The spirit of '68

Even London was considered a sideshow to Paris’ cobblestone throwing conduct of 1968. Mick Jagger summed it up lyrically in a song the same year, “In sleepy London town there’s just no place for a street fighting man.”

Edinburgh, then, was even more politically provincial. And yet the students made their actions felt in ways still seen today. Some matters were addressed through well-run campaigns and demonstrations. Others employed shock tactics to elicit a response from what one student journalist at the time labelled a “notoriously apathetic university.”

George Foulkes, Senior President of the Student Representative Council (SRC) in 1964 and currently Labour MSP for the Lothians, told The Journal: “The 1960s were the decade of change. I have a picture of myself and a number of others standing outside Holland House at Pollock Halls and we’re all there in blazers and shirts and ties in serried ranks, a bit like a public school photograph. But by the mid-1960s everyone was in jeans and sweatshirts and things had changed dramatically.”

Campaigning for student representation in university governing bodies was a central issue. For the first time the paternalism of the 1950s was being overturned by a generation who wanted to have a say in the way universities ran courses and examined students. “Students are not machines to be produced to order on a University assembly line”, protested the Radical Student Alliance (RSA), an organisation who produced pamphlets and organised meetings and demonstrations.

David Adelstein, the president of London School of Economics (LSE) student union the year before Tariq Ali took over in 1968, outlined student ideals in a book he wrote aged 21. He encouraged the establishment of student-run courses in which the student decides what is taught, how it is taught and how it is examined, if at all. Students would be able to make their own staff appointments and, “finally there would be the fusion of staff and students so that all would be considered students.”

Militarism

In October 1968 the Scottish Union of Students (SUS) sent an ultimatum to the vice-chancellors of the Scottish universities demanding direct student representation in the university courts. Mike Shaw, Aberdeen University’s SRC president hinted that militant action would be taken, including a takeover of university buildings, if there was no positive reaction from the vice-chancellors. Such action was not required, however, and the vice-chancellors took the hint.

The struggle for student representation, which gathered pace in the late 1960s, reached its climax when in the early 1970s two successive student rectors were installed – the second being the current prime minister, Gordon Brown. Mr Brown was responsible for merging the SRC with various Unions to create the Edinburgh University Student Association (EUSA), a representative body which survives today. Current rector Mark Ballard told The Journal: “This didn't happen in Glasgow, and to this day the unions and the SRC remain fiercely independent of each other. But I think the strong EUSA we now have means we don't need another student rector.”

The students didn’t constrict themselves to local issues either. They were particularly active in organising demonstrations and protests against apartheid in South Africa and war in Vietnam.

In May 1968 Tariq Ali, organiser of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, was supposed to give a lecture at Heriot-Watt University on the war in Vietnam. However, the principal had been absent when the booking was made and, owing to Mr Ali’s radical reputation, the lecture was cancelled on the pretext that the debating hall was needed for students revising for exams. Mr Ali was eventually given permission to speak in lecture hall C of the David Hume Tower, Edinburgh University.

Student activism reached its height in 1968 when students at Nantarre University in Paris took over their campus and faced the infamous CRS riot police. Across the channel, Tariq Ali was speaking in Grovesnor Square at a bloody anti-Vietnam demonstration. Further north still, Edinburgh University students forced the resignation of their rector for opposing the contraceptive pill.

Sex

One of the first demands of the students at Nantarre was the right to have sex with each other in their rooms. Sociology students, led by David Cohn-Bendit, used sexual oppression as a symbol for political and spiritual oppression. Edinburgh students followed suit when their conservative minded rector, Mr Malcolm Muggeridge, refused to endorse the introduction of the contraceptive pill at the university medical centre.

Edinburgh student paper, Student printed a picture of Mr. Muggeridge’s face turning into a worm-ridden skull—around the same time, Gerald Scarfe’s infamously grotesque cartoons were first being printed in Private Eye—with a message encouraging him to agree with the students or resign.

Nick Chalmers, president of the SRC in 1968 told The Journal: “A good run round Arthur’s seat was the sort of thing you needed to do in those days to burn off energy, then you didn’t need your girlfriend to have the contraceptive pill. The national press took it that we wanted it for free. The point was that it would be ‘freely available.'”

Mr Muggeridge resigned in a speech in St Giles cathedral. Several more SRC members followed suit, catapulting Barry Sesnan into the Honorary Secretary role. He told The Journal: “We had a dinner with Muggeridge in the George Hotel to try to mitigate the damage. All I remember was that we paid for an expensive buffet and he just had a fried egg, which offended my half-Scottish ancestry.

“Then it hit the media and we had everyone phoning us up to try to discover the details of the sinful life of Edinburgh students. TV people asked me to find two students who could be interviewed who would obviously be sleeping together. It made Newsweek.”

Drugs

In another scandal of the same year, then editor of Student, Hugh Griffiths, was temporarily suspended for writing an article endorsing LSD. The back page was reserved for the radical article, offering advice on how and where to take drugs.

Griffiths wrote: “Anyone is completely justified in borrowing from the advances of pharmacology in an attempt to come to grips with his own potential.” He suggested Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception as background reading and encouraged students to get their tabs from a reliable dealer.

The following edition of Student was entirely devoted to the fallout from Griffiths' article. The front page featured a message from the principal condoning the use of drugs whilst the rest of the paper comprised of letters either condoning drugs or supporting freedom of speech. At that time, Student was published by the SRC – it was the SRC executive who had suspended Griffiths. Issues regarding freedom of speech at the University raced to the fore, and the team at the newspaper supported Griffiths arguing that his article had not endorsed drugs but had encouraged discourse on a cultural issue.

The Edinburgh Police Department, however, had been deeply concerned by the article and passed it on to the home office. The principal, Baron Michael Swann—future chairman of the BBC—reassured the police that the SRC would act responsibly on the matter.

For the foreseeable future, then, SRC president Nick Chalmers was tasked with reading Student before it was published, checking for inappropriate material. Accordingly, the newspaper was printed with “Censored” written under its by-line. Mr Chalmers recalls getting into trouble with Swann for allowing an article about students urinating on the war memorial to be published.

However, Mr Griffiths was eventually reinstated as editor of Student and soon after, the paper became independent of the SRC.

Recalling the furore over Griffiths and the drug article, Mr Chalmers says: “I wasn’t in the drug scene. I think Hugh did law and I stood as his proposer to be the president of the student law society, which went down like a lead balloon.”

Polarisation

Student politics undoubtedly had its wider political connections in the 1960s: “There were two blocks of students: the one behind the Iron Curtain who met as the International Union of Students (IUS) based in Prague, and then there was the Western block, International Student Conferenece (ISC) based in Leiden, Holland. The student world certainly reflected what was happening at the national political level,” says George Foulkes.

In his book on the history of the MI6, Stephen Dorril suggests that the anti-communist ISC was funded by the CIA and MI6. At that time, Mr Foulkes was the organiser of the Fund for International Student Co-Operation (FISC) – a group that the Radical Students' Alliance denounced as a CIA front. The allegations were denied by FISC: “It was a lot of nonsense," Foulkes says, "typical RSA sort of attacks that were thrown around at the time.”

That said, when Baroness Margaret Ramsay—then a Glasgow University student, secretary of the ISC and a worker at FISC—joined MI6 in 1969, conspiracy theorists were far from placated. And indeed, the CIA and MI6 were certainly using student informers with communist sympathies—many from the National Union of Students (NUS)—to keep in touch with international student activities.

But with many radical socialists of yesteryear now heading up a free marketeering government in Westminster, it can be easy to think of their youthful campaigns as overly romanticised. One thing is for certain, though: the freedoms won by the students of that era are still benefiting universities forty years on.