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L'idée d'université

Sixième partie. La Révolution tranquille 1960-1970

52. L’université critique et révolutionnaire

1969

Stanley Gray

Résumé

À la fin des années 1960, une fraction du mouvement étudiant québécois adopte des positions sur l’université qui en expriment une vision que l’on peut qualifier de révolutionnaire, en ce sens non pas d’abord ni essentiellement qu’elle se démarque avec force d’autres visions de l’université, ce qui est bien le cas, mais plutôt parce qu’elle veut confronter l’université aux deux seuls choix qui lui soient possibles : servir le capitalisme impérialiste, dont la guerre du Viêtnam illustre les inéluctables conséquences, ou servir la création d’une autre société, d’un autre ordre économique, social, politique et culturel. Il n’y a pas de moyen terme possible. L’idée que l’université puisse occuper un espace neutre, à l’extérieur en quelque sorte de la société et des forces antagonistes qui s’y affrontent, l’idée de liberté académique et d’autonomie institutionnelle sont des illusions qui occultent, en fait, la solidarité de l’institution avec les puissances économique et politique dominantes. Ou l’université consent à ce pacte avec le diable ou elle devient révolutionnaire. Telle est la position que tient Stanley Gray en 1969. Né à Montréal en 1944, Gray est diplômé de McGill et d’Oxford. Professeur au Département de science politique de McGill à compter de 1967, il soutient la grève étudiante dans ce département en 1968 et il joue un rôle important dans l’organisation de l’« Opération McGill français » qui, en mars 1969, envahit le campus et réclame la francisation de l’établissement. Quelques semaines plus tôt, il avait participé à une manifestation perturbant une assemblée du Conseil des gouverneurs de McGill. Il s’ensuit que Gray est congédié pour avoir « délibérément empêché le fonctionnement de l’université ». Pour Gray, l’idée de « neutralité institutionnelle » ou celle d’« université pluraliste » constituent une « façade derrière laquelle la direction [de l’université] cache le soutien matériel et intellectuel considérable qu’elle apporte aux forces régressives du monde ». Il faut donc que l’université devienne « un agent de libération tant pour ses propres étudiants que pour la communauté environnante ». Il faut instituer une « université critique » qui se consacre à la libération de l’humanité plutôt qu’à sa répression ; il faut que l’université, par son activité de recherche et de formation, s’associe aux « luttes et aux objectifs des classes opprimées et exploitées » ; il faut qu’elle fasse cause commune avec la classe ouvrière et ses organisations pour créer une nouvelle société. Ainsi, dit Gray en référence aux conflits du moment, les spécialistes en sciences sociales devraient se mettre à la disposition du Front national de libération du Sud-Viêtnam engagé dans une lutte implacable contre l’impérialisme américain. Telle est la vision révolutionnaire de l’université proposée par Stanley Gray. D’autres étudiants et des professeurs, anglophones et francophones, minoritaires les uns et les autres, partagent cette vision. Mais, il est intéressant de la voir formulée par un diplômé issu de la plus ancienne et de la plus riche université du Québec et de l’une des plus prestigieuses universités britanniques.

Note de l’éditeur

Source : Stanley Gray, «Towards a Critical University», Old McGill, vol. 72, 1969, p. 168-172.

Texte intégral

1The university is necessarily part of, and involved in, the outside society; this has become a standard cliché, but its implications are rarely drawn out. In fact, we find concerted efforts to obscure the real meaning of this proposition and to conceal its full implications regarding the nature of the present university and the alternatives open to us.

2Any aspect of the internal education process, when examined, can enlighten us as to the relevance of a university’s connections to the outside society. Take, for example, the examination and degree system: it is generally agreed that examinations and degrees have no intrinsic educational value. Rather, their general affect is to warp and distort in various ways the student’s intellectual self-development; to twist his educational experience into a competitive activity where memorization and “conning” the professor are the required skills.

3They have no educational content or purpose. But examinations and degrees do have a function outside the university; and the university’s outside involvement is so key that they remain a pillar of the educational process.

4Corporations and the government require certificates of skill and competence from students. Academic standing and degrees are the calling cards required. A degree is necessary to get certain jobs, whether it be engineer, social worker; lawyer or professor. To get the degree you have to prove competence in the field, that is, exams and all that.

5At this point one might think that the university is simply teaching students to function in society. But the brand of education that universities offer doesn’t merely teach students to function. It teaches them to function in a certain way; it channels them into jobs of specific sort. The university tries to produce minds that will fall nicely into place with the character of jobs already existing in the outside society.

6It is at this point that we have to analyze and understand the social organization of industry, the character of work and work relations in the outside society, in order to understand how the university tries to mold its students. Private ownership of corporations and the bureaucratic hierarchical nature of government and industry enforce a passive and dependent condition upon the employee or wage worker. Reduced to the status of a commodity selling his labour power on the market, his activities channelled into narrow and specialized areas, his faculties are used and his labour exploited for the ends and interests of discipline, the ends and social priorities of his work determined by the needs of capital and profitability.

7The university therefore trains people in a certain way in order to make them capable of acquiescing in this type of condition. That is why uncritical thinking and passive submission to the discipline of the Professor and the university’s authority hierarchy constitute the essence of the university’s educational process.

8The university, of course, only tries to mould and train students into a particular pattern. It doesn’t, and can’t succed in this. First, it performs the training educating function in a typically inefficient and imcompetent manner. Second, and this is the critical point, more and more students are now reacting to and revolting against the type of training forced upon them. The radical student movement of the 1960’s is eloquent testimony to the fact that human beings are not infinitely malleable objects to be formed and conditioned according to the desires of an external elite. [...]

9The particular description of occupational imperatives given above is true only for those graduates who take jobs below the managerial level — the upper echelons of the working class, or the “new working class” of scientists, engineers, technical workers, etc. But the relation of external determination also holds for the managers, lawyers, and academics that the university produces, although the content differs. In all cases, the university aims at turning its students into the product that will fit the needs of the outside society — the last thing the corporations and government want, thus the one thing our universities avoid, are students who are independent, critical, and self-directing.

10And this is only one of the implications hidden in the general truth that the modern university is neither divorced nor separated from the society surrounding it, but is affected by it in a definite way. Whom it serves and what functions it tries to perform for that society colours the specifics of classroom procedures and other aspects of student experience at university.

11But the content of what is taught, as well as the form of teaching and the general attitudes it induces, reflects the university’s external involvement and goals. This is particularly evident in the “social sciences”, where the academic orthodoxy pumped daily into the student tells him, in fact, that the present form of North American society is the best of all possible worlds, that there are no realizable alternatives to it or that all the realizable alternatives involve a destruction of freedom, that the society has an inbuilt equilibrium mechanism, that basic social conflicts and antagonisms don’t exist, that power is dispersed rather than concentrated in a specific class, and so on.

12What passes under the name of social sciences in today’s Western universities obscures and falsifies the real nature of the society and implicitly or explicitly counsels conservatism in social change, thus acting as significant supportive bulwark of the status quo.

13But often the university’s academics act as the intellectual whores of the Establishment in a more direct way. In their research and consulting activities, engineering, economics, psychology and political science professors and others give direct intellectual services to the society’s power-holders.

14In today’s complex neo-capitalist society, business, government and the military have become heavily dependent upon the universities. [...]

15To maintain that the university is neutral because it may not take direct and public political stands, is to engage in the worst sort of mystification. For by the very operation of its research for the government and corporations, the university makes its solid contribution to the Establishment.

16American universities are a chief source of research on “counterinsurgency” domestically and internationally, for the Pentagon and the CIA.

17By training a new working class and management and inculcating them with the proper attitudes and values, and by providing the Establishment with its much-needed intellectual services, the modern “multiversity” has become vital and central to the functioning of the system domestically and internationally.

18It is thus for good reason that the Board of Governors, at McGill and elsewhere, is composed almost wholey of financiers and captains of industry. It is also for good reason that academic senates persistently have a heavy majority of administrators and senior faculty. For should students ever have parity or majority, they might use their power to make decisions for the university which would sever or endanger its connections to the outside Establishment. In fact, they might even decide to orient the university to the needs of students and workers, and not to those of business and the military.

19This is an important point. For the previous analysis has shown how the present orientation of the university goes counter to the interest and needs of students. Operating as it does in the interests of a conservative elite, the university intellectually and culturally represses rather than liberates the student. It attempts to train in a narrow and stultifying way, rather than to give a broad and integrated training which includes an understanding of the social relevance of any field.

20The university substantially contributes to the governments and corporations which at home and abroad seek to maintain their domination over the majority of the population. In relation to the outside community which it effects, the University thus unequivocally sides with the repressive political and economic elites in the world, and against the forces striving for human liberation.

21The ramification of this point must be clearly understood. The university is involved in and committed to the society, but only in a certain way. For the society is not a monolithic, homogeneous one; Canada and the United States are class societies characterized by structural social conflict. Their elites rule and exploit both their own working-class and the poor, and the masses of the Third World. [...]

22The interests of exploiter-exploited, oppressor-oppressed, ruler-ruled conflict, and the university are solidly committed and contribute to the Establishment, radical and oppositionist forces in the society and in the Third World.

23The myth of “institutional neutrality” or “pluralist university” is a façade behind which the Administration hides its considerable material and intellectual support to the regressive forces of the world. The rethoric of academic freedom is often used to obscure the reality of the situation: but the claim that one cannot dictate research projects to individual professors hides the fact of research in the service of corporations and the military; the claim that one can’t discriminate against particular companies recruiting on campus justifies the Administration’s giving over campus facilities to napalm-manufacturing companies to further their non-academic objectives.

24What, then, is the alternative? Can the university be so oriented that it serves as an agency of liberation for both its students and the outside community?

25First, it is evident that the “community of scholars” is no viable alternative. The university cannot isolate itself from the outside world, and even if it could, it would be undesirable, for this would isolate students and faculty from the lives and struggles of the majority of people.

26Is “democratization” or “student power” in itself the solution? No. Quite apart from its insular and parochial emphasis, this approach falsely concerns itself only with the forms of decision-making, not with its content; with how decisions are made, but not with what decisions are made. It avoids the crucial substantive issues of where and how the university should commit to the ongoing process of social change, of what kind of people it should try to develop and what type of knowledge it should try to produce. Also, it should be noted, this emphasis upon democratization or student power, in itself, always plays into the hands of administrations, who can keep the radical movement in a perpetual debate and fight about numbers of students and faculty on governing boards while it goes on its merry way committing the university’s resources and facilities to the Establishment.

27The only meaningful alternative, recognizing the necessary connection of the university to society, is to commit and orient the university to different values and to the opposite side in the society in structural conflict. A “Critical University”, on the basis of radically altered social priorities and ends, would dedicate itself both internally and externally to human liberation rather than to its containment and repression.

28In the final analysis, a free and critical university can only develop within a fundamentally changed social and economic order. But although a socialist society is the precondition of such a university, nevertheless we can constantly press for the present university taking a radical and critical stance against the existent Establishment and orienting its educational and social-political policy in that direction.

29On one level, a critical university would aim its learning and intellectual processes at the active self-development of the individual, at the liberation and expansion of his faculties and talents. Its educational structure would be participatory, rather than top-down directed absorption of techniques and information. Furthermore, a critical university would abolish the false power and status hierarchies that now permeate all aspects of academe, and would base status and authority only on the spontaneous respect for knowledge, intellect and action.

30In general, democratization would characterize all levels of decision-making.

31The university would not only encourage and stimulate a critical attitude in individuals, it would also develop and dissiminate radical and critical social theory. Such an intellectual orientation would address itself to the relevant questions in society and the world, and would seek to unmask, dissect and demystify the real workings and human effects of the present social-economic-political order: the dimensions of elite power, the human consequences of the capitalist organization of industry, the operations of international imperialism, the spoliation of natural resources by their corporate exploitation, etc.

32An essential part of the critical intellectual work would be the development of theories and strategies of social change and revolution, as opposed to the present “social scientist’s” preoccupation with counter-insurgency and social pacification techniques. It would address itself to the problems of social transformation, and commit itself to the concrete struggles of existing oppositionist and radical movements. And this is merely one of the ways in wich it would overcome the separation of theory and practice that the present university tries to impose upon its students.

33Being committed to revolutionary movements, the critical university would train organizers for work in the outside society, e.g. labour organizers, community activists in the slums, medical experts for guerilla units, and so on.

34The intellectual processes of the critical university would be characterized by an unrelenting and uncompromising search for truth, and this by its very nature must be radical, critical and subversive of the status quo. These criteria conflict fundamentally with those of the present academic world, which relate more to prestige and status climbing in disciplines which partake of a generally bourgeois ideological framework.

35By no means would a critical university be intellectually monolithic. On the contrary, a wide variety of critical viewpoints and approaches would co-exist and compete: the different varieties of Marxism, some forms of existentialism, anarchism, pacifism, various modern radical Catholic philosophies, and so forth. Furthermore, certain forms of liberalism would fit well into this critical framework. One must distinguish between people who are called “liberals” because of their political position of support for the present form of North American neo-capitalism, and some critical liberal schools, such as that of John Stuart Mill and his modern successors — the difference between, for example, Arthur Schlesinger and Maxwell Cohen on the one hand, and such honest and critical liberals as Christian Bay and I.F. Stone, on the other, men who often have radical (though by no means revolutionary) critiques of contemporary society but differ with revolutionaries on many points of analysis and political means. Most modern liberal academics would necessarily be excluded, since their intellectual positions support a status quo that enforces human misery and exploitation and has little relation to truth, and since they are often more concerned with petty research notes designed to raise their personal status in the academic ladder.

36The knowledge, research and theory developed in the critical university would explicitly relate to the struggles and goals of the oppressed and exploited classes.

37On one level, it would contribute to the creative extension and elaboration of a revolutionary theory of society and social change. It would also, for example, counterpose and develop ideas of an alternative civilization and alternative allocations of material resources to foster genuine human progress and creativity, rather than the exploitation of human beings and the spoliation of the human environment. It would formulate socialist theories of cultural and artistic production, as well as creating and applying new cultural and artistic forms.

38At another level, the critical university would combine with workers’ groups to develop a workers’ counter-plan for the organization of industrial expansion based on the fulfillment of human needs (as opposed to corporate or government plans based on profit maximization). Its social scientists would do research for the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, its architects and engineers would be engaged in urban planning designed to create beautiful and inhabitable cities, etc.

39Finally, the critical university would explicitly and self-consciously commit itself politically. It would end the hypocrisy of present universities which won’t openly admit their political involvements, or clarify their political stands and alliances.

40In all the aspects of its life, the critical university would abolish any separation of theory from practice, thought from action. For it is only by clearly acting upon one’s position that one can remain an honest and integrated person; only through actively participating in the social process and in social struggles can one obtain a valid understanding of the society.

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