Oxford Confronts Student Rebellion

...that working-class politics, once the active source of moral challenge, have been deadened not by direct repression but by the opiate of relative prosperity...

...Nonetheless a university has as its distinctive purposes the advancement of knowledge and teaching, conceived not as the mere transmission of knowledge, but as the development of powers of criticism and judgment and the adjustment of the vital interplay between research and teaching...

...Fifty-five meetings were held, and all members of the university were invited to submit written evidence...

...The threat from the Right is difficult to assess...

...T T HE HART COMMITTEE recognized clearly the ideological threat of the student New Left to the academic university: In the perspective of this movement the universities appear both to sustain the structure of a corrupt society and to reflect it...

...The Hart report accepts that "there are aspects of university life where students should participate in strength on decision making bodies...

...Hence one of the few positive principles discernible in this form of radicalism is that conventional forms of democracy and the authority of elected representatives must be replaced by "direct" democracy, so that, to the maximum KARL BOTTIGHEIMER extent possible, decisions in the factory and in the university, as well as in society at large, shall be made by general assemblies of those principally affected by them...

...The justification that radicalism had attracted too few followers at Oxford to be regarded as a serious force seems out of place in a report that gives so much emphasis to the intrinsic worth of ideas...

...With the exception of a few "asides," the body of the Hart report seems to have been written without student radicalism much in mind...

...The Hart report acknowledges "various formulations of the case for student participation in the government of universities" but is quick to observe that "some of these invoke democratic principles and in so doing, seem to us to beg some very large questions concerning academic authority and the relevance of such principles to it...

...First responses to the report go some distance toward dashing such hopes...

...Four beliefs, however, differentiate the attitude of student revolutionaries to these evils from the indictments of the traditional Left...

...and one can only hope that as the clash of arms comes closer to Oxford he will in time be stirred to reemerge...

...Then comes the sentence one is not likely to have heard recently on an American campus: ". . . there is a need for a clear statement of the character of academic authority which distinguishes between its defensible forms and unnecessary or obscurantist accretions...

...The first is the belief that the radical, economic, and social changes required for the solution of these agonizing problems are excluded by the refusal, and indeed inability, of all the conventional political parties to contemplate genuine alternatives to the system...

...Those who have the authority to decide academic matters which are of vital concern to any generation of students, such as the syllabus and methods of teaching and examination or assessment, should be under an obligation to explain their exercise of their authority to students and to modify their practice in the face of cogent criticism while remaining free to tell students (as they would their colleagues) when they are talking nonsense...

...Secondly, there is the belief that the traditional sources of challenge to the established order have been invaded or neutralized by it...

...Thus the Hart committee sets the stage for the 66 recommendations which follow and which clearly call for major changes in OXFORD CONFRONTS STUDENT REBELLION the university...

...The great problem with the resistance to student activism is that it is becoming increasingly unintellectual, covert, conspiratorial, and inarticulate...

...A very modest effort at self scrutiny is sufficient to reveal to most of us, besides ordinary human failings, symptoms more or less advanced, of the specific failings which the conditions of academic life may foster or at any rate not sufficiently discourage: fear of doing anything for the first time...

...But where most university committees shrink visibly from confronting the underlying philosophical questions, which if allowed any prominence will ordinarily divide an academic committee, the Hart Committee placed them in the forefront...

...The committee seems to have found student radicalism so repugnant that it despaired of any efforts at dialogue...

...The priviliges are not likely to give up without a fight, despite the excellent English record for throwing in the towel at the strategic moment...

...unnecessary secrecy...

...Such a demurrer would be more bearable if one did not feel that H. L. A. Hart (the undoubted author) was so preeminently a man to plead the cause...

...Fourthly, militant students believe they have a special position and function...

...The resulting report, in 228 numbered paragraphs and four sizable appendices, treats the rules and institutions of Oxford and is as parochial in its specific recommendations as all such university business tends to be...

...Two hundred and three students responded individually, as well as several dozen student groups...

...LAST SPRING the University of Oxford published, mainly for internal circulation, the Report of the Committee on Relations with Junior Members.* The investigatory prose of university committees is not in short supply or great demand, but the Oxford committee's report is distinguished both by the lucid thought of its eminent chairman, H. L. A. Hart, professor of jurisprudence, and by its unimpassioned examination of the issues which underly university problems everywhere...

...must be as objectionable as the crudest assertion of the absolute right of teachers to dictate what students should learn, how they should learn it, and how they should live...

...The high degree of order, the low repute of violence, and the still formidable distinctions of a hierarchical society all conduce to lingering stability...

...For this form of radicalism the conception of academic authority which we have presented...

...The Hart committee does not employ this statement for the benefit of the status quo...

...By showing in Appendix A that student radicalism is reducible to a coherent system of thought, Hart brings us to the very border of a critique...

...We think that the contrary view can only be held by those who ignore the complexity of the truth and the extent to which its attainment is dependent on experience, accumulated knowledge, and organization...

...The report is filled with implications that "most students" respect academic values and that "most faculty" deplore autocratic authority...

...THE GREAT DEFICIENCY Of the Hart report is, I think, that an issue of such magnitude is tidily swept out of the main arena to be displayed, inconclusively, in a side-show...

...Thus the teacher's experience and accumulated knowledge are not qualifications for determining academic policy but disqualifications: the teacher enclosed in the prevailing orthodoxies of his time is blind to the radical alternatives, to existing policies and methods of which the young, the ignorant, and the inexperienced have an undimmed vision...

...In our view, no theory of legal and political rights for the conduct of a society as a whole, not even democratic theory, is transferable to the government of these distinctively academic activities...

...English universities, and Oxford and Cambridge in particular, thus far seem the least afflicted of Western universities...

...From a liberal point of view (the point of view that "justice" rather than "repression" is the progenitor of peace), there should still be time at Oxford to make the concessions necessary to avoid the chaos that has engulfed universities in the United States, France, and Germany...

...But troglodyte Oxonians are warned that the harmony of the past, based on "factors no longer present or now much attenuated," cannot be recaptured by the mere reassertion of authority...

...Thirty-one senior members chose to do so, including such Oxford worthies as Max Beloff, Isaiah Berlin, and the Warden of All Souls...

...It is the special affliction of via media solutions, when they fail, to fail on all fronts...

...7 to The University Gazette, Vol...

...Men of power in the universities are determining to deal with it "in their fashion" which, in the clinches, can result in unwarranted concessions and/or the triumph of reaction...

...Hence Conservatism and Socialism, Western Democracy and Soviet Communism, behind their different forms of idealistic cover, are held to be alike repressive oligarchies committed to the maintenance of the established order...

...Students complained that the recommendations did not go "far enough...

...It has already admitted, and implicitly deplored, the existence of "obscurantist accretions" to academic authority, and having squared off against the student Left, it now takes on the formidable Oxford Right...

...what arrangements and channels are desirable for consultation between the University and Junior [i.e., student] Members on faculty and other university matters affecting them...

...Worse than that, it is a blow to those who share the Hart committee's respect for academic values and who hesitate to commit them, unarmed, to battle...

...Hart immediately set about widening these "terms of reference," so that almost all relationships within the university might come under his committee's scrutiny...

...The committee of six "senior" (i.e., faculty) members was appointed with a mandate "to consider...

...A compelling and articulate defense of academic values is needed, one that addresses not the critics of the past (the church, congressional investigators, and so forth), but the critics of the present and their particular moral consciousness...

...99 (Oxford University Press), 203 pp., 12 shillings...

...The subject is treated at length, however, in an appendix where it is explained that the number of radical students at Oxford is relatively small, not having exceeded 300 (out of approximately 10,000 students) even in the most exacerbated situations...

...Authority divorced from such readiness to give reasons to those over whom it is exercised and to attend to their arguments is a foreign element in a university whose whole educational policy is designed to foster critical and rational discussion...

...Oxford remains a sanctuary of privilege...

...Has the doctor diagnosed the disease properly, and if so has he reached the patient in time and prescribed an effective remedy...

...Outsiders submitted evidence from points as distant as Auckland and Berkeley...

...We think that this general argument from the democratic character of society rests on an undefended and indeed indefensible assumption that a university has no special purposes or functions and no special problems to confront, which should differentiate its academic decision-making processes from those of society at large...

...It is not impossible to sympathize with such an abhorrence—it merely mirrors the hostility of radicals to academics—but in a world in which student radicalism is not likely to remain negligible, nolo contendere is a disappointing plea...

...The question is: will the nostrum work...

...Since there are these distinctive purposes to be pursued, it is, we believe, plain that teachers equipped by skill, knowledge, and experience, training, and continuing professional association with a university should have final authority as to the manner in which they are pursued...

...The root of unrest is a horror of contemporary forms of society, excited by realization of the conditions of the world's poor, both within the West and even more outside it, by racial intolerance, by the extremes of inequality, by the spread of materialism, and by the impoverishment of human life in advanced industrial societies, stunted by monotonous labour and the artificial divisions between social classes...

...Then, like Achilles, he retires to his tent...

...Believing that academic authority has "defensible forms," the committee sets forth its case: We conceive that it is quite wrong to approach questions of academic authority with the assumption that a university either is or should be a microcosm of society at KARL BOTTIGHEIMER large, and then to draw the conclusion that, in a democratic country where students are acknowledged as entitled to the legal and political rights of adults, they have a right to share in the government of a university in all its aspects, and so to be represented on all its decision-making bodies on at least an equal footing with teachers...

...Thirdly, both the parliamentary democracies of the West and the bureaucracies of communist society and indeed all conventional forms of organization and authority are thought to be forms of repression, neither sensitive to people's grievances nor concerned to fulfil their aspirations...

...and the tendencies, sometimes hardening with the years, to believe that what is interesting or merely convenient for the teacher to teach is interesting and necessary for the student to learn...

...Take the central question of "democratic principles" and their applicability to a university...

...Such a feat is admittedly difficult in the face of the abuse, rudeness, and even force with which the New Left forces have learned to silence those who disagree with them, but it is what Hart promises and does not perform...

...So, too, the transience of the student as compared with the continuing connection of the teacher with the university, far from disqualifying the former, is a fact which gives him a special right to share in the control of academic policy, because the short years of a student's stay are far more important to him than the same years for the permanent staff...

...From the Senior Common Rooms came rumbles of discontent that the recommendations went anywhere at all...

...reluctance to learn what students think of the teaching offered to them...

...Idealistic faculty (which is all faculty, by self-definition) are left to choose between students whom they know to be silly and administrators they know to be wicked...

...But the appendix takes student radicalism seriously...

...IN ESSENCE the Hart report recommends "democratization" (my word) of all aspects of the university not critical to the preservation of academic values...

...If they do not, the future of the report and what it stands for is dim...

...The division of students and faculty into "they" and "we" is deplored as foreign to the Oxford tradition of small, close, collegiate societies, and denounced as "a howling wilderness where no academic purposes can prosper...

...It regards this as an attainable, and indeed necessary, goal if the historic concept of academic community is to survive...

...Not yet caught up in the system, but possessing intelligence and insight into it, they are, in their own eyes, the vanguard whose first task is to awaken others to the realities of their condition, to "politicize" them and thus begin the redemption of society...

...A smaller number of persons was invited * Report of the Committee on Relations with Junior Members, Supplement No...

...Much depends upon the support available for the report's conception of the university as an unequivocally academic institution nevertheless compatible with a degree of democratic procedure...

...to present oral evidence, including representatives of the Thames Valley Constabulary and the National Union of Students...

...But the most visible threat to the Hart report comes from the growing tide of student radicalism...