The Revolution at the LSE

Last Friday, 3000 students marched through the City of London and the West End, demonstrating national support for the "rebels of the London School of Economics." For Britain's universities, sharply divided by tradition and the "tracking" system, it was a rare moment of unity: students from Leeds, Manchester, Regent St. Polytechnic, and Cambridge (among others) carried banners together and wore a new symbol of quiet protest: yellow daffodils. The London Times called the student demonstrations "unprecedented in British university history." The march was inspired by the round-the-clock LSE sit-in which began a week ago Monday. Between 200 and 800 students have been occupying LSE's main entrance hall, unfurling a banner reading, "Beware the Pedagogic Gerontocracy"--beware the rule of the old men.

The old men--administrators, professors, journalists, and MPs--have advanced many theories in the last few weeks to explain the student unrest at the LSE and its apparent national resonance. Some were quick to pick out the "Berkeley-influenced American agitators" who objected to "any kind of authority." Others more intelligently viewed the crisis in the context of Britain's larger problems of higher education. The students themselves saw it both as part of a general social problem, and as a result of specific events at the LSE.

It has taken acts of peculiar genius over the last five months by Sir Sydney Caine, outgoing Director of the LSE, and his allies, to bring the unquestioned authority of the School Administration into a state of seige. Their actions have had a common theme: contempt for the student's position in the university, or at best, disbelief that worthwhile changes could be brought about by "unofficial means." Thus last fall, when students wanted to ask Director-designate Walter Adams some well-founded questions about his administration of University College, Rhodesia, the LSE authorities stuck to the letter of their regulations. The students had no "constitutional capacity" to raise doubts about the next Director, and their questions were dismissed as a "vicious character attack."

When the Students' Union tried to answer these charges, it ran up against another regulation: the Union could not write to the Press without the Director's permission. Working on the theory that criticism was being fanned by a small group of "agitators," the Director refused permission; he would not let the Union take an "unrepresentative" public position. The Union President, a white South African exile named David Adelstein, wrote to the Times anyway. Adelstein was summoned before an archaic disciplinary board (it had not met since 1951, has no provision for student participation), but a massive student boycott on November 21 apparently persuaded the board not to impose a sentence.

In the second term, the Administration intensified its attack on student action. The President of the Graduate Students' Association, Marshall Bloom (an American), helped organize a meeting held Jan. 31 to discuss opposition to the new Director. Sir Sydney reacted to the discussion as if it were a conspiracy to overthrow a School appointment; he banned the meeting an hour before it was scheduled to take place. Four hundred students gathered outside the "banned room"; in the tension and confusion which followed, one of the School's elderly porters suffered a heart attack and died.

No one was singled out for blame in the porter's death, but the Administration apparently decided that someone had to be punished for the "disorder" which preceded it. Six student officers, including Adelstein and Bloom, were summoned before a similar disciplinary board to face charges of convening the meeting in defiance of the Director's order. The four lesser officers were acquitted, but on Monday, March 13, Adelstein and Bloom were found guilty and suspended for the remainder or the academic year.

The atmosphere of the School that Monday symbolized the change which had occurred between the end of January and the middle of March. In the hours before the verdict was announced, steel fire-doors were lowered between the administration building and the main teaching building; at the single open entrance to the administrative offices, students were required to deposit their registration cards as they went in, and a written record was kept of their movements. During February the students had been depressed and divided; most hoped that quiet negotiations with influential professors would somehow secure leniency for the accused leaders. But March 13 was an incredible day of instruction: the fiction of legalism ended for even the most moderate students, and by the middle of the afternoon the former president of the Conservative Society was proposing a sit-in and boycott "until the suspensions are rescinded."

The issues of the sit-in went far beyond the original opposition to Dr. Adams. The students were protesting the infringement of their right to speak, their subservient position within the School, and the lack of communication with School authorities. In the third day of demonstrations, with 104 students now suspended, the Director ventured to address a packed Union meeting; he was asked, "as a human being, as a man," to make some gesture of goodwill to help end the disruption of the School. He stood in front of his students, white-faced and tight-lipped, and shook his head.

The ten days since the sit-ins began have embraced an astounding movement both within the School and throughout Britain. Three major newspapers--the Times, the Observer, and the Sunday Times--had at first reacted to the student protest with hostile editorials calling for a better "moral climate" in the nation's universities. Last week-end they did an abrupt about-face, exposing, for example, the Administration myth that the protest was the work of a small minority of "foreign agitators" as "completely wrong."

Within the School, both students and some faculty members are now trying to implement a sweeping reassessment of the School. On Saturday, the Board of Governors upheld the supensions of Adelstein and Bloom and stated that no discussions could take place "under duress." The students replied by refusing to abandon the demonstration; they opened a debate on whether to continue the sit-in during the Easter vacation and to establish a "free university" with faculty aid.

Whatever the outcome of the present sit-in, three points have been clearly made. First, student leaders are unlikely to be victimized for their views on politics and university structure; as one law lecturer said, "No disciplinary charges would ever be brought again unless approved by a student-staff committee." Second, the principle of student solidarity--with detained students in Rhodesia, with exiled students from South Africa, and in universities throughout Britain--has received new strength. Third, and most ominous for the rule of the old men, there are no longer any sacred, unquestionable aspects of the London School. "The demonstrations have changed the atmosphere completely," said one politics professor. "Everything is now on the agenda." An American student leaving the Union meeting put this in his own idiom: "Something's happening, and you don't know what it is, Mr. Jones."

"Mr. Jones" does not know what is happening because he sees it as an isolated problem of a few "trouble-makers"; his widest vision may grasp an idea of some sinister underground conspiracy. An uncanny international cooperation has formed at the LSE, with veterans of Alabama, the anti-apartheid movement, Pakistani politics, and Greek student strikes working easily with British students educated by the Aldermaston marches and left university politics. But the "conspiracy" is the result of a universal experience: the established authorities are making terrible mistakes.

Britain is currently facing a major crisis in higher education. As the Observer wrote last Sunday:

"The universities as a whole are in the middle of an industrial revolution.... Higher education, from being a cottage industry, is becoming a large-scale mass-production process. Students are in danger of coming to regard themselves as a new kind of intellectual proletariat, with a new sense of grievance."

Against the immense problems raised by this trend, the LSE Administration's concern with minute points of discipline can only hurt the real business of education. For six weeks in February and March, the Administration exhausted the School with disciplinary hearings which most students and many faculty members thought fundamentally unnecessary and unjust. This week, the students have taken possession of the main buildings, and are running an "open university." In a letter from London which arrived yesterday, a friend described the round-the-clock seminars on educational theory and structure; lectures by sympathetic academics; and the general ferment of trying to discover what "freeing education" means, and how to implement such a revolution. "Time has lost its power at LSE"--such an achievement must inspire hope in a world where students usually feel only the pressures of time and power, and rarely the fruits of their control.