VIEWPOINT
Showdown on the campus?
GEORGE GALE
There are not many last-resort sanctions for those who persistently break rules. Generally, however, it may be observed that the sanc- tions available to parents, and those avail- able to magistrates and judges, are adequate, although many might think that long-term imprisonment is essentially far more barbaric than the stocks, exile, forced labour, or the cat; and some would argue that capital punishment is a cheap, necessary and fit punishment for certain crimes and criminals. There are, nevertheless, certain societies %,ithin the public or political society at large where it would seem to the outside observer that no obviously just and practically enforceable sanctions exist by which the transgressor may be punished and the par- ticular society be preserved.
I am, of course, thinking particularly of those societies which we call universities. The traditional sanctions here have been, in ascending order of severity, rebukes, fines, house-arrest (or gating), temporary expulsion (or rustication) and permanent expulsion (sending down). Usually, except for the most serious and flagrant offences, universities have preferred to mete out their own justice lather than let the law of the land take its own course; and the police have been quite con- tent that this should be so. Also, until recently, the sanctions at the disposal of university authorities have been reasonably adequate for their purpose. There is accumulating evi- dence that this may no longer be the case, partly because the sanctions themselves are not always appropriate, partly because of the difficulty of enforcing them, and partly because of the difficulty of trying the cases.
If, for instance, you have a university whose campus, for ideological or socio- logical reasons (whether good or bad is immaterial) is open to the public, you can pass the sentence of rustication on a student, or you can send him down, but you cannot make him actually remove himself. To be sure, his grant, if any, will be cut off, but any enterprising student in such circum- stances will not lack food, shelter and enough to smoke and drink. You can decline to award him a degree, but what if he doesn't want one anyway? Nor, in many cases, can you allow the law of the land to take its course, for the student may not have offended against that law. It is no offence in the eyes of the law to do no academic work whatever. And even if the law of the land has been broken, evidence may be hard to come by The last thing the police want to do is to police universities.
There is a utopian ideal of a free university Which would flourish in a park-like setting, in which there would be constant intercom- munion of teachers and students, in which no barriers would be erected, in which all students would be treated as adults and as entitled to privacy and free expression as any ther citizen, and in which the only law ould be the law of the land. And there ould be much to be said for such a uni- ersity (as there would be much to be said or any utopia) if it could be made to work. or some, neo-Platonists particularly, the cription of an ideal or utopian university Is in any event beneficial, since it declares an aim to be striven for even if not achieved. To such people, to know the ideal offers the simplest way to better the real.
Certainly to seek an approximation to such a university would require the most careful selection of teachers; for it is to be supposed that teachers with essentially authoritarian, traditional, or reactionary outlooks would not only be out of place in such a society but would positively impair its prospects of betterment. Equally, however, if such a uni- versity's students are supposed to be adults, they too would have to be selected with the same care as the staff. Unfortunately, at this point the egalitarian principle intervenes: students must not be chosen on account of their social proclivities but rather on the basis of a given academic standard and thereafter first come, first served. There thus seems to me to be an inherent self-contradic- tion in the idea of a libertarian university made up of adults in which its junior mem- bers are selected in effect by rote and not by standards of acceptability other than academic. Such a university is bound to be continually threatened, year by year, by students who, far from admiring the liber- tarian principles of its organisation, utilise those principles to subvert the organisation.
Those who despise such a university are not fit to be members of it. Fortunately, it is not difficult to discover those who despise it, for their actions reveal their attitude. They demonstrate their contempt either by failing to reach the academic standards they are capable of reaching; or by behaving in such a manner as to prevent the teaching or the researching or the administering of the uni- versity to be carried out. No further evidence of someone's unfitness to be a member of such a university is required; academic or social misconduct of this kind is ground enough for expulsion. Moreover, the respon- sible members of the university itself, if it is to escape becoming a laughing-stock and is to continue to be taken seriously, have a duty to preserve its reputation and to ensure its future. The legitimate interests of the great majority of members of such a university, senior and junior alike, require the weeding out of that minority of members who seek, or who act as if they seek, to destroy it. There is no place in an academically reput- able university for those who will not or cannot meet its academic standards. There is no place in a libertarian university for revolutionary fascists who violently demon- strate their abhorrence of free speech and free assembly, and who use physical coercion in an endeavour to gain their illiberal and irrational ends.
What, then, to do? Surely the dilemma is
more apparent than real. The law of the land can and should be invoked as a final sanction to deal with those who, rusticated or sent down, nevertheless continue to live within, and thereby subvert, the community from which, as a consequence of their deliberately destructive or idle behaviour, they have properly been expelled. Injunctions can and should be obtained restraining such offenders from entering the grounds and buildings of the university.
The University of Essex has a high and growing international reputation in certain academic disciplines such as economics. It also has a reputation, perhaps equally justi- fied, among the general public for riotous assembly, grossly bad manners towards visiting speakers, and a seeming inability effectively to discipline persistent offenders. Its ethos is possibly the most permissive and libertarian of all the new universities; yet probably in no other university in the country is freedom of speech less secure.
A test case of classic form has now arisen at Wivenhoe Park, home of that university. A student was rusticated for failing to reach the required academic standard in a sub- sidiary subject. At the meeting of the Senate, last week, which considered the rustication, students' representatives made no substantial points, and the decision was endorsed. During the course of the meeting the only door leading out of the committee room was barricaded up. and upwards of seventy students held the members of the Senate captive in the room for several hours until eventually a chief superintendent accom- panied by a uniformed police officer from Colchester persuaded the students to disperse, the alternative being that if they refused sufficient police would be brought in to arrest those still persisting in their barricade. Obviously, the names of a substantial num- ber of the students concerned are known. The moment for a showdown has surely arrived.
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