ignored the results of all the appeals and was backed by the faculty association executive in doing so (700727, 700916). Both the American Anthropology Association (AAA) and American Sociological Association (ASA) investigation teams found the suspensions and dismissals were invalid (700527). The Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association proclaimed a blacklist on their members teaching at SFU (700916). The CAUT executive recommended a censure of SFU but the SFU Faculty Association successfully lobbied the CAUT Council to defeat this motion (701204). The defeat of the strike was also the end of an effective on-campus student power movement at SFU – most of the faculty and student radicals of the 1965-69 period engaged thenceforth in off-campus activism -- even though SFU students would continue to organize to try to win parity and changes in the classroom for years to come.
CONTEXT:
External environment: The year 1968 was the peak of the on-campus New Left student power movement virtually everywhere around the world, including Canada. New Left students increasingly oriented their activism to social inequalities and injustices beyond the campus. 1968 marked a sharp leftwards radicalization among students and youth. It was met with increasingly severe and increasingly pro-active campaigns of repression on the part of the authorities. On campuses, the perceived costs of supporting New Left protest greatly increased. There was a rising student counter-movement (SFU was in many ways an exception to this latter trend). In 1969, both UGEQ and CUS, respectively the national student federations in francophone Quebec and the rest of Canada, dissolved themselves. In the United States, the main student activist groups, SNCC and SDS, did the same.
On February 11 1969, students protesting what they deemed to be systemic racism at a Montreal university, appear to have panicked when police began breaking down the door to the computer lab they were occupying. They seem to have started a fire, which quickly got out of control. The occupation came at the end of a months-long campaign, that had resulted in what was perceived by many students as a rigged jury conducting hearings into allegations that a Sir George Williams University professor was discriminating in his grading against black students. The mass media and political leaders in Montreal and across Canada immediately denounced the (Black and foreign) student occupiers as violent extremists (for having caused extensive property damage). They implied or even stated that the protesters were importing issues of racial strife into Quebec and Canada. We were not racist like the United States and other countries (at least not against Blacks) (690212). The ‘Gosh, Not Peaceful and Non-Racist People Like Us in Canada’ racist appeal worked to quell any open expression of sympathy or support for the protesters and the serious issues that they were raising. So much for Canada’s supposed moral superiority to the United States on race issues.
The on-campus student power movement was over. To be fair, progressive movements almost always lose mass support whenever protesters are seen to engage in violent conflict with police, or in damaging property that symbolizes some issue. This is true even when it is clear that the protesters did not initiate the violence, and wanted to avoid it. Many students and others were no doubt surprised and shocked because they had not been following the Sir George Williams protests. It seemed to them to come out of nowhere, to somehow be disproportionate as a response to the police storming the computer lab. What were those foreign Black students complaining about anyway? It was their word against the professor’s, wasn’t it? Don’t we have to defend the academic freedom of faculty at all costs? There had been very little overt violence or property damage in any of the student movement activism in Quebec and Canada from 1965 until then. But all of that is a set of excuses. It is very difficult to stand up against the hysteria of a mob, and that is exactly what the elite and mass response to the Sir George Williams computer lab burning was. Precious few self-defined progressives, let alone non-progressives, did stand up to be counted, when it counted, on February 11 1969 and in the ensuing months.
The student movement had failed the test. It was all but over. (There is a longer explanation of this to be made elsewhere. All leftward movements rise at some point in time in relatively favourable conditions, win some reforms and do a lot to change mass consciousness, and then reach the limits of what they can win. Private and state authorities always respond to popular movements with some mix of co-option and repression. At some point, and in Canada as elsewhere that point was in 1968, the elites reach a limit beyond which they are not prepared to go. From then on, their predominant response is repression, and they will continue to escalate their repression until the popular movement demobilizes. At this point, people in the movement have to choose between demobilizing (and trying to work within the system by accepting the limits of what they are allowed to push for within that system) and carrying on. Those who carry on are further radicalized, not least because they experience sharply increased repression, but also because they increasingly understand that the problem is systemic and the problem is with the system itself, which simply cannot, or at least will not, go beyond a certain limit in making reforms.)
Minor events providing context to the major conflict:
1968 at SFU had ended with the arrest and charging of the 114, a week of debates involving thousands of students and a decisive vote to not launch a student strike. If leftward radicalizing students had had any illusions that they could continue their progress in winning student power without meeting significant repression, or that most ‘non-political’ students (or, indeed, many of the activists) would be willing to share in the costs of that repression, those illusions were disappearing. The year 1969 was defined by one gradually unfolding event – the SFU administration, strongly supported by most faculty, would prepare and execute a thorough political purge of left-leaning PSA faculty and several non-PSA faculty. Repeated attempts by moderate Student Council president Rob Walsh, working in parallel, to de-democratize the Student Society and to set up a court system that could suspend and expel students, failed.
Moderate Student Council president Rob Walsh spent the entire first semester of 1969 trying to set up a system of student-faculty courts with the power to suspend and expel students for disruption. He did so in consultation with members of the Faculty Association executive, including its president Milton McLaren. Students voted to reject various iterations of this mechanism of repression, hidden behind a window dressing of a bill of rights, not once but three times (690212, 690319, 690410).
Walsh’s constitutional proposals also sought to end the reality of the SFU student society being a kind of participatory democracy, with major decisions debated and decided in general meetings. The constituencies for election of student council members were to be changed (gerrymandered) to increase the representation from faculties that tended to be more conservative. Power would be concentrated in the hands of the Student Council president. Any general meeting that did occur could only debate agenda points set in advance by the Student Council. Hence a repeat of the 1968 impeachment votes would be impossible. Departmental unions would be effectively outlawed and replaced by faculty-based ‘unions’ directed by a student council member from that faculty. All Student Council decisions, notably ones like the early 1968 support for the Board walk-in, would be constrained by the requirement to submit to the ruling of a Constitutional Judicial Commission. The CJC was required to “solicit and receive [the] written opinion of the Student Society legal advisers before formulating their opinion” (690205). All of Walsh’s efforts were to no avail. If there was one thing that students had learned from the years of debates and conflicts at SFU, it was how to see through the facade of legalistic and hierarchical structures of decision-making that empowered elites and disempowered the base.
President Strand, the Senate and the newly appointed faculty deans repeatedly warned students, in very explicit language, that ‘disruptive’ student protest would be met with arrest and prosecution by off-campus authorities or even academic suspension and expulsion (the rejection of Walsh’s constitutional proposals made the latter politically impractical). 114 students were already experiencing that new reality (most escaped with a $250 fine, but a subsequent arrest and conviction would likely mean jail and a significant criminal record). From January 1969 through to December 1970, protests involving any kind of civil disobedience were rare. **ADD footnote on the shameful failure of those of us in the 114 legal committee to pay enough attention to what was being done to Dave Carrell, who was the only one of the 114 to end up in prison.
On Tuesday March 11 1969, 100 students assembled outside the main office of the campus police to demand an explanation for their handing over to the RCMP of Robert Wilder, a deserter from the US army who had been sleeping in the student rotunda (Wilder would subsequently be deported back to the USA). The campus cops made vague threats, so the protesters moved on to visit President Strand, but went no further. On Wednesday March 26, Senate voted to exclude student and other observers from its meetings. President Strand told the Peak beforehand that he would be willing to call the RCMP again to arrest anyone who attempted to enter and thereby disrupt the meeting. The Peak reported that Arts dean Sullivan had made the (idle but fear-inducing) threat that “any student who tries to observe Senate [would] be expelled for one year” (690402). 150 students met in the Senate chambers before the meeting. They voted to not try to observe the meeting and withdrew. Instead they submitted two motions for the Senate agenda. Senate voted to not consider either (690410). After that, the only significant on-campus protest of any kind was the Fall 1969 strike by PSA and by students from supporting departmental unions.
The drop in protest activity on the SFU campus did not signal that left-leaning students in particular, or even the majority of students in general, were becoming less radical in their thinking or less willing to engage in protest action. Just the opposite. 1968 was the peak of the on-campus student power movement and 1969 brought it to an end, but the Long Sixties new left wave would shift off-campus and continue in zigs and zags through most of the 1970s. In 1969 and 1970 most student radicals at SFU were already putting much of their energies into the off-campus issues that would provide the basis for some of the progressive social movements and left-wing political groups of the 1970s and beyond.
The Women’s Caucus, that had begun in part as a challenge to the sexism of male leftists within the SDU, rapidly expanded to organize women on and off-campus as the renamed Working Women’s Association (690205, 700121). The parent-run on-campus daycare co-op, that had begun with the occupation of part of the Student Lounge in summer 1968, continued and expanded as the Family Co-op (690521, 700729). SFU women sent SFU student Janiel Jolly to the Waterloo Lutheran Winter Carnival Beauty Pageant to talk to other contestants and organize a successful protest (691029, 700204). SFU students were involved in the cross-country Abortion Caravan that drew massive publicity, as women chained themselves to the observer gallery benches in the House of Commons and later met with the prime minister (700513).
Opposition to the war in Vietnam was becoming more militant and politically radical in the United States and this impacted the SFU left. Many American left groups, notably SDS and SNCC and the Black Panther Party, framed the war as not just an immoral mistake but as a typical example of US imperialism. African-American and other racial minority groups championed Third World national liberation within the United States as well as in Third World countries like Vietnam (600219). The number of draft dodgers and deserters coming into Canada increased. Left students and faculty at SFU became more active in groups like the Committee to Aid American War Objectors. Some students helped the off-campus American Deserters Committee set up by expatriate Americans. The ADC provided emergency housing and legal advice to deserters and sent leaflets into US military bases that gave advice on how to desert and get to Canada (690625, 691015). SFU students were prominent in persuading a majority of the organizers of the April 20 1969 anti-war march to adopt a Victory to the NLF theme (690226).
Since SFU opened, students had repeatedly taken a pro-union stance when faced with pickets by striking workers. They appeared to take readily to the concept that student councils should refashion themselves as membership-controlled student unions – hence it was widely accepted, even by those who voted against a particular proposal to go on strike, that the student union could choose to use the strike weapon as a pressure tactic. This did not change after the defeat of the 114 strike vote. In summer 1968, SDU supporters Ron Brown and Evelyn Lyle had played a significant role in signing up the campus food services workers into a union (680925). In summer 1969, SDUers Robbie McAninch and Guy Pocklington organized yet another cafeteria coffee boycott to protest food prices and quality. The boycott persisted until the employer threatened to lay off food services staff, at which time the students immediately met with workers and called off the boycott, putting the interests of workers first (690604). Several student activists did what they could to aid Tom McGrath and the CBRT union in an almost successful drive to unionize SFU support staff (690528, 690910). Former secretary Jean Rands and others from the Working Women’s Association would eventually unionize the secretarial staff at both UBC and SFU into new explicitly feminist unions. A number of SDU activists walked on the picket lines at the nearby Shellburne oil refinery in summer 1969. The strike eventually ended after a strike-breaking truck ran over and killed a picketer (690604, 690903). The summer 1969 moderate Student Council voted support and funds for the labour movement aligned TACUS, The Action Committee of Unemployed Students (690608).
In the three 1970 semesters after the defeat of the PSA strike, many left students and faculty set up groups off campus. Former PSA chair Mordecai Briemberg and several other of the dismissed PSA faculty created the Community Education and Research Centre (CERC), where they joined students in providing educational workshops and doing research for unions and community groups (700107). Most ex-PSA faculty would have to move elsewhere to find work. Briemberg stayed in town and would go on to be a major public speaker and an organizer in multiple left-wing coalitions and projects over the next few decades.
Left students from PSA and the departmental unions tried unsuccessfully to reorganize the on-campus student left in Winter 1970 (700211). After that, different subgroups went their separate ways to try to organize a radical new left, off campus. Former student power council vice-president and student senator John Conway, former food committee activist and student senator Donn Korbin and History Union organizer and Peak editor Phil Dubois mobilized students to attend the late October 1969 federal convention of the social-democratic New Democratic Party in support of the Waffle Manifesto that had been drafted mainly by activists in Ontario and the Prairies. The outcome was the establishment of a strong country-wide left-wing Waffle Caucus within the NDP based on a synthesis of left Canadian nationalism and a new left style of parliamentary socialism complemented by extraparliamentary activism (690806, 690917).
Another subgroup, led by SDU and PSA student union leaders Brian Slocock and John Cleveland, created the Red Collective that initiated a March 14 1970 March Against Repression. The names of the main groups supporting the march gives a flavour of where the most visible off-campus new left was heading in spring-summer 1970: the Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP), the SFU campus Black Panther Party supporting group Vancouver Black Action Group (VBAG), the American Deserters Committee, Women’s Caucus, the Red Collective and the UBC campus chapter of the International Workers of the World (IWW) (700311). This initiative would stimulate the formation of the provocatively-named neo-Marxist Vancouver Liberation Front (VLF), based on a number of residential collectives of mostly former student radicals. The VLF worked with a third subgroup that formed the radical youth culture anarchist Youth International Party or Yippie, also based partly on communal houses of countercultural youth, to put out the newspaper Yellow Journal and to lead militant demonstrations, that relied on a large influx into Vancouver of transient youth, throughout the summer of 1970 (700506, 700513, 700722).
In October 1970, during the October Crisis caused by the kidnapping of a British diplomat and a Quebec cabinet minister by the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ), Briemberg and former students from all three subgroups came together in the Free Quebec Free Canada committee. They supported the VLF-led public rally against the War Measures Act and published and distributed a special issue of the Yellow Journal containing the FLQ Manifesto (701019).
CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND ACTION
What radical(izing) students saw as the issues and interests at stake: It was clear to everyone, left or right, students or faculty, what was at stake in the purging of left faculty in PSA – everything that had been won by students through their many struggles going back to the very first days of SFU. The overriding issue was whether SFU would continue to try to make progress towards the ideal of being a progressive and experimental university, where a community of faculty and students got to decide what experiments would be attempted. For most students, except for the moderates maneuvering behind the scenes who for the most part dared not openly declare their views, the key issue at stake was the PSA parity system and especially parity in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions.
Having parity in hiring and firing meant that students and faculty could genuinely try to meet as some kind of equals in the classroom. It meant rejecting the trend towards making universities “multiversities” that served the narrow interests of corporations for a technically trained (rather than liberally educated into a spirit of critical inquiry) new middle/working class. It meant rejecting having faculty locked into a system of grant-chasing that led many to self-censor and to orient their research to topics and perspectives that could get grant money. But it also was a direct threat to the capacity of university faculty to strengthen themselves as a professional caste.
((FOOTNOTE 2:
Former student council president and student senator Stan Wong responded to the PSA trusteeship in July 1969 with a withering criticism of students for misreading the motives and interests of SFU faculty. “When confronted with the question, ‘Who runs the University?’, most students naively reply, ‘The Board of Governors of course and ultimately Premier Bennett and the Social Credit government’… In this article, I wish to demonstrate that the faculty really run the university… The faculty has gained control… on the backs of many students… The date of this transfer of power may be considered to be May-June 1968… [After] the faculty voted for the resignation of President McTaggart-Cowan, the Board of Governors [complied]… Foolishly the student body sided with the faculty… With this cry of academic freedom and academic control of the university, students joined hands with the faculty to repel the ‘evil’ forces of businessmen-Board of Governors and government appointees in the hope of founding a new spirit of academic community which would include students”. What happened instead was that the Board and the Faculty Association maneuvered to make Strand president and to negotiate an Academic Freedom and Tenure system that was really all about tenure and the protection of a professional caste, not about academic freedom -- certainly not for students and only a very little bit for faculty. “The lesson learned from this experience is quite simple. The faculty as a body does not believe in giving meaningful power (let alone parity) or sharing responsibility with the students in major decision-making in university government … The existence of a community of scholars is just a myth” (690910). ))
In this conflict, a majority of students plus a handful of faculty and perhaps a few individual administrators were on the side of PSA. The Board, Senate, deans, chairs and almost all faculty were on the other side. Not to mention governments at all levels and the most of the business, managerial and professional classes off campus.
Strategy and tactics: The strategic goal of the PSA strike was to defend the jobs of the majority of PSA faculty and to restore the PSA department and its parity system. It was a hopeless cause. Most faculty and students recognized this fact on some level, while hoping that they were wrong. There was a faint hope that somehow the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) would do a repeat of the CAUT investigation leading to the CAUT censure of spring 1968 – but PSA strike leaders argued explicitly from the beginning that this faint hope would only come to pass as the result of the success of strike action mobilizing active support from students and faculty both within SFU and elsewhere across North America and from off-campus groups (690924). The strike failed to win anywhere near the amount of vocal support that might have put pressure on CAUT to do the right thing.
The strategic goals of defending faculty jobs and student parity were unwinnable regardless of what tactics might have been adopted. As the subsequent refusal of Strand to reverse the firings despite appeal findings confirmed, the large majority of SFU faculty, supported by the Board that had been trying to get rid of troublesome faculty and graduate students for years, wanted to purge the PSA left by any means necessary. The only alternative tactic would have been to surrender the parity system as soon as the trusteeship was imposed in July 1969 and to focus on developing a strategy for saving the jobs of as many progressive faculty as possible (several faculty who later refused to strike actually proposed this 690716, 691029). This would have meant no withdrawal of services by faculty. It would have meant some combination of faculty going through the stacked appeal procedures and having students engage in a “student strike”, i.e. in various forms of educationals, rallies and civil disobedience that would disrupt “business as usual” enough to claim public attention and then make the case for PSA’s cause. This would be combined with an off-campus campaign to win visible declarations of support from unions and community groups and from liberal and left academics at other universities.
Some left students in the PSA student union (including myself) actually considered the idea of conceding student parity in hiring and firing (instead students would express their preferences as inputs to decisions by faculty-only committees) and sent a motion to this effect to the PSA faculty plenum. They rejected it. From a tactical viewpoint, they were right to do so. From a personal survival view, not so much. Tactically, having faculty withdraw their services showed that they were willing to risk great costs to their individual careers in order to take a stand in support of student interests and the interests of the “poor and powerless” that the PSA Statement declared the university should serve. It is hard to overstate how important this was to establishing their moral authority and authenticity in the eyes of potential student supporters and in the eyes of many other potential supporters elsewhere. The decision of PSA faculty to engage in collective action made it clear to everyone, opponents and supporters, that they were indeed being fired because of the parity system not because of their academic performance. It was not about the individuals. It was about what those individuals did together.
Having said that, the PSA student radicals of the time (and most definitely myself) have a lot to answer for in our advocacy of the tactic of what was conceived as a double strike, one by faculty and one by students. As for the faculty strike, it was entirely foreseeable that Strand would get court injunctions against picketing of both scab PSA and replacement non-PSA courses. When the injunctions came, and we students were unwilling to defy them, the strike was effectively over. If faculty were willing to risk their careers, where was the moral authority of students who were unwilling to be arrested and charged, and in some cases go to jail, and to thereby risk their own careers? My point here is not that students should have kept picketing and have ended up with significant prison sentences (which is what certainly would have happened to the many of us who were effectively on probation after our arrest and conviction as part of the 114). Maybe we should have, and probably we should not have, done so. The point is that it was all foreseeable. We went ahead anyway as if it was not going to happen, and did nothing to prepare the strike supporters inside and outside PSA for it.
As for the student strike, it was both a significant success and a definite failure. The success was the decision to let student support for the strike outside PSA build from the bottom up, as one departmental union after another conducted debates in their departments and voted support for PSA and even went on strike themselves (but, as Brian Slocock and John Cleveland and others failed to fully recognize in post mortems after the strike, these were not student strikes, but students agreeing to do support pickets to bolster the PSA faculty ‘withdrawal of services’ industrial union style strike– that was the successful part of the strike, not the imaginary separate “student strike”, 691119).
The failure was that the PSA student strike leadership took the same hands-off approach to organizing a student strike within PSA itself. The PSA student leadership needed to have started preparing the ground for a massive student campaign on and off campus with detailed ideas for activities, and dozens of individuals recruited to take the time to be organizers in that campaign, well before the strike vote. Reliance on the rank and file to develop their own initiatives is crucial, but it is no excuse for abnegating responsibility for mobilizing that rank and file to debate and decide upon definite plans of action based on an analysis, strategy and tactics. There was no such set of ideas for activities, no such cadre of volunteer organizers, not even an effective strike committee to coordinate and provide day to day tactical leadership.
If there was going to actually be a student (or genuinely combined, two-pronged faculty withdrawal of services plus ‘student strike that shut down the scab classes’ PSA strike) it could not restrict itself to preventing scabs from teaching PSA classes on campus. Indeed, it should have put most of its energies into getting students and faculty to go out to groups in the community to explain what PSA stood for, and why it was in their interest to support striking PSA faculty. Some of this was done, but much of it was initiated and conducted by faculty, and not enough by students.
Student support for the strike (and faculty opposition to it) on campus was solid from the beginning. The attack on parity was an assault on everything that students of all political stripes had fought for and won over six years. It damaged their immediate and fundamental interests as students who wanted an education where they were engaging in a co-operative and experimental active learning process inside the classroom and out, in a student-faculty community. The parity system would obviously end university-wide, if the PSA faculty were purged.
What strikers needed to do most was to raise the level of the price (degraded reputation) the SFU administration paid for firing the PSA faculty, by educating and mobilizing off-campus public opinion. Whatever slim chance the PSA strike had of winning at least some of its goals (namely, protecting a few faculty jobs and winning more hearts and minds to egalitarian and democratic ways of thinking), the strike was lost before it had begun, because of failures of political analysis and tactical leadership from PSA student ‘leaders’ (including me). It was a classic industrial trade union type strike after all, and the priority should have been to rally off campus community understanding of the stakes and support for the striking professors.
Public sector strikes are usually won or lost to a significant degree depending on how much the workers can win sympathy from the general public (who are usually inconvenienced by the withdrawal of services to the public). The Simon Fraser PSA strike had high political stakes, standing as it did for the core vision and demands of an entire six-year university democratization and student power movement, but on a tactical level it was no different than any other public sector employee strike.
Having said that, the PSA faculty majority and a large majority of students in and outside PSA stood fast together, for six weeks. The strike led to outside bodies intervening to do their own investigations and appeals, and all of them ended up taking the side of the fired PSA faculty. For students, student power had been defeated, and would soon be dismantled everywhere in the university. The new left moved off campus to organize around other issues.
NOTE 1: The post-mortem self-criticism of the PSA strike by Slocock and Cleveland struggled to make sense of of the fact that two things were true at the same time — the majority of students actively supported the PSA parity system and opposed the firing of PSA faculty, yet strike leaders were unable to get people (outside the departmental student unions acting within their departments) to volunteer to get out into the community or to engage in civil disobedience on campus. Why the apparent ‘passivity’, the confinement of the strike action to the withdrawal of cooperation (for PSA faculty this meant not teaching, for PSA and other students this meant refusing to attend PSA scab classes), the inability to launch any kind of pro-active ‘offensives’?
The situation was complicated perhaps, but not that complicated. As just noted, it was an industrial union strike of the kind that prevailed in Canada then (and now), and such strikes are ‘passive’ affairs of non-cooperation, of withdrawal of services to put pressure to get good faith negotiations for a new contract.
As for ‘non-passive’ action by strike supporters on campus, such a sit-ins or pickets intended to prevent people from crossing the picket line, President Strand and his lawyers made explicit threats that anyone engaging in those actions who actually succeeded in being ‘active’ disrupters would be arrested and criminally charged.
Finally, a large number of students, including many who would not consider themselves to be left-wing, had spent six years seeking to build a student-faculty beloved community in which students would exercize real power. But their support for that movement depended on believing that one thing was true that the PSA strike was just the latest event to make extremely clear was not true — it assumed that faculty wanted to share power in a student-faculty community, at least a little bit.
The passivity of SFU students during the PSA strike was above all based on the crushing recognition that faculty were not their allies or their friends when it came to having a university governed by some type of democracy. The passivity was the profound demoralization of people who have just realized that they had persuaded themselves to believe in an illusory reality than cannot be. Stan Wong was right. Faculty wanted to achieve the status of an exclusive professional caste. Castes do not share power with those outside the caste, definitely not with people who are in a lower caste. That is the very definition of a ‘professional’. The faculty at SFU understand very clearly that the one thing getting in the way of their achieving professional caste status was the PSA department and other faculty who allied with students to achieve a democratic university. Defending parity by defending PSA was a hopeless cause.
NOTE 2: It is not quite true to say that progressive students had been living with the illusion that faculty did not have professional caste interests that would inevitably trump any sharing of even some power with students. It is mostly true but the student authors of the constitutional arangement for PSA departmental decision-making (myself especially) were very much aware that faculty had to operate as a professional caste that was as autonomous from students as it was from anyone else. That is why the system retained the existing faculty-only professional decison-making structure formally and actually, but then established the norm that the faculty-only department plenary meeting would recognize a separate parallel student union system of decision-making, and negotiate with it before reaching a final decision. Departmental subcommittees included students (and in some cases support staff) but they were only advisory. People like me were naive too in thinking that this parallel structures and mutual veto system could work, even for a while. But every effort was made to enable PSA faculty to operate within normal professional structures.
Changes in social understandings and political goals:
The changes in social and political consciousness among leftward radicalizing students at SFU from January 1968 onwards (all of which began during 1968) appear to have been influenced by at least four related patterns. First, while generalized support for student power among radicals and many non-radicals alike only got stronger after the 114 defeat, the attention and activity of many self-defined radical students was more and more oriented to social and political issues and movements off-campus. For some, this might only mean taking more PSA courses or courses from the more left faculty sprinkled in other departments, and reading more left-wing publications. For many, notably women in the Women’s Caucus, people involved in protesting the Vietnam war and in aiding American dodgers and deserters, and members of racial minorities like African-Americans and First Nations students, but also others increasingly committed to aiding in unionization drives and participating in solidarity pickets during strikes, it meant actually engaging in activist work with others from off-campus.
Second, there was an increasing differentiation in what specific social issues and movements individual students chose to make their priority, as the pattern emerged of ‘autonomous’ social movements and organizations (of women only, First Nations people only, African-Americans only etc) being formed. This meant more struggles among left students over their personal sexism, racism etc. But at the same time there was a rising notion that all these autonomous movements, including the student movement, were part of a big-M ‘Movement’ that shared the common goal of changing the overall ‘System’/Society, which was racist, sexist, imperialistic etc. Hence it is more accurate to say that there was a trend towards more of a Rainbow type sense of what a new left movement was about, coupled with an increased sense of how ‘changing the self’ and making the personal political was central to actually building a successful Rainbow coalition type Movement.
Third, while the (non-radical) majority of SFU students joined with the minority of self-defined radicals in continuing to move leftward in their ideas about how extensive the changes in the university needed to be in order to become/remain a place where students could enjoy progressive, consciousness-raising experiences -- and remained rock solid in their support for student power as a means to that end -- there was an increasing gap in consciousness, because the arc of radicalization of those who had taken on the identity of radicals in 1968 (or before) accelerated upwards both in 1968 and after 1968. This double pattern (of a shared commitment to an even more left version of student power and an increasing gap between radicals and not [so] radicals) had first become evident in Fall 1968 when the majority of students voted to release Strand to become president and elected Rob Walsh and a Moderate student council, but then proceeded to expect that the moderates would implement the essentials of the program of the radical Student Power student council of summer 1968. This pattern continued through the 114 crisis, the period up to and including the PSA strike in 1969 and after it in 1970 – the radicals were seen as too radical and too disruptive in their constant initiation of confrontations to be elected to positions of power (with a number of exceptions), but the Moderates were repeatedly pressed by student opinion to seek, or pretend to seek, to win student power through moderate means. Attempts to curtail open decision-making or participatory democracy, or to allow repression of students for engaging in disruptions, were defeated as often as Walsh and other right-wing moderates proposed them.
Fourth, the radicalized students who wanted to carry on building a new left movement despite the increasing repression were deciding to move their political activism off campus (an estimated one thousand SFU students dropped out of school, at least for a while, with many coming back later to finish their degrees). They wanted to do what left students were doing around the world after 1968. They wanted to build a new left movement that was not just an extra-parliamentary social (protest) movement pressuring the elites to make concessions. They wanted to build a political movement that would seek to unite all the different social movements of workers, women, First Nations people, Quebecois, gays and lesbians, people of colour etc to win “power to the people”, to win direct political decision-making (state) power. The SFU student and faculty left were moving from organizing focused on ‘changing the university’ (in order that the university could play a progressive role in supporting changes in the wider society) to trying to directly ‘change the society’.