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By CHARLES BOYLAN

The bourgeois education establish-
ment has found another champion in
its war against the fledging democra-
tic students’ movement in Canada.
Northrup Frye, fresh from his “schol-
arly” denunication of the “closed my-
thology” of Marxist literary critcism
(see his book The Modern Century) and
the V. G. Vance essay in Horizons.
Winter 1968 issue), charges head-long
into open-battle with student power
advocates at the University of Toron-
to where Frye holds court in the Eng-
lish department. Not ironically did
Frye attack students in a speech deli-
vered Sept. 17 to Canada’s elite educa-
tional bureaucracy of school inspec-
tors, superintendents and_ trustees
then gathered in convention at the
Royal York Hotel. Nor is_it unpredic-
table that The Toronto Star, i.e., the
very mass media which Frye wrist-
slaps for encouraging a “cult of bump-
tiousness,” would carry his speech in
full page editorial article (Student pro-
test . . . has shallow roots, Toronto
Star, Sept. 19). ~

Frye begins his assault with the
statement “students are instinctively
docile.” By “instinctively” I presume
he means after 12 years of careful
screening and indoctrination (more
often than not in overcrowded class-
rooms run by poorly trained and over-
worked school teachers) the elite of
upper-working class ({i.e., non-im-
migrant, organized workers) and mid-
dle-class kids who finally make it to
university are sufficiently conditioned
in their reflexes that they don’t chal-
lenge their environment whether in

the class-room or in the total social -

framework of state monopoly capital-
ism.

But even if that is what Frye means
by “instinctively,” we cannot under-
stand at all what he means by “docile.”
Most Canadian students are youth
(18-24 years old) and like youth every-
where are the most active section of
the population. A week ago at his own
institution, for example, Frye would
have seen several hundred white-
frocked pharmacy freshmen being
herded around by seniors past a men’s
residence where several dozen resi-
dent students rushed out with waste-

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—OCTOBER 4, 1968—Page 6

buckets full of water to soak the in-
itiates. Hardly a docile scene.

At Brandon University in Manitoba
where I spoke during their frosh orien-
tation program, the freshmen delight-
ed in wearing green-and-gold beanies
made at the local insane asylum. The
most unanimously subscribed to activity
that week were the freshmen dances.
Hundreds of farm-fresh youth gyrated
to the blasts of an acid-rock band.
These scenes are repeated across the
country every September and point to
the fact that students are far from
being docile. It is just that their activ-
ity and energy is diverted into mean-
ingless student rituals which a matur-
ing student leadership is now begin-
ning to challenge for the first time in
nearly two decades. And so while
U.of T. pharmacy frosh were being
castrated as human beings, a smaller

-group of freshmen gathered at the
“Student Council organized tent-city to

discuss the phenomenon described by
Jerry Farber in his article “Student as
nigger.”

To Frye, however, this new aspect
of freshman activity contains a care-
fully guised threat to “academic free-
dom.” He argues that teachers worth
their salt have always loved their stu-
dents (as distinct I suppose from the
“bad masters”) and have always been
very vigilant against threats to acade-
mic freedom.” Staff are confused, ac-
cording to Frye, because they don’t
suspect that “the threat to academic
freedom might conceivably come from
the student body itself.’’ He then cites
Jerry Farber as an example of one of
those who has_ subverted student
thinking.

What he doesn’t add is that Jerry
Farber was an English teacher at
U.C.L.A. (Berkeley) until- he was
thrown out for attempting to introduce
non - authoritarian, non - bureaucratic
learning situations in his class room.
Most likely Farber’s colleagues in the
UCLA (Berkeley) English department
hadn’t read Frye’s comment that
teachers worth their salt fight en-
croachments. against academic free-
dom. Most likely these professors
joined the overwhelming majority of
professors in North America to pro-
tect their privileged position in the
university by expelling one of their

¥ “err ee —

Canada there are a dozen examples of
such encroachments on academic free-
dom from Jim Harding in Saskatche-
wan to Prof. Kenneth Bernstein at
Simon Fraser. I can remember well the
near hysteria when I wrote an article
for the student paper at UBC denounc-
ing the exploitation of teaching as-
sistants in the English Department and
of a class of graduate students dressed
down by the department head for re-
belling against a particularly obnoxious
academic bureaucrat’s insistance that
students should memorize reams of
bibliographical bumpff. Frye’s assess-
ment of his colleagues is highly over-
rated.

The system of rigid mechanical
instruction (often 500 students to a
class) sterilized regurgitation of lec-
ture notes on examinations, a sweaty,
miserable and generally meaningless
ritual in itself, is characteristic of all
major universities in Canada today.
Frye’s wisecrack that this process
“still does not prevent the student
from thinking for himself, even about
his lecture notes” is a flat contradic-
tion to the bourgeois demand itself
for more integrated, competent intel-
lectual workers. After all that is what
the famous Hall-Dennis report in Ont-
ario is about. <

But Frye goes on to denounce him-
self when he says, having debunked
students’ grievances about education,
that the movement is an important
one. An insignificant important move-
ment I guess he thinks.

He claims the movement is “anar-
chist rather than Communist,” that it
challenges the “work ethic” which is
accepted, according to our Marxist au-
thority, by the Old Left. The cause of
this anarchism, Frye continues, is that
“we (note his identification with the
process) had also been making, uncon-
sciously, a proletariat out of the stu-

dent body.”

Is Frye then a proponent of student

syndicalism, of students as productive ~

workers, as is argued by leaders of
the Union General des Etudient du
Quebec? No. To Frye, “A proletariat in
the Marxist sense, is a group of peo-
ple excluded from the benefits of so-
ciety, to which their efforts entitle
them.’”” So much for Frye’s gobblede-

number who tried rocking the boat. In ~~ gook understanding of Marxism. Eve

a first year political science student
knows the proletariat is a social class
created by the capitalist mode of pr0-
duction whereby the proletariat sells
his only commodity, i.e. his labor
power or ability to work, and the bour-
geoisie then proceeds to sell “his
commodities and distribute the surplus
value of modern production throug

- profits, rent and interest, with the

largest chunk, not surprisingly, going
toward the maintenance of the priv
ileges and power of the bourgeoisié
itself.

That’s the name of the game and if
Frye wants to play by the rules he
might read Lenin’s State and Revolu-
tion if he wants to find a Marxist cate
gory in which to place students. OP-
pression does not define the class °
proletariat. Their relation to large
scale production does. Hence students
are not proletarian. But this does not
mean students are not exploited. “Only
the proletariat—by virtue of the econ-
omic role it plays in large-scale pro-
duction—is capable of being leader of
all the working and exploited people,
whom the bourgeoisie exploits, Op-
presses, and crushes often not less, but
more than it does the proletariat, but
who are incapable of waging an inde-
pendent struggle for their emancipa-
tion.” (Lenin, State and Revolution.)

Now Frye may have a point when
he claims “the movement of student
protest has rather shallow roots” if
he interprets the student movement
developing in Canada as one which
can be satisfied by token participation
on university committees.

In fact, however, the Canadian
Union of Students has located the stu-
dent movement within a very pro-
foundly political context with roots
that extend into the very past and
future of the two nations existing in
Canada. CUS speaks of a continental
system of monopoly capitalism whose
educational task is to prepare skilled
man-power in Ontario and Quebec and
pacify the peripheral, raw-material
zones (the West and Maritimes) with
liberal-arts, teacher-training institu-
tions. Furthermore CUS traces the
long-standing Anglo-Saxon capitalist
exploitation of the nation of French-
Canada as cause for the fragmented