Ends and means
STUDENTS IAN MacGREGOR
Christmas is the time for parlour games, and there is one I commend to everyone with a taste for irony. It involves nothing more than reversing the old saying that he who wills the end must will the means. Instead the players are invited to interpret events as though he who willed the means must also have willed the end. Does it sound over-subtle for the mellow hours after food and drink? Not at all.
Take the latest student outburst —sit-ins at Bristol and Birmingham, the near shouting- down of Mr Roy Jenkins before the television cameras at East Anglia, and the invasion of a committee room. The participating students claim to have a set of aims, ranging from ending British arms sales to Nigeria to admitting technical college students to their uni- versity union. Since such aims are not obvi- ously outrageous, one is briefly tempted to take them at face value (even though the mili- tants discovered Biafra only the week before last, and the Bristol union itself had formerly rejected the idea of admitting non-under- graduates).
But, if the rules of the game are not to be broken, the temptation must be resisted. The players are required to consider not the students' declared aims but what the students are likely to achieve in practice. Once this line of thought is embarked upon, even in the thickest post-prandial haze, everything, I assure you, falls into place.
Well, what are they likely to achieve? Un- doubtedly a number of things: an upsurge of anti-intellectualism, especially on local authorities; mounting public hostility to col- leges and universities and those who attend them; cuts in the amount of money made avail- able to higher education; and, in the 1970s and 1980s, almost certainly a reduction in the number of newly created university and college places. The anti-intellectualism and hostility are already upon us. It is only a matter of weeks before the first local authorities and private donors decide their money would be better spent elsewhere. It is only a matter of years before the expanding gap between the number of eighteen year olds .seeking further education and the number of places available —in the absence of a strong public sentiment supporting further education—becomes un- bridgeable.
It is pure fantasy, of course, to suggest that these are the ends the militants consciously seek. Yet, playing the game, one is bound to observe that, if they were seeking them, their means could' hardly be better chosen. The impact of the Birmingham sit-in on public opinion does not have to be imagined; it can be inferred from the fall in the takings of the annual university carnival from f10,000-plus in the past to £3,500 a fortnight ago. More- over, as I observed in an earlier article, one is bound to be made suspicious by the total absence of militant clamour for expansion in higher education, and by the fact that the pedagogical reforms they advocate would all involve a higher staff-to-student ratio and therefore, since staff cannot be increased much further, a reduction in the number of students. It can all be made to smell, after a Christmas dinner, like a privileged class seeking to extend its privileges.
Which is a pity, since the activist students are not, by and large, dishonest or delinquent; they are merely deluded. A new delusion has emerged at Birmingham. The student leaders there list as one of the major demands that university business should be conducted in public. Only personal matters are to be dis- cussed in private sessions. The students seem fondly to imagine that, if meetings of univer- sity bodies were thrown open to the public, business would proceed as usual—only better. Everyone who has ever served on such a body knows that frank discussion would be in- hibited and that formal meetings would become a facade behind which the true decision- making processes went on. The students would be left, as it were, the parliamentary gallery; the cabinet would continue to meet in secret. The end result? An enormous amount of time wasted rediscussing in public what had already been decided on in private, less candour on the part of university authorities, mounting student suspicion of sharp practice . . .
This demand, like the others, will be pressed and resisted, and meantime both the univer- sities and the general public will, if they are not careful, fall into a number of fallacies. For, at the moment, hostility to students is rapidly becoming as irrational as the students themselves. Wild-eyed students are bringing into being equally wild-eyed critics of students. Adults' prejudices are no more pleasant than adolescents'—and a good deal more repre- hensible.
One current fallacy even figures in the logic textbooks. It is to infer that, because most militants are students, most students must therefore be militants. In fact (except at Essex in the spring) the revolutionary minority has never succeeded in mobilising anything like half the student body at any university. Generally speaking, the larger the student meeting or the larger the turnout at an elec- tion, the worse the radicals do. And, of course, the militants always seem numerous because it is mainly the moderates who, showing a proper disdain for undergraduate politics, do not turn up. Furthermore, 'militants' come in innumer- able varieties. Only a tiny minority even of them are perfervid supporters of Cohn-Bendit, the Vietcong and now Colonel Ojukwu. Few militants are genuinely ideological. Many are just along for the ride, and are as sensible and good-tempered in private as they are absurd in public. No one should underestimate the element of sheer fashion; undergraduates have always been conformist even in their noncon- formity.
Indeed, no fallacy is more widespread than the belief in a university golden age, when all the boys and girls were bright and eager, worked hard, washed often, never slept tg- gether, and deferred to their elders. Whether such an age would have been golden is open to doubt; but the point is moot since it never existed. Idleness has declined markedly since before the war; more has not, intellectually, meant worse. Young men have never washed their hair; we only notice it now because there is so much more of it. Fornication is probably more prevalent, but so it is in the population at large. More pot has meant (at least this is my impression) less alcohol.
Nor are even the militants as disruptive as, reading the press, one would be led to imagine. After all, 200 students can gather outside an administration block without most of the uni- versity knowing the meeting is taking place, much less attending it. The several days' work lost by the Vice-Chancellors at Birmingham and Bristol would equally have been lost if they had caught the 'flu or taken a holiday. The time lost by students is no greater than had they been on the river or acting. To
visit a university these days, even the LSE, is to be reminded that most students are most of the time going about their business as usual.
Paradoxically, the sheer normality of most university life partly explains the trouble. Uni- versity authorities, as at Birmingham and Bristol, are prone to assume that, because there are no overt signs of trouble, trouble will not come. When it does come, as at Birming. ham and Bristol, the authorities, unprepared, overreact. I referred at the outset to the amuse- ment to be got from inferring people's ends from the means they adopt. As universities adjust to the reality of student protest, they will discover that there is no substitute for tight, well-coordinated executive leadership. The era of a thousand committees is past; the era of the inner university cabinet is upon us. The militants may discover that in the end they have achieved not more participation in de- cision-making, but less. Is it possible that the militants want not equality but authority, not big brother but big daddy? Yes, on reflection, I think it is.
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