TABLE TALK
Workers by hand and brain
DENIS BROGAN
The extension of the war of undergraduates, or some undergraduates, against the university and police authorities in Cambridge is in a way surprising. Cambridge (I am writing for the moment not as a former Cambridge don, but as a former Oxford undergraduate) has always been regarded as comparatively peaceful, not much given to ideological displays although full of too many rugger toughs. The appearance of Cambridge as a centre of student revolt will not be welcomed by old-fashioned Cambridge dons, of whom I used to be one. But the Garden House row plus the prosecution plus the sentences plus the behaviour of Mr Justic Melford Stevenson raise a great many questions.
I should begin by saying that I dislike very much moral sermons delivered from the bench against unnamed villains by a judge who is protected against criticism by the law of contempt of court and by the immense self-esteem of the bench. It is one of the superiorities of the United States that judges are not protected against such criticism, and I think the readiness of the American bar to stand up to the bench is one of the few ways in which American law enforcement is superior to ours. The whole 'bench of British Themis' is, I think, cosseted more than many of its members deserve to be, and reading the judgment of Mr Justice Melford Stevenson I was annoyed by the tone of moral superiority and reminded of Burke's unkind description of the results of purely legal education. I also think that the sentences were excessively severe, and if I am told that the skinheads are sentenced in the same way, I can only ask when they were sentenced in the same way, at any rate in Cambridge.
On the other hand, there is of course already, and will be more of, an irrelevant sympathy for the motives of the people who broke up the party at the Garden House hotel. I dislike very much the colonels' regime in Greece. I also dislike very much the record of the Communist party in Greece, bloody, mendacious and deceptive. I also dislike dons cultivating the young with imitations of the current fashions of student protest. A don is not necessarily wiser than his brighter pupils—he is often much less bright than they are, as teaching wears down the mind; but he has seen 'four-and-twenty leaders of revolt' come and go, and he can remember, if he has any historical memory at all, that it is not always the left that benefits by student violence. Quite by accident, I saw the takeover of the Italian state by the Fascists, and I was in Germany just before the taking over of the Weimar Republic by the Nazis. The young Fascists, the young Nazis, were youth leaders and I suspect that, temperamentally, it was more or less accidental what side they joined. At any rate. I am barely tepid in my admiration for militant students in the western world.
Student disorder is, of course, a very old affair. In the Middle Ages Oxford had some very magnificent riots. So had Paris. The student universities like Bologna (mother of Glasgow) shared in the general disorder of the Italian city states. And traditions of disorder lasted a lot longer. There is a famous story which I had from Sir James Fergusson of Kilkerran, Lord Lieutenant of the County of Ayr, about a kinsman of his who tried a Glasgow student for murder- ing another Glasgow student. The two cives, to give them their legal title, had been drink- ing very heavily (this shows that the story belongs to a quite remote past) and one had killed the other. Lord Kilkerran, in commenting on the conduct of the panel (i.e. the accused) asked the rhetorical question, 'If a man would kill his best friend when he was drunk, what would he have done if he had been sober?' The implication was that he would have found some more monstrous crime to commit.
I have seen a great many student riots in Paris in which, I think, the ideological content was quite low. Indeed, If we think rather of inbuilt feuds like those of Celtic and Rangers in the Glasgocw football world, or of the built-in religious quarrels of Ulster, we should perhaps be moving in the real world which lies behind many student revolts.
Nevertheless, some student revolts are provoked and may be justifiable. The original revolts in Berkeley and Columbia had a good deal of justification, if only as protests against the neglect of real university education and the neglect of the social duties of great university landowners to the slums by which these great universities were surrounded. Sometimes the students are protesting with great generosity and courage against outrages and they are exercising their rights as men and citizens rather than their rights- as students. And the behaviour of the National Guard (a draft- dodging body, in the opinion of many Americans) and the police of many American states and cities is enough to justify violent reaction and to turn perfectly docile students into supporters of militants if not into militants themselves.
But the appearance of highly politicised students undertaking to demonstrate against a publicity stunt in a Cambridge hotel which I know well is, I think, not to be encouraged. The indignation is extremely selective. There are other bodies politic at least as unattractive as the rule of the Greek colonels which do not seem to attract the attention of indignant students. The rulers of North Vietnam are only slightly more attractive than the rulers of Soqth Vietnam. Yet we have Miss Mary McCarthy having a love affair with the rulers of North Vietnam, I suppose as a substitute for her quondam Trotskyism?
There is another aspect of the problem of student violence which ought to be noted. In
the last few weeks I have been taking taxis a great deal, since I aril still very largely immobile. I don't share the view that taxi drivers are necessarily intelligent, public- spirited, open-minded critics of the world. But some taxi drivers in Cambridge have had lives far more interesting and far more educational than those of the undergradu- ates; and two or three have seen a great deal of the world—more than undergraduates are likely to see—and they have been very hostile indeed to the students.
There is a reason for this which ought perhaps to be stressed. The Labour party in its famous Webb constitution of 1918 was designed to unite the workers by hand and brain; but, as Mr Wilson and Mrs Castle discovered when they encountered Mr Callaghan, the Labour party's wedding has never been really consummated. Most of the workers by hand don't regard workers by brain as real workers at all, and of course many of the students don't work very hard (as an old college teacher could testify). It is true that the workers by hand don't work as hard as they used to do, and this on the continent of Europe is unkindly called 'the English sickness'. But the chief beneficiaries of our vast extension of education are the middle classes. With rising wages, the number of workers (in the ordinary sense of the term) who, to their indignation, have to pay income tax is also rising, and the spectacle of young men whom they regard as passing lives of agreeable idleness, breaking up meetings, interfering with tourism, sticking their snouts into the workers' business, is profoundly irritating.
Perhaps some way of drawing off this superfluous political energy of the undergraduates could be invented. In Scot- tish universities, the mediaeval institution of electing a rector by the undergraduate body every three years provides a chance for political demonstrations, mild and some- times not so mild rioting, and a general feeling of having a share in the government of the university. Perhaps an annual election of an officer with a title, with a handsome uniform, with not very serious prerogatives, could draw off some of the bad blood?
I hope some solution can be found, because the problems are becoming extremely serious. One of them that really cannot be neglected at the moment is the way in which non-British students feed the increasingly visible xenophobic attitudes of the British people (especially of the English people). If it became widely known that all foreign students, like all native students, are subsidised by the British taxpayer, at least indirectly, this would help to alienate the workers by hand from the workers by brain. Many of the workers by hand will think, and rightly, that their work by hand is a great deal more useful than a good deal of what passes for work by brain in certain places and certain fields. I should be very distressed to see universities run in the spirit which would appeal to Mr Justice Melford Stevenson.
I should also be very distressed if they were to be run on the lines of Nanterre, not to mention some other institutions which are, if you like, slightly more spirited versions of Nanterre. But I am convinced that if there is going to be an economic crisis, as I fear may be the case, there may be few more popular causes than slapping down the students in a way that will appeal to the simple, materialistic working man, i.e. cutting off their grants for doing what he cannot regard as work.
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