Power, knowledge and the anti-exam movement

On 8th November 1973 more than 300 students at the University of New England in the regional NSW town of Armidale held a “Peasants’ Revolt” against exams:

Students were in the role of peasants, there were lords and peasants…and professors would expropriate people’s work and use it in a very feudal way.

Upon marching to the administrative building where they intended to make their case against exams, they found locked doors. Undeterred, and after a violent struggle, students occupied the administrative building for 24 hours. 

The University of New England was not alone in this – examinations were a focus of student movements across Australian universities. Melbourne University formed an “SRC Exam Reform Group” and published articles entitled “Abolish Exams”.  They distributed protest stickers that students could put in their exam booklets:

I consider this exam to serve no educational purpose as all. I sit it under duress, because no creative alternative has been offered.

Students at the Australian National University in Canberra were also unhappy about exams in 1973, having campaigned unsuccessfully for four years to reduce the quantity of assessment assigned to examination.  By 1973 some students were boycotting exams, which was portrayed as analogous to Vietnam War draft resistance, and they publicised an “Exam Resister’s Manifesto”.  By 1974 Australian National University students occupied university buildings to protest against exams, as did students in the History Department at Flinders University in South Australia. 

“The examination”, according to Foucault, “opened up two correlative possibilities”:

Firstly, the constitution of the individual as a describable, analysable object…in order to maintain him in his individual features … under the gaze of a permanent corpus of knowledge; and, secondly, the constitution of a comparative system that made possible the measure of overall phenomena … the calculation of gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given ‘population’

Through exams, students were either monitored for their individual achievement against a canon of knowledge, or they were measured against one another in order to rank and sort them. Examinations assert power and deny students ownership of the knowledge that is both the measure and the measured, of their success (or failure).

“Most students do not feel that they are able to control their own destiny”, read the Educational Policy of the Australian Union of Students, in which exams were described as “repressive” instruments.  In rejecting examination as a means of assessment, students felt that they also shed the shackles of an educational system that “indoctrinated” rather than “educated”.  Resisting exams was, for them, one means of claiming a knowledge that was their own and which in turn provided a sense of self-determination of both knowledge and life. At the University of New England, the importance reclaiming their knowledge emerges in Rod Noble’s description of the Peasant’s Revolt occupation:

It was an incredible, creative time with people writing poetry. For the first time students had control of something that was ours. Actually it is incredible what creativity comes out of people when they’re in control of even a small part of their destiny.

The anti-exam protests continued beyond the occupation in various ways, including treating the main exam centre carpet with foul-smelling chemicals so the room could not be used.  For the Classical Marxism II exam, students “in the true spirit of Marxism” drew their chairs together to complete the exam collaboratively. The exam supervisor, understandably, did not know what to do and fetched the Dean of the Arts Faculty, who alerted the Vice-Chancellor. The Armidale police were called:

Three detectives and eight uniformed police with paddy wagons were ready. Interestingly, they were prepared to use the armed forces of the state to uphold the examination system. 

While not arrested, some students then spent the remainder of the exam period – around 3 weeks – dodging officials trying to serve them with injunctions while they also supported increased student resistance against exams.

Especially sinister, according to students, was the perceived impact of exams on learning. Preparation for exams substitutes for learning in an exam-dominating educational system , screamed the student publications, determining the knowledge selected for learning and enhancing the power of those who select it:

Learning has developed into a one way traffic from powerful to powerless. Students have been conditioned all their lives to believe the god teachers and be good receivers of knowledge. Students’ self-confidence is constantly undermined by teachers until they reach the stage where they will not challenge the teachers.

The Exam Resisters Collective at the Australian National University felt that abolishing exams would enable a “reinvigoration” of teaching and learning, by removing the driver that (falsely) determined what knowledge was. Students hoped that removal of exams as a teleological agent would enable more diverse and personal forms of assessment, under an assumption that knowledge is individual rather than absolute:

To speak of the calculation, quantification and measurement of one’s personal development or fulfilment is nonsense.

Evidence of the failure of exams to fulfil their role in the educating mission, was their negative impact on students, according to anti-exam activists. Higher stress levels were attached to a single exam as the only means of assessment, resulting in unfortunate suicides.  Moreover, students questioned the validity of exams as assessment of knowledge given the types of preparation for exams – examination only evaluated memorisation, they claimed. Assessment, it was increasingly felt, should support learning by individuals, rather than sorting and categorising them. It was hoped that, if any assessment was used at all (and only a minority felt that there should be none), then it would support individual empowerment rather than function as an instrument of power. 

“God is an exam”, read one student article, an indication of the power students identified in the examination system. Exams were the tool by which the university exercised its power over students. Exams enabled the university to compare and map the landscape of knowers in the guise of an objective chart of student achievement. This measurement of student success both exercised and legitimised a stable body of knowledge. Students claimed that the stress of exams was evidence of its violent power – it moulded students’ intellectual selves according to an established canon. Rather than inspiring learning, exams killed it, requiring instead a habit of cramming to memorise dead knowledge. Sydney’s professor of philosophy, David Armstrong, saw it differently:

Exams enable students to put off their work until the end of the year and that strikes me as an immensely valuable thing...if you [have] a system of continuous assessment...you have a pretty hard life. I like for the Faculty of Arts the idea that you sit around for a long time discussing things in coffee shops and pubs and quadrangles and anywhere else that you can get some seating and, finally, towards the end of the year you've got to get some work done... That's a good way, I think, to conduct an Arts education; students educate each other in the course of this.

We will come back to Armstrong, who personified the god-professor in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for despite the flexibility advocated in this interview Armstrong was also determined to claim the power of recognised expertise. For, as well as asserting power over students, exams proclaimed the authority of the university over knowledge of the world – the authority of the knower over that which was to be known.



[footnotes have been removed. please contact me if you are interested in them]

Student ratbags: opposition to university discipline

In one of his two largely sympathetic books on student participation in university governance, Eric Ashby expressed puzzlement at the 1960s student movement’s approach to university discipline. That students defied the authority of the university was (often) admirable, when done for reasons of conscience. He could not understand why then, they would not submit to the discipline that resulted. If students were genuine reformers, he argued, they would accept the consequences of their actions – true believers would be willing martyrs. Since they did not, the new student movements of the late 1960s could be seen as little more than a frivolous veneer of reform – what many Australians referred to as a bunch of ratbags.  Ashby had a perspective on the university that prevented him from understanding that university discipline was a part of the apparatus of power that student movements wished to collapse.

At Monash as we have seen, Albert Langer’s destroyed transcript of his disciplinary hearing functioned as a signifier of university authority. Disciplinary proceedings after a sit-in had led Monash students to invade Matheson’s lunch with Clark Kerr. Students were open about their opposition to the fact of university discipline. When used against them in response to political activities, university discipline appeared to be an instrument of political repression. It went still further than this. At Sydney University, opposition to university discipline was a key organising concept for student protest for a couple of years. Disciplinary proceeding following the Max Humphreys and Victoria Lee cases had led at Sydney to widespread discussion about the role and structure of the university and the knowledge it wielded as a controlling structure. 

Many more students had mobilised in support of Max Humphreys than had participated in the library sit-ins that had prompted the university to discipline him. This opposition to the university’s disciplinary practices was reinforced shortly afterwards, during the disciplinary hearings of those whose named as leaders of the student occupation of administrative offices during the Victoria Lee case. Student action against university discipline at Sydney was especially vehement as there had been ill ease amongst students for some time about the aggressive behaviour of the university’s security staff, leading many to question the right of University guards to carry guns (for although guards had been heard to say they wouldn’t waste bullets on students, this was little comfort). 

It was the combination of the character of university discipline as well as the fact of it that highlighted aspects of the university that many students and a growing number of staff found questionable. Students accused of breaching university regulations were not presumed innocent when they faced professorial judges, whose disciplinary traditions resembled paternalistic school discipline more than the democratic legal system students felt should provide their model. Those judging discipline cases – the university proctorial board – were professors whose sense of authority was most likely smarting. After the Victoria Lee case, one member of the Proctorial Board, Deputy Vice Chancellor Professor O’Neil was required to evaluate the cases of accused students, including Chris O’Connell, with whom he had been fighting in a bitter war of words in their respective publications, Honi Soit (O’Connell was an editor) and the University of Sydney News. He could not be considered to be impartial.  Students angrily pointed this out, but the university could not suddenly change its by-laws to arrange for student disciplinary hearings to be conducted by “a random selection of peers in an open forum” – but they did agree to include student representatives on the proctorial board.  Despite the best efforts of O’Neil to prevent it, Chris O’Connell and his brother Gregory (who was also a vocal opponent of university discipline) were promptly elected as student proctors – something the Student Representative Council found perversely funny.  Chris O’Connell took the opportunity to call a Proctorial Board meeting on his own authority, against the wishes of the chair (who was then Professor Taylor, Chair of the Professorial Board). All the student proctors formed quorum, though they were “forced”, according to O’Connell, to eject the (only) Professor who was acting as the Board’s secretary for “offensive interruption of student proctors”.  The objective of this coup sounds relatively innocuous, for all its drama – they instated a joint Student Representative Council and Staff Association Standing Committee on Discipline.  But it functioned to remove discipline from the members of the professorial board acting as proctors and handing control to a combination of students and the staff union – decentralising power and authority.

Students wanted to control the world that impacted them, but this was not just a reflection of youthful wilfulness. It was not, as Donald Horne argued, that the traditional authoritative structure of the university grated with emerging ideas about liberation and freedom of expression.  The student movements identified the university as a structure that exercised power. By influencing the inner intellectual lives of students and by manipulating their patterns of behaviour, universities were a formidable structure for social control. When Ashby was disappointed that students who sought reform were not willing to submit to the discipline of the university he demonstrated that he did not really understand the extent to which reform was not only about improved pedagogies and a renewal of the roles of students in an unchangeable conception of a community of scholars. Rather, it was a direct challenge to the position the university held as a technology of power. 

[footnotes have been removed. please contact me if interested in them]

Controlling the production of knowledge: student participation

Overdue library books – a topic at least as banal as the Monash car park – was the issue at the University of Sydney in April 1967, the consequences of which were still felt more than a year later. Over this issue, students held mass meetings, more than a thousand signed a petition, and up to 250 people conducted several sit-ins of the University of Sydney’s Fisher library, undoubtedly having a fabulous time camping there overnight.  According to then University Librarian Harrison Bryan, some of the students participating in the sit-ins were confused about what the protest was about, a number of them believing they were seeking increased opening hours. One student apparently declared that Fisher library “even sans air-conditioning or light, was so much more comfortable than his lodgings that he would be back any time any old protest was on”.  The Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit gave a number of reasons for students to support the 1967 protest against increased library fines, the most convincing of which was that wealthier students would get a better education than poorer ones, since they would be able to afford to keep books for longer. Students’ real anger seems to emerge with statements like this:

The chief librarian and his nebulous associates … have treated students as morons – not worthy of consultation or consideration in what is essentially their own problem. We as students will rebel against these insults.

The University librarian felt angry too, he confessed, after students protested over his increased library fines – largely because he felt hurt that, in identifying this one failure to consult students, they did not acknowledge all his effort to provide high quality library services. In a heartening display of humility, he also confessed that his anger was “partly I suppose because my authority was disputed (which was perhaps a little ignoble of me)”.  The University Librarian named the student he believed to be the ringleader in the original protest (he was very sorry he did later) leading many more students to mobilise in support of that student, Max Humphreys, escalating the conflict and the sense of division between students and the university’s administration.  The incidents attached to increased library fines at the University of Sydney did not in fact do much to knowledge or its ownership, except to suggest to students that they needed increased representation in university government. This idea, emerging with the feeling of being treated as “morons” by the university, was confirmed in the Victoria Lee case.

Victoria Lee was given some bad advice when she was at school, when her careers advisor told her that studying maths for her high school matriculation was unnecessary, since she wanted to study anthropology and archaeology. Upon application to the University of Sydney in 1969, however, she found that, although she had the required grades, she did not have the required maths. Victoria Lee then enrolled at Macquarie University and took the anthropology and archaeology she needed at Sydney, having them credited to her Macquarie degree. She did this on the understanding that Sydney accepted students who had successfully completed a year at another NSW university. After her year in exile, she reapplied to Sydney in 1970, only to find that the Professorial Board had changed the rules and students from other universities were no longer eligible for admission. Victoria Lee’s polite letter to the University’s Senate explaining all this was reprinted in Honi Soit – for students were deeply concerned about the fact that the Professorial Board, as they explained to the distressed Victoria Lee, had decided to change admission requirements but had forgotten to publish the change in the University Calendar or anywhere else. Victoria Lee felt that her only chance was to appeal to the University Senate to ask them to make an exception in her case. 

What Victoria Lee probably didn’t expect was that a thousand or more students would support her. The worrying precedent of the Professorial Board implementing unpublished decisions made students and the Student Representative Council realise that they really needed representation on the Professorial Board as a means of ensuring students interests were heard and that decisions could be communicated back to them, in the event the Professorial Board forgot. Student Representative Council president, Percy Allen, wrote a very polite (but unsuccessful) letter in which “the Student Representative Council humbly submits that the Professorial Board recommend and the Senate accept two or more students on the Professorial Board”.

In analysing the case for Honi Soit, student John Maddocks was generally supportive of the Professorial Board’s policy, which was obviously designed to “keep out inferior students”:

…to ensure that there is not a flood of applicants to enter Sydney University from people who have completed first year at NSW and Macquarie. The resolution was not passed to exclude a student like Victoria Lee who had easily made the quota for this university.

Students could be as capable of elitism as professors – but were also supportive of a student who they perceived to be one of their own. The same issue of Honi Soit reports that 1000 students had protested within the previous week over the Victoria Lee case. These 1000 students had voted to support student representation on the Professorial Board, publication of the agendas of the Professorial Board and Senate well beforehand, opening the meetings of the Professorial Board with decisions displayed around campus, and that no major decisions be made during students’ exams or vacations.  These resolutions all say the same thing: students wanted increased participation in university decision making and demanded communication from the decision makers. Feeling silenced, overlooked and frustrated, Maddocks, concluded, “it appears that direct action by the student body is the only way to confront the administration”.  One week later, on 25 March 1970, the front page of Honi Soit reported a 3-day student occupation of the administrative offices in Sydney’s Main Quadrangle in support of Victoria Lee and increased participation in University government. Many university staff wrote to support both Lee and student participation in university governance, often expressing a similar level of irritation as students at the university’s lack of consultation with sub-professorial staff.  Before the end of the year, the Professorial Board changed the rules to enable students like Victoria Lee entry to the university and had commenced detailed discussions on a new Academic Board to replace the Professorial one, restructured to include non-professorial academics and students. 

All other universities experienced the same change. At the Australian National University, a sit-in of the university administrative offices sought increased student participation, a change made successfully by the early 1970s.  Student radicals at the University of New England set aside divisions between student groups and the university to work together on restructuring academic governance to include students.  At Melbourne, a formal Planning Group was established to investigate university governance, on which representatives of all types of staff and student served, with students elected by the student body. Simon Marginson, then Arts II (Hons), in his policy speech seeking election (successfully) for a position in the Planning Group, said that the planning should contribute to a restructuring of the university that follows a change in priorities – priorities that should reflect a re-orientation of courses and enhance the capacity for the individual to have increased control over their learning and their learning environment.

The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee took a detailed interest in this trend. In 1968 they did a detailed survey of student participation in all Australian universities, noting the number of representatives at all levels, from Council and Academic Board to departmental staff-student liaison groups. A draft of the summary report was circulated privately to all university Registrars in December 1968: “as the subject could be a controversial one an opportunity is being given for University Administrations to have a look at the document before it is finalised”.  Having a look, in this instance, means giving the universities an opportunity to collude on desirable levels of student participation. Even Matheson, who supported student participation, was not keen on having too much of it. Earlier in the year at a meeting with the other Victorian universities:

Dr Matheson said that student exchange of ideas was such that if one university put 20 students on its Council, all universities would be under pressure to do the same. In these circumstances, exchange of information and experience between universities was vital.

Matheson researched the issue well before embarking on his student participation project. He practiced first, involving students in focused issues that impacted them and required them to contribute with purpose. His file shows he read this advice from Canada, where student participation in university governance had grown dramatically:

Their contributions were critical without being constructive, often being related to the issues of society at large over which universities have no control.

Matheson hoped to direct student energy constructively to the business of the university. Contributing under leadership was acceptable to some students. The more radical believed that the university should be absolutely democratic and that a majority – majority of students that is, since they necessarily outnumbered staff – should rule.  

[footnotes have been removed from this posting. Please contact me if interested in them]

Change the university, change the world

Monash University in the late 1960s was reputed to be a hotbed of student radicalism, hosting the most famous of student protesters, Albert Langer.  For many Monash students, particularly members of the Maoist-dominated Labor Club, the drivers for change at Monash were related to the changes they wished to see in the wider community. The Labor Club distributed a roneoed newsletter – known as a “broadsheet” – called Print at uneven, but frequent intervals. The Vice-Chancellor Louis Matheson kept a file of them, along with other broadsheets and handwritten chronologies of what he thought might be important events. These show substantial attendance by Monash students at anti-Vietnam War protests from 1965, culminating in a violent protest (that is, protesters claimed to be subject to police violence) during the visit of US President Lyndon Johnson in 1966.  This opposition to the war and the character of street protests shaped the ways that students negotiated their place in the university. Matheson recorded “sit-ins” in nearly every building of the university – the library, the administrative offices, the bookshop, the careers office and more – from 1966 onwards. But it was after disciplinary proceedings were brought against Albert Langer for a sit-in in 1967 that the focus of students’ attention shifted (not entirely, of course) to the university itself. On appeal, the university dismissed the disciplinary charges made against Langer. Langer wanted a transcript of his appeal, presumably to use in the wider antagonism between university administration and the student Labor Club. Thinking its publication might result in action against the university, Matheson refused. Langer told the university that if he could not have the transcript, it should be destroyed – which, by early 1968 it was, provoking students to protest, burning an effigy of the Vice-Chancellor. This prompted students to identify Matheson as Vice-Chancellor with other authorities they decried: the police during the anti-Vietnam protest marches, the government that instigated conscription and the hierarchical society that systematically channelled wealth to the few. With Matheson now the enemy, Monash students staged countless successive protests at the university from 1968 to 1972 – a period that coincided with Albert Langer ‘s remaining enrolment.

As if to demonstrate the banal level on which student politics could play out, one of the primary issues that concerned Monash students was a long-running and bitter dispute over the car park. The university had started charging students for parking on campus and to facilitate this separated student parking from staff. Students protested not only against the imposition of fees, but against the structure of the car park as a reflection of the university’s hierarchy – and society’s class distinctions. Red, green and yellow signage designated different spaces and students temporarily painted all the signs red in protest. Students found any hierarchical organisation unacceptable and used the university to express their dissatisfaction with a hierarchical society. “No longer is the issue simply one of car parking,” claimed one issue of Print, “the issue is the place of students in the university”. 

Through Print and other broadsheets, Monash students expressed anger at the wrongs they observed in the world and frustration that the small space in which they felt they should have some influence – the university – was not as active as they were in “trying to change the rotten society we live in”.  This frustration, at Monash, was directed against the Vice-Chancellor:

A Vice-Chancellor who genuinely believed our academic freedom was threatened…would not tell students to protect their academic freedom by not exercising it. On the contrary he would resist government intimidation. He would stand up for students’ right to dissent (and not waffle in about ‘the conscience of society’ when he means the degree factory of society). He would not fit in with government plans.

It is the irony of Monash that compared to other university leaders at this time Matheson was relatively close to being on the students’ side. Actually quite a liberal Vice-Chancellor, Matheson worked to establish Monash differently to the much more hierarchical Melbourne University on which it had originally been modelled, instigating a model that included students and junior staff in decisions much earlier than other institutions.  He stood firm in insisting to government that the university administration should not assist the conscription of students to military service by making university student records available.  But the Maoist students in Monash’s Labor Club could accept no hierarchy, so the enmity with the position of Vice-Chancellor had to continue even if he had been able to implement every change they demanded.  If he did all the things a true believer in academic freedom would, according to the authors of Print, “then he wouldn’t be the Vice-Chancellor”.  Another edition somewhat guiltily justified their opposition to the Vice-Chancellor by saying, “the university is a component part of the capitalist social system” – so Matheson was structurally “still caught in the logic of it”, even if he was personally closer to their own position than many in authority.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), as might be expected, were watching the growth of the student movement. One of the files, created at a desk in Canberra (not in the field), contains a press clipping from The Australian newspaper entitled “Reform in the Ivory Towers”. ASIO staff have marked parts of the clipping, with especial emphasis on the following passage:

Self-management of universities goes hand in hand with a general movement to extend the principle of self-management throughout society.

ASIO was concerned about participatory democracy, of which we will see more later. But in ways that included, but went beyond participatory democracy, reform of universities was intended to precipitate reform of society. This meant that the place of universities in the structure of Australian government and culture was under scrutiny from those wishing to reform it and those hoping to keep the university as it was. Participants in student movements expressed the feeling that the role of universities should be to question society’s structures and values and provoke change. Revolution was needed, since universities currently did the opposite, affirming the status quo. In Adelaide, Grass Roots, the newsletter of the Students for Democratic Action (SDA) made the following declaration:

SDA unequivocally states that it stands for the destruction of this university, as it stands for the destruction of the social system to which the university is a willing bootlicker.

These Adelaide students were especially angry, for some university equipment was being used to pursue weapons research.  What had been a virtue in the Second World War was certainly not during the conflict in Vietnam. Their anger pushed this statement a little beyond their normal stand, which was that the university should be transformed. This transformation both depended on and was a prerequisite to social change, since:

Education (in the true sense) and criticism are hostile to the interests of capitalism and such a change in the University is a threat to the continuance of the privileged and powerful elite which constitutes the ruling class.

In Adelaide. the SDA sought to secure staff-student control of the university. Control was important, they said, as the current hierarchical control meant that the university was run for the maintenance of the system, perverting education to affirm social and economic inequalities.  The first step of this was a key transformation looked to in every university: the formalisation of student participation in university governance.

[Footnotes have been removed from this posting. PLease contact me if you would like them]

Introducing Revolutionary Knowledge

In July 1969, Louis Matheson, the Vice-Chancellor at Monash university, had an important international visitor. After their meeting, they adjourned to the staff club for lunch. Before they could finish eating, hundreds of students invaded their lunch party, outraged about disciplinary action against students who had conducted a sit-in of the university’s Council meeting recently – one of five major on-campus student protests that had already occurred that year.  For Matheson’s guest, Clark Kerr, it must have all seemed very familiar. Clark Kerr had been President of the University of California at Berkeley, where student uprisings in 1965 had alerted the western world’s universities – both students and administrators – that something new was happening on their campuses. In the United States and Australia, opposition to the Vietnam War fuelled a youth movement that challenged accepted ideas, especially on campus.  A large portion of this youth movement consisted of university students, whose numbers had grown to levels that made them formidable.  Their educational backgrounds changed the nature of Left politics, integrating intellectual problems into the concerns of what became known as the New Left.  The barricade uprising of May 1968 in Paris had shown that campus politics reflected a more widespread shift that focused on the rights of members of society who, by the structures of internalised moral schemes and externalised systems of discipline, held less power.  Gender, sex, class, race, peace and the environment were issues that captured the attention of a youth-based counter-culture that thrived in the universities and whose rhetoric spread across the world. 

Buried in this well-known history are important questions about knowledge. Exasperated, the normally sympathetic Eric Ashby described students in this period – his were fairly quiet ones, at Cambridge – as running “non-stop seminars” on “what the university is for”.  The student movements’ discussions and the events within the universities during the 1960s and 1970s led not only to a disruption of ideas about morality, gender roles and inequality but also to the widely perceived nature of university knowledge, its place in society and politics and the role of students themselves in its construction. This exposed the university to questions about the instruments of power used by institutions: examination, disciplinary rules and governance structures that reflected a particular, and potentially objectionable, structure to university knowledge. The ways that university traditions exercised control over students paralleled ways that knowledge exercised control over that which was to be known – and a battle for the control of knowledge ensued.

In this period the ownership of knowledge is about its control, for the controllers of knowledge were now identified by all involved in the universities as able to determine which knowledge was considered valid – which knowledge had the esteem attached to universities – and how it was deployed. It made it possible to ask who would determine what truth is – or indeed if such doctrinal knowledge was even possible, or permissible? The role of those figures who came to be known as god-professors in legitimising a canon of acceptable university knowledge was pitted against a de-centred configuration for the control university knowledge promoted by student movements. With these battle lines drawn up, events in the universities in the 1960s and 1970s have substantial importance for what university knowledge would become.

Most of the literature on this period in Australian history focuses on the influence of campus-based student movements on society broadly or on the New Left in particular.  The perspective of this chapter is the other way around: the impact of student movements on the campuses themselves. This doesn’t make the questions at stake insular or parochial, however for they go to fundamental questions about what is known, how it is known and who benefits from knowing it. Accounts of student revolutionary activities on Australian campuses tend, understandably, to be nostalgically heroic – demonstrating the struggles experienced by students as they sought to change universities and the society beyond them. This chapter does not try to give an account of student protest in this way, since my subject is knowledge, not students. Instead, I look at the influence of wider issues on the university and then at issues over which the control of knowledge was fought: student participation, university discipline, deployment of knowledge to support what students called the ‘establishment’. I consider examinations and assessment, the structure of the professoriate, experiments with participatory democracy on campus and student choice in subjects of study. John Burnheim, in a 1968 article prematurely entitled “the Death of student Politics”, said:

All revolutions are confused, and most carry within them the seeds of their own undoing. It is futile to appraise them as if they were calmly thought-out plans for reform. Their significance lies in the vital impulses behind them rather than their explicit proposals or demands.

The student movements in Australia were not coherent and whole. Their plans and activities were not all thought out, calmly or otherwise. Their “impulses”, as Burnheim said, are important in this chapter but so too are the consequences of their ideas and actions. These are not always the same thing – for this revolution had some unintended consequences.

[Note: Footnotes have been removed for the purposes of this posting. Please email me for details if you would like them]

It is only quantity that can be measured

"All this seems insubstantial. Quality always does; it is only quantity that can be measured. But this is the intellectual health at the heart of all living: all other things derive from this. Universities are concerned with thought..." Eric Ashby, 1946, pp. 99-100

Knowledge and Revolution: draft structure

I am thinking about structuring my third chapter in this way. Look all right?

Chapter 3 Knowledge and Revolution 1967-1975

Introduction

First the University, then the world (or vice-versa): universities in a time of change

University governance and professorial authority: the movement for student participation

Student ratbags: opposition to university discipline

The lie of objectivity: universities, the establishment and the purpose of knowledge

An exam resister’s manifesto: examination as apparatus of power

God-professors: the professoriate as defender of the canon

Participatory knowledge: de-centred, innovative…and not doctrinal

Core curriculum and student choice: the showdown between truth and relevance

Conclusion