Students united

BRYAN WILSON

The Right to Say We: The Adventures of a Young Englishman at Harvard and in the Youth Movement Richard Zorza (Pall Mall 40s) Academic Freedom in Action Paul Hoch (Sheed and Ward 42s) The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson (Macmillan 50s)

If the fragmentation of the university ex- perience needed any further contemporary evidence the divergence of style and content of these three books, all intimately con- cerned with university affairs, would surely provide it. They are all the work of inmates who have had rather more than the man- datory eighteen months of field-work ex- posure which is adequate for A respectable anthropological monograph, but they do not quite produce a respectable monograph sep- arately or collectively.

Mr Zorza is the youngest and most immediately impassioned of the authors, although he cannot quite communicate his passion. That a student strike or sit-in is the nearest modern equivalent to an evangelical revival experience (as Ashby and Anderson remark) is fully evidenced in Mr Zorza's pages: for him the youth movement was an 'almost spiritual experience' that revealed 'the depths of people's souls'. But the clichés of emotional release in the strike and the sit-in at Harvard (to Zorza The Strike and The Sit- In) are as exciting as a line-by-line, if oc- casionally garbled, account of a believer's 'born-again' experience to a confirmed agnostic. •

The long-drawn-out account of a short spell of Harvard history may be more engag- ing to those who were in on the act than it could ever be to the distant reader. But the real human tragedy which Zorza's pages reveal is that it took such a destructive up- roar to teach him—and perhaps many like him—what, at least in England, every little old lady knows. Namely, that there is a lot of pleasure and an inward glow of righteousness to be had from uniting one's energies in a 'good' cause, from the sense that one 'loves' people. Certainly it is an in- dictment of contemporary society and its callow television communication, if a simple message of this kind is lost and can be discovered again only through iconoclastic orgies such as a few weeks of student revolu- tion.

Academic Freedom in Action is meant to be an exposd of the universities. Their ad- ministrators are corrupt; their disciplines are banal and self-contradictory; and their ultimate purposes are forged in conspiracy with the capitalist organisations of the technical industrial complex. Hoch marshals his evidence from all conceivable sources, and one must occasionally wonder at the style of his natural science (for he is a natural scientist) from the type of evidence he drags together in this essay in social commentary. A director of Ise in its early years had once been in the Colonial Service—there's guilt for you! Another worked in a government ministry in the war—a common government training ground for professors. Someone at Sussex University is doing research on the politics of educational policy in Tanzania, at

Cambridge on factory social structure, and at Manchester on urbanisation in Africa.

Hoch concedes that the projects may be above-board but 'their findings in many cases provide just the sort of information to allow some counter-insurgency expert to manipu- late certain of the areas in question'. Con- foundedly clever chaps, counter-insurgents.

Academic standards are a plot to deprive the illiterate (as every sophomore knows—

one must add, if one may be forgiven Hoch's favourite device of supplying paranthetical comments for many of his quotations). The sixfold increase in government funding of the universities in Britain between 1957-67 is another proof of governmental determina- tion to set university guidelines. As for the private foundations, their iniquity is well- documented. The Ford Foundation's culpa- bility is clear: they helped the National Association for the Advancement of Col- oured People, but provided no funds for Stokely Carmichael or for Eldridge Cleaver's Black Panthers. It all goes to show .. .

After the excitement of so many capitalist rapists under Mr Hoch's spinsterly bed, The Rise of the Student Estate comes as a pretty humdrum exercise in Whig history. It is the story, in large part, of the emergence of stu- dent representation (and the rectorial system) in Scotland, and of the National Union of Students in England. The tone is judicious, benign and slightly patronising. No doubt

ever crosses the authors' minds about the worthiness of the NUS, the appropriateness of

student representation, or the proper pro- gress of the cause—not, that is, till very recently indeed. For Sir Eric's students are all rational men—or almost all and very nearly so.

Progressive utterances by liberal academics of the past are reported with strong words of commendation (for this is a highly evalua- tive • history) and the authors never pause to suppose that statements made at one time and in one context might mean quite different

things, in a very changed educational and cultural environment. The NUS is regarded as

really representative of students: there are a few backward glances at the apathetic majority in students' unions, but even though

NUS policy statements are the work of 'very

small groups', 'they nevertheless ought to be accepted as the voice of the student estate'.

For, the authors ask, in what democratic institutions is there not apathy? Where indeed, but where else (unless one admits the trades unions) do union presidents get elected on such tiny proportions of the constituency votes? Where else is there such flagrant rig- ging of elections as among students? There are university unions in Britain today where the union oligarchs so arrange meetings that large seEtions (notably engineers and medics whose political views are clearly not fit to be heard) are systematically disenfranchised. And so no doubt it will go on—as long as stu- dent union fees are compulsorily paid by local education authorities: if students were given the money, and allowed to opt for just what sort of union facilities they wanted to pay for, we might see different types of stu- dent politics—more representative politics perhaps?

But this sort of evidence does not come the authors' way, any more than do the many mismanaged schemes of the National Union over its five decades of history. In the final pages the wreckers are discussed—still judiciously, if less benevolently—as the abusers of the collective student conscience (a phrase about which the authors clearly feel some difficulty, but which, since they are em- barked on a somewhat abstract sociological

argument, they let slip through). The counsel for the really wayward is 'aggressive tolerance' and counter-propaganda (one would like to see a university like Oxford providing the recommended half-hourly news-sheets from the administrative offices with factual information on the latest state of the sit-in . . . alas, there are not even the typists to do it!). And when the -real destroyers are defeated, universities will be handed back to the noble and peaceful pro- test movements from which students learn so much.