Save our universities!
STUDENTS IAN MacGREGOR
This is the last of three articles by a senior unirersity teacher: His two previous articles appeared on 18 and 25 October.
Most governments in the modern world provide old people with pensions. They go alike to rich and poor, deserving and undeserving. Britain is one of the few countries that also provides pensions for the young. They go to the rich more than to the poor, and they enable the young who receive them in the fullness of time to become even richer. These young people's pensions are called student grants. And, as we all know, some of the pensioners are not very happy these days.
Last week I cited one manifestation of their unhappiness—the current debate over examina- tions. How should universities react to student demands on exams and a host of other matters? Tactics must vary but, as I wrote in my last article, there are certain strategic principles appropriate all over the country
One is to refuse to be intimidated. Fear of student unrest suffuses the atmosphere at many institutions this autumn. University senates are told that, unless they do this, that or the other thing, the roof will collapse. But, once a uni- versity starts to take decisions not because it believes in them but to appease vociferous students, it is damned: those who teach at it will find their self-confidence, their self-respect and their moral authority forfeited. Teaching staff are bound to despise authorities that capit- ulate; so are students. And undergraduate appetites grow by what they feed on. Already the vanguard of the scholariat is advancing students' claims to choose their own teachers; Britain a banana republic is the aim.
In any case, the roof need not collapse. Sit- ins, paint-daubings and mass meetings may be irritating but they are as nothing set against the possible destruction of great academic in- stitutions (which, by world standards, most British universities still are). Are students threatening to strike? Let them. Are they dis-
rupting lectures? Cancel the lectures. The students lose instruction: the staff can get on with their own work. In fact, one of the most
amazing, and disturbing, features of the uni- versities' response to militant unrest so far is their failure to grasp the reality of their own
power. The students' only weapons— strikes, sit- ins, demonstrations—are ultimately self-defeat-
ing; it is not the universities that suffer but the students' education. But the authorities' weapons —suspensions, expulsions, the cutting off of local authority grants, the punctual holding of examinations—do the universities no harm; on the contrary, they may do them good. And they can be used to deter all but the most determined militant students, perhaps 0.005 per cent of the total, and if necessary to exclude even them. Preserve the traditions of academic civility by all means; but universities should ensure that civility is not allowed to degenerate into sheer nervelessness.
They should also refuse to be rushed. Written examinations, having formed a central part of academic life for a century (most universities refer to them casually in their statutes), are now in danger of being abandoned by some universities like lemmings dashing for the sea. The militants are impatient, everything should and can be done, if not tomorrow, then next week. A problem they have never thought of before, even though it has existed for genera- tions, has to be solved instantly. The universi- ties under pressure on examinations should clearly declare that those planned for next spring will go forward on schedule, with no changes to be introduced until 1970. If rules of assessment are as important as claimed, they are important enough to be considered soberly —and at length. The same goes for discipline, teaching methods and much else.
Universities had better, in addition, look to the way they make their decisions. Typically, different student demands—say, on exams in different subjects or on discipline—are dealt with by different committees. The various com- mittees are under varying pressures, have vary- ing memberships and far too often varying principles. One body takes a 'hard' line, another a 'soft.' At the least, such discrepancies cause anomalies and frictions. At worst, they cause the university progressively to surrender its authority since. confronted with anomalies, the pressures are always for the 'hard' committee to fall in line with the 'sort'; Gresham's law applies. The more decentralised a university, the worse the trouble. One or two university heads are notorious for their reluctance to give strong personal leadership; they play a passive chairman-of-the-board role. The problems of their institutions are almost certainly going to be the most acute, and the hardest to solve.
But Gresham can apply even where decision- making is decentralised. A scientist at a northern civic university analysed his experience. 'Often you deal over a term with perhaps four or five matters relating to student affairs. In each case, the students seem to have some justice on their side, and anyway you want to avoid trouble. So you give them most of what they want. Then you realise at the end of the term that, even though each individual decision made sense separately, the effect of all four or five taken together is to deprive you of a good deal of authority, and also to make it very difficult for you to hold the line in the cases coming up next term.' He added that he felt he knew better now how Churchill, Macmillan and the others must have felt in the 'thirties, with Chamberlain giving everything away, one bit at a time.
This man and his colleagues, like university authorities elsewhere, are paying a price for having failed to anticipate students' reasonable claims. For—we should be clear—students do have such claims: not to have a powerful voice in university government but, as the Vice- Chancellors have belatedly recognised, to be consulted about matters affecting them (includ- ing many academic matters) and to be left free to lead their private lives as they wish so long as .they do not disrupt the institutions or the lives of those around them. The distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding actions• is still serviceable. Students attend uni- versities to learn; it is up to the universities to offer them facilities for learning and to find out at the end of the day whether learning has taken place. But, in my view, it is no part of the university's business to tell students how late they can stay out at night, when they must come into residence, where they must eat, or with whom they must (or must not) sleep. Equally, the university, if it is to offer facili- ties for teaching, learning and scholarship, has an unqualified right to enforce order and free- dom of communication and inquiry.
If university authorities accept this line of reasoning, they can proceed in either of two ways. Either they can wait for students to make demands and then—haltingly, belatedly—accede to the ones they deem reasonable and, prob- ably to some others as well. Or they can try to determine in advance of need what the students' role should be, and then assign the students that role whether they have asked for it or not. My own preference is for the latter course. But in either case universities should avoid putting themselves in the position they have so often occupied in the past, of trying to defend the indefensible. To do this is to undermine the will to defend that which can and must be defended—the existence of univer- sities as sanctuaries of freedom, order and tolerance in a world increasingly hostile to all three.
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