Bad year for the universities
Donald Watt
The academic year is over. The students have largely departed. The last of the seemingly endless piles of examination scripts have been returned to the university administration. The examiners' meetings are all over. The results have been posted, eventually to achieve immortality in next year's university Calendars or, in the case of Oxbridge, in the Times. The University Grants Committee's letters on the remaining four years of the present quinquennium have been assessed. Cash is tight and will get tighter. For the academic staff as a whole the pill has been slightly sweetened by a pay award which keeps them still in sight, if a little more distantly, of this year's fall in the real value of money.
It has not been a good year for the universities. They have had to face the brunt of their students' resentment at the corresponding erosion of their own much more exiguous standards of living. The peculiar idiocy of the National Union of Students chose to focus this on university halls of residence in the form of rent strikes; which suited the Treasury so well that one could almost believe they inspired the NUS in the first place. Some halls of residence were forced to withhold improvements in the pay of their staff; all had to live in the red until the university authorities, having failed to persuade the militants of the stupidity of their actions, were forced to break the strikes in one way or another. None of which has made the universities any more pleasant places to work in. And the number of health crack-ups among staff 'in their forties from stress diseases are increasing sufficiently that one wonders why the Times diarist left them out of his recent, rather peculiar survey.
Much more serious in their implications, however, for the universities are the affaires Eysenck and Huntington. The case of the Leeds honorary doctorate merely proves that some university top brass lack cojones, something everyone knew long ago, and one of the strongest arguments for breaking the old oligarchic structure of university government. The most serious aspect of the Huntington affair was the revelation that a majority of the staff of the University of Sussex were prepared to defend the denial of Professor Huntington's right to speak. The correspondence columns of the Times Higher Education Supplement have made most instructive reading. But here again, while academics must regret that the existence of such black sheep in their profession has been revealed to the outside world, their actual existence has been known within the profession itself for a decade or more.
The Association of University Teachers is still a battlefield where the minute minority carries far more weight than its numbers deserve, and endeavours to impede the development of that body into the kind of self-policing professional association concerned with standards of professional conduct and dedication to professional ideals into which the more far-sighted of its officers wish to see it develop. It is to be hoped that its working party now concerned to develop a definition of academic freedom come up with something more than a bureaucratic anodyne.
The Eysenck affair IS rather worse. For it shows that at present universities have no practical protection against any self-appointed group from outside who choose to pronounce one of their staff unworthy to exercise his profession. The beating-up of Professor Eysenck at the LSE was organised by a group which had no connection with the LSE students and had no connection even with Birmingham University, although it contained some students from that university. They obtained entrance to the LSE by the simple method of walking through the door from the street (as did the Irish Trotskyite seaman who played so prominent a part in the earlier LSE troubles). Having failed to disrupt Professor Eysenck's appearance at Birmingham, they deliberately decided (their own throwaways made this quite clear) to make his next public appearance impossible. And when he opened his mouth they went for him. The girls in their teens who led the assault had worked themselves into a state of hysterical ecstacy of which the Mahdi's followers would not have been ashamed and were still in that state several hours later when one of them bit a prominent LSE 'radical' student who was trying to argue with her. Contrary to what appeared in The Spectator's Notebook, no LSE students were involved or identified. Only that fatal unwillingness to be identified as opponents of the lunacies of the left, which still informs many of their seniors, prevented the LSE Union from collectively censuring their attackers.
Now it cannot be emphasised too often that at present university institutions have no practicable defence against such organised gang intrusion from outside save measures which would virtually destroy the freedoms they are pledged to defend. Student clubs, being run by people who, as they are over eighteen years of age are legally responsible, cannot be interfered with, nor ought they to be, by university authorities, save in matters of public funds for which the universities are held accountable by the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons. It is for them to police, if so unacceptable a word can be used, those who attend their meetings. As for access to university buildings, with the exception of libraries, these again could not be policed without producing just that appearance of authority which would challenge all students to circumvent it and prove an easy target for the discontented. In any case how can one preserve a university as a place where all ideas are accessible if those who wish access have to pass through the kind of checkpost which would be necessary to guarantee really effective security? As for campus police, they have been talked of by Oxbridgians bemused by reminiscences of' Progs ' and' Butlers.' All of us who have American experience know that their existence simply provokes an escalation of violence only too welcome to the diseased minds and disturbed personalities with whom one has to cope. No one wants a siege of Tokyo in Houghton Street.
Nor are the police much help. They will come, and promptly if a breach of the peace has been committed; but not, given their other commitments and reduced resources, before — which is the point at issue. And they, like the university authorities, face very serious problems of identification after the event. Nor are they easy to bring to the point of preferring charges — save when flagrant and persistent excesses by known individuals are concerned. They prefer to keep a low profile, as the jargon goes. In the case of Professor Eysenck, once he had refused to prefer charges of assault, they preferred to ignore the clear evidence of conspiracy to commit a disorder, since university prem ises, though in practice open to all-corners while the university itself is open, are regarded as private and not public in character.
A possible remedy lies in legislation. It is understood that theViceChancellors' Committee is currently discussing the matter. Some profess to see a way out in the recent House -of Lords verdict in the case of Kamara and Others v the Director of Public Prosecutions, In this case (which concerned the invasion of the London premises of the High Commission for Sierra Leone) their
Lordships ruled that "a corn' bination to commit a public mischief could be indictable" as a " conspiracy " and stated that the "public peace" could be regard. ed as being "in question "when either an affray or a riot or an unlawful assembly took place in the presence of innocent third Parties" and need not be confined to "public places," and quoted approvingly from R. V. Parnell of 1881: "a combination of persons to commit a wrongful act with a view to injure another shall be all .offence though the act if done by one would amount to no more than a civil wrong." On first sight the Eysenck affair would seem to fall fair and square within this definition. Once again however the universities are in the hands of the police and the authorities. The real problem however remains. How to identify and produce reliable evidence against the perpetrators of this new form o,f guerrilla activity against the tine versities? In the end the universities are in the hands of the public and of the authorities elected by the public. At present the public's reaction to events such as the Eysenck affair is to damn the urnversities for doing nothing. &it the universities can meet none of the public's demands without,i ceasing to function as places oi free learning, free research and free instruction. If their freedom is to be trammelled it will only be se' tisfying the guerrillas, not society as a whole. This does not release the universities from the obligation of removing from their midst those whose actions are designed to destroy their freedom to func.tion properly or to bring the universities into public disrepute. But it does mean that it is for the pub.' lic to act to maintain the onlY kind of environment in which they can do their duty as places devoted to the preservation and advancement of learning. Plenty of people must know those who conspired together to deny Professor Eysenck the right to practice his calling before the LSE stUdents' society. Where are they?
Donald Watt is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics.
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