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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 33 No. 15 1970

Student Power

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Student Power

The article below is an abridged version of an address titled, "Crisis in the University—Is Anarchy the Rule?." given by Lord Bowden, principal of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. The full text appeared in the December, 1968 issue of The Chemical Engineer. The reason for its publication in Salient will be self evident upon its reading. Moreover, as the European experience has shown so far this year, the so-called "student power" movement has not died as a temporary phenomenon, but has gathered momentum. Undoubtedly it will do so here.

In the last few years everyone has begun to worry about the universities. They are growing faster than they have ever before. It is probable that more students will go to universities in the last 40 years of this century than have been before in the whole recorded history. They have become a vital part of society—and they are helping to change the face of the world as they change themselves. They appear to be tearing themselves apart just as the world has come to understand that no community can prosper in the modern world unless it has large expensive universities of its own.

Why have universities exploded into riot and confusion?

Most of them are as orderly and efficient as they have ever been, but others seem to be in total chaos.

The Early University Foundations

I think many of the difficulties which now beset us can only be understood by studying the history of these great and ancient institutions. I shall try to show-that some of the most acute of the problems of today had perplexed the world several hundred years ago, and that traditions which had been forgotten before ever the Pilgrim Fathers set foot in New England disrupted American universities last year. It is an astonishing story.

The three pillars upon which society rested in the Middle Ages were the Empire, the Church, and the Universities. Universities were as important then as they are today.

The oldest universities in the world were established 800 years ago in Bologna and Paris. Every university in the world today has developed from these two. Both were professional schools which educated men for careers in the learned professions, but they differed in one quite fundamental respect. The University of Paris was organised and run by the masters and professors who admitted students to their fellowship and treated them much as members of a guild treated their apprentices. The students were relatively young—they often went to university at the age of 14 or 15—and their masters disciplined them as best they could—and beat them from time to time. We can all understand an organisation like this.

But the University of Bologna, which is a few years older than Paris, was very different. For one thing, it attracted mature wealthy students, many of whom were beneficed clergy who had been given leave to study law. But-most important of all—the whole university was run by the students who hired the faculty, paid them, are subjected them to an iron discipline.

Ye Olden Student Power

The extemist advocates of student power today have never contemplated even the palest reflection of the situation which existed in Bologna for 300 years.

The professors were dominated by their students to an extraordinary degree and subjected to what we would regard as intolerable indignities. Lecture courses were prescribed in detail by students; the times at which the professors lectured were laid down by the students; professors could be fined if they began to lecture late or finished early. If a professor failed to turn up for a lecture, he was fined; if his audience dropped below five, he was treated as if he had been absent and fined accordingly. A professor could not leave the city without permission of the students and without depositing a bond to guarantee his return. There was a time when professors could not get married without permission from the students! University regulations prescribed that a junior professor who left Bologna and tried to set up a rival establishment in another city would be fined 200 ducats, a more senior man could be put to death.

Sooner or later the masters and professors took control of all student universities but constitutions which nominally gave power to the students were preserved in some places until the 19th Century.

Avaricious and Corrupt Professors

In Bologna it was the avarice of the professors and the restrictive practices which they were able to introduce which nearly ruined the university. In every university the professors and masters always had the right to admit other members to their guild in other words, it was they who conducted the examinations and awarded degrees which allowed a man to teach. There was trouble from professors who accepted bribes and let students get examination questions beforehand. In the 15th Century the professors persuaded the citizens of Bologna that it was outrageous that they should be at the mercy of an ill-disciplined and tumultuous student body. The city endowed several professorial chairs with stipends paid from the city revenue. This was the beginning of the end. Professorial chairs became exceedingly valuable so that the professors tried to reserve them for citizens of Bologna. This was bad enough, but after a few years they insisted that university chairs should become the property of their holders and be handed down from father to son.

The students of Bologna realised how rapidly the scholastic reputation of their university was declining under its hereditary professors so they persuaded the city to endow five more chairs whose incumbents were to be elected by the students themselves. But, alas, supporters of the various candidates took to fighting in the streets over the claims of their men and so in the end the students' own professors were chosen by lot. This method of election was not a success either and the university continued to lose ground.

The Power of the Universities

In spite of all these troubles the medieval universities were very powerful indeed. Paris, Bologna, and Oxford has at least as much influence as Harvard, or MIT, or Cambridge has today. They were most powerful when they had no possessions of their own. Staff and students could pack up their books and the Common Seal of the University in a chest and then they would go away and establish a university in another city. A university brought wealth to the city which housed it and glory and fame to the community. The threat that scholars would leave if their demands were ignored brought mayors, kings, and even emperors to heel. Student migrations created new universities all over Europe. Oxford was probably founded by scholars who fled from Paris; and Cambridge by refugees from Oxford. Once the universities acquired their splendid buildings and pious benefactors gave them real estate and books and gold and silver plate, they ceased to be mobile and they had to stay and fight it out where they were. Great wealth immobilised them and destroyed their power. They have never been as powerful as they were when they were penniless.

The Present Government of Universities

All of this was far away and long ago. You may think it is outlandish and quaint, but some very ancient ideas are troubling us today. The Student University of Bologna influenced several French universities and its traditions went from there to Scotland. To this day, the rector of a Scottish university is chosen by the students and he is, at least in theory, the chairman of the supreme governing body of a Scottish university. In practice, the masters (that is to say the staff and the administration) have long taken over control of the Scottish universities, as they have of all the original student universities. Scottish students have a great deal of freedon but their Rector cannot compare with the old student rectors of Bologna. His duties are honorary, he is always a distinguished man of mature years. After the students have elected him, the rector always appoints as his deputy a man who has been chosen by the university administration and who presides over committees on his behalf, but were the rector to exploit the ancient privileges of his office, the students' own nominee would be in control of the Scottish universities. The constitution of Queen's University in Ontario was inspired by the traditions of Scotland. Even in Canada there is at least one university in which the students might have power.

Staff and Non-Academic Domination

But of course all universities in England and North America were based on Paris and Oxford, which were always dominated by their staff who did their best to keep students under control. Few English speaking people have ever known that there could be any other system of university administration. The actual organisation varies very much from university to university. Oxford and Cambridge are still governed entirely by their own graduates and staff; they have no lay officers at all. Most English universities are governed by a lay council which may or may not have a substantial minority of academic staff upon it. A senate or professorial board is responsible for all academic matters. Student representation on these bodies is still rather unusual though students sit on many sub-committees whose business directly concerns them.

Photo of two police holding a student against a wall

In America, lay regents, as they are often called, are in charge of universities and there has been a constant struggle for power between them and the academics. Twenty years ago, the regents of the University of California insisted that their position vis-a-vis academic staff was like that of the board of a company vis-a-vis its employees; it was this more than the argument about the oath of loyalty which produced that terrible row just after the war. It has almost been forgotten in the troubles of recent years, but at the time it seemed likely to destroy the University of California in Berkeley. Perhaps universities are more resilient than we think. I doubt if many Boards of Regents would adopt such an extreme point of view today. But should scholars be subject to the whims of politicians or of a self perpetuating oligarchy of regents?

South American Universities

But what about the other American universities? We are always apt to forget that the biggest universities in the New World are south of Panama. The universities of Spain were based on the student universities of Italy—(Spanish student rectors had to pay for a bull fight as well as a banquet when they were elected to office! So that even at the time of Christopher Columbus, there were no student rectors left in Spain.) The Spanish kings took Spanish traditions to the New World and founded new universities such as that in Lima, Peru, which is nearly 200 years older than Harvard.

Some of the universities of Latin America still pride themselves on the fact that their traditions derive directly from medieval Spain and that they were only slightly influenced by Napoleon Bonaparte's reforms of the University of Madrid. Most of them are professional schools. Many of them are enormous. The University of Buenos Aires has nearly 80,000 students, about two-thirds of who are reading law. The ancient professions attract all the best students and no one wants to qualify for a career in industry. Few students, few professors, and few universities expect to play any part in the economic development of the country.

I think that only two per cent of the students of Buenos Aires are studying agriculture upon which the prosperity of the country depends; a few years ago, there were only two students of geology in the whole University, which is the largest university in a country whose mineral wealth is probably vast and is totally unknown.

There are virtually no student grants. Many of the students spend years in university before they finally abandon their academic career and leave without a degree. Many professors still regard their chairs as sinecures which give a man a salary, but require little or nothing of him in return. Professors in Oxford and Cambridge and Anglican Bishops had the same idea 100 years ago. Many professors in Europe seem to have the same opinion today. 150 years ago, Talleyrand was Bishop of Autun—and Foreign Secretary of France. He visited his diocese only once—to persuade the chapter to vote for a friend in a parliamentary election. Members of the Italian cabinet hold chairs in the University of Rome—but never lecture there. Too many part-time professors are bad, but absentee professors are worse.

Students have a most important part to play in the administration of all universities in South America. They are represented on all committees which appoint professors and senior staff. Students have vetoed a man whose standards were higher than those to which they were accustomed and who might make it more difficult to pass examinations. Sometimes they veto a man who wants to change the syllabus and stop them using their fathers' lecture notebooks.

On the other had, sometimes it has been the student representatives who insisted that scholars of distinction should be chosen rather than men whose claims were based on family influence or political pressure. I once heard the vice-chancellor of a large university in Latin America describe a novel and very courageous experiment which his university had initiated. They were allowing their students to read books for the first time in the history of the university. Apparently many universities fear that if their students have independent access to primary sources of information they will lose their confidence in the infallibility of the professoriat. No wonder some students are restless!

Much of Latin America is under the control of military dictatorships, and many universities have page break become centres of political unrest. They are, perhaps, the only places in the country in which free discussion is possible and from which political reform can emanate, and for this reason they are feared and mistrusted by governments.

Progress

New countries which are trying to establish themselves often begin their march into the future by founding a university—next they found an airline and build a parliament house. Then they want to close the university down for subversion.

Only a couple of years ago, the government of Argentina decided to show its strength; police broke into the faculty of science in Buenos Aires; they knocked down the dean, who tried to bar their way; they broke his head and his arms; they beat up every human being who happened to be in the building at the time; and the next day 308 of the 312 staff had to go. The work of a life-time was destroyed in an afternoon, and practically no science is being taught today in the largest university in the southern hemisphere.

Even in countries where governments are tolerable and where universities are not corrupt and centres of political action, they may be inefficient and grotesquely overcrowded. The University of Paris, for example, has 180,000 students—30,000 more than they expected—and yet there are, I think, only 500 seats in the library. Students were admitted for whom there are no places in lecture rooms or laboratories. Some queue from 7 o'clock in the morning in order to get a place for an 11 o'clock lecture. Many students never see a professor all the time they are at university. Last year I believe 920 candidates graduated in archaelogy in the Sorbonne and it was then that they discovered that there were no jobs available for them at all. German universities are run by all-powerful professors, some of whom are completely uninterested in student affairs. University courses get longer and longer and an alarmingly large number of men do not graduate until after 30. An attempt by Parliament to make it possible for men to be professionally qualified by 26 was most bitterly resisted by the universities. One cannot help feeling that some form of rebellion was inevitable in Europe and one can only marvel that many universities have been so quiet for so long.

And what is one to make of the universities in India? The University of Kerala has about 140,000 students—almost as many as the Sorbonne. Both universities are obliged to admit every student who comes with a school-leaving certificate, although the standard of school teaching has declined and the number of would-be undergraduates has increased beyond all expectation. University staff cannot be found, buildings are inadequate, and equipment is out of date. Students study subjects which are of no use to them, and in Kerala there are no jobs for the graduates. 50 years ago, devoted missionaries created the best schools in India in the state of Kerala—today it has some of the best universities, more graduates than any other state and more graduates unemployed—and Kerala was the first state in India to go communist. Many of the problems of Kerala seem strangely like those of Europe; everywhere desperate problems seem to inspire desperate remedies. And who can wonder? What are frustrated young people to do?

If we are to understand the student riots and the very peculiar form that some of the demonstrations have taken, we must think of present difficulties and present discontents; but we cannot ignore, even today, traditions established 600 or 700 years ago. In the Middle Ages university students were clerks, and in some ways they were indistinguishable from clerics in holy orders. Many of them has a priestly tonsure, and nearly all of them claimed the extraordinary privileges which were demanded by the church for its priests. In England, it used to be said that it took two murders to hang a priest—one to unfrock him and one to condemn him. All over Europe, students were to all intents and purposes immune to the processes of civil law.

Blood Spilled

University students rioted. They fought each other; they fought and killed the townsmen. More blood has been spilled between the churches of St Mary's and St Martin's at Oxford than on many an English battlefield. When they were threatened with retribution by the authorities, students always claimed the privileges of ecclesiastics. One student at Oxford, who raped a woman and then murdered her father, appeared before the lay authorities. His case was referred to the university chancellor, who made him say a few penitential psalms and as a final punishment sent him to Cambridge. An ordinary layman would undoubtedly have been hanged for the same crime.

Photos of two students and a baby and a man being arrested by police

After one tremendous riot on St Scholastica's day, the citizens attacked the university and killed scores of students and staff. The university appealed to King Edward III, who reinstated them and made the university chancellor the supreme magistrate of the City of Oxford. For centuries the mayor had to swear fealty to the university in a ceremony every year in St Mary's Church. Students today may wear their hair down to their shoulders instead of having a priestly tonsure, but the idea that in some way they are never subject to the rigour of the law is very ancient. Students have claimed it and everyone else has resented it for centuries. No wonder people are perplexed by the astonishing way it has survived into the 20th century.

Furthermore, the idea that a university is a place of sanctuary, much as ancient church might have been, was all important in medieval times. A felon fleeing from justice would find refuge in an abbey or a church. The law has known nothing of such privileges since the time of the Reformation, but the first major riots at Berkley occurred when the police refused to allow students to use part of their campus for political meetings, and when the police invaded the courtyard of the Sorbonne in May 1968, staff and students fought side by side on the barricades on the very spot where their predecessors fought for the same cause hundreds of years ago, and the whole world applauded them.

Some historical traditions are astonishingly tenacious. After St Thomas had been murdered, the Pope anathematised the King, but, even after Henry had submitted and done penance in public by walking barefoot to À Becket's tomb to be scourged by the cathedral clergy, the tragedy of the martyr and the iniquity of his murder were not forgotten. When the next Pope was consecrated, he took the opportunity to anathematise all four knights who killed St Thomas and all the knights' descendants. This precedent was followed by his successors for hundreds of years. By now almost everyone in England must be descended somehow or other from one of these four men, so that we must all have lived under the anathemas of successive Popes for many a long year.

Pope John XXIII and his successor Pope Paul have been the only pontiffs to be consecrated for nearly 800 years who did not anathematise the murderers of the saint who died, whether he knew it or not, to establish the freedon of undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge from arrest and conviction by the civil power, and their right to kill each other and their fellow citizens without any fear of the consequences, as they did for several hundred years.

Students no longer wear a tonsure to identify themselves, but many of them have adopted curious hair styles, and many of them are certain that they can defy the law and that they are immune to the consequences were they committed by ordinary apprentices.

But, in spite of these privileges which are claimed by students and denounced by their contemporaries, there are signs of slow awakening. Once upon a time, students refused to submit to the civil law, and demanded to be judged by the ecclesiastical courts in their universities. Today they speak of 'double jeopardy'. They fear that they may be subject to the civil law in any event, and that, if they are found guilty, they may be punished both by the courts and their university. This is, of course, a risk to which all professional men are exposed. A doctor who rapes a patient or a solicitor who steals from a client must expect retribution from the courts, and from the fellow members of his profession as well.

Photo of a large group of students

In Britain, and even in North America, the idea that a university is a special place, perhaps a sacred place, but certainly a place where the writ of the law does not necessarily run, is part of student folklore. Most people realise that, however weak this case may be in law the memory of man goeth not to a time when students and their universities were subjected to all the rigour of the law and to the discipline of the civil courts as laymen are.

Some universities in South America are avoided by low-flying aircraft because the Students use them for target practice. The University of Havana, Cuba, is dominated by a student president who fought with Castro in the jungle and who carries a gun with him into classes and has 'seen off two or three deans and a couple of presidents. There are universities into which the police can scarcely venture except in a tank. In some places, students have formed an unholy alliance with local criminals for their mutual protection.

To me the most ominous event in the riots in Paris was the entry into the Sorbonne of a body of men who called themselves 'Katangese'; they proposed to use the sanctuary of the Sorbonne and to provide the students with armoured support. To the relief of everyone else, mutual suspicion drove students and gunmen apart, and the Katangese left under police escort.

The Conflict of Two Traditions

It seems to me that many of the troubles with which we are now confronted are due to the fact the the Spanish American tradition arrived in California with exiled students from the Argentine. They had been accustomed to student power and to professors who expected it.

They found in California a system which was alien to them and the found furthermore that many of the people who were supposed to be teaching them had lost interest in undergraduates and were devoting most of their efforts to research projects inspired from Washington. This tradition is very familiar in Latin America so it is perhaps not therefore suprising that the students from South America should have tried to introduce the rest of their own system of student participation and student power.

Impersonality and Alienation

Their ideas fell on fertile ground, they were in an enormous university in which many [unclear: studen] felt lost and alienated. Few undergraduates [unclear: ev] experienced the vitally important and [unclear: excir] contacts between the mind of the student [unclear: d] the mind of a stimulating teacher which [unclear: pro de] the most important of all education experier [unclear: as]. American has always excelled in the [unclear: ass] production of motor cars, but individual services, like hair cutting, or getting one's teeth fixed, are expensive and hard to arrange. Young people began to complain that they could only get individual attention by bending their I.B.M. card. No wonder they responded enthusiastically to the idea of student power. They did not know it was 800 years old, or that it came from Latin America. We all know how much they like it—end how fast it spread.

There is a worldwide subculture of [unclear: adolescen] among whom communication takes [unclear: plac] extraordinarily rapidly. It is astonishing, [unclear: fo] example, that long hair should have become fashionable in almost every country in the world; and it is astonishing that the Beatles and beat music should be a source of anxiety simultaneously in New York, Liverpool; Moscow, Peking and Jakarta.

Student Rebellion: A Perspective

I think that some student rebellion in some countries is justified and almost inevitable, but I think it is spreading for no other reason than that it is the modern thing for young people to do. At the moment we have an extraordinary alliance between student idealists; students who are very properly dissatisfied with the conditions in which they - have to work and students who want to reform both the universities and society at large. There are student malcontents; students who are emotionally disturbed and a few students who have quite deliberately decided that, since the whole of society is rotten and must be reformed universities must be destroyed as a first step. Some English students seem to rebel against society because their universities are so good—and so permissive that they have to find a cause in the world outside—the irony of fate! It is extraordinarily difficult to reconcile the conflicting claims of these people, and for university administrators to cope with them all. They can do a great deal of damage. Few universities have ever had to deal with the disciplinary problems created by mass rebellion. All universities are vulnerable: their most important task is, and always has been, to maintain the dialogue between authority and dissent. Their tradition of free speech makes censorship impossible, and they cannot function without the cooperation of every student with all the staff.

Conclusion

Universities are almost the most ancient institutions in the world, and their problems are many and various. They have survived the attacks of kings, emperors, churchmen, and ordinary citizens. I think they may have to reform themselves and adapt themselves. I am sure that they will have to listen to the ideas of the rising generation. Some universities may face serious trouble, but I feel certain that they will survive and emerge from their troubles stronger than ever and better fitted to face the future. They will remain the most flexible and the most conservative, the oldest and the most modern Institutions in the world.