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BRITISH UBSARY Of POLITICAL i ECOIUMIC SQENCE
Nt) o
1 8J11N1990
NEWSPAPER OF THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS STUDENTS' UNION
6d. or 24 NP
No. 92 First of Autumn Term



ft

mmm
2
BEAVER
PHILADELPHIA
GHETTO OF THE CONSTITUTION
—	"Janie can't come today: she's gone to a funeral," I tell Tessa.
—	"Oh, I forgot!" "What's the name of that guy?—Mark—Still, 1 wouldn't go that that funeral nohow. It's bound to be them all fighting."
One of the students has missed class today because Mark, who reputedly "had a big mouth", was beaten up and shot dead by the Imperial gang.
—	" They shouldn't have done it. He was drunk", says Robbie, full of disgust. In Philadelphia, every neighbourhood has its gang. Robbie's brother has joined one up on Brandywine Street—"He can be eatin' his dinner," she says, "and soon as he hears there's lighting on 35th Street, he's out there with them. He'm lucky he ain't been shot." Robbie, Janie and I face each other as elements of a "Work and Learn" summer programme, .set up to help High School students who have failed their exams in at least three subjects.
They go to West Philadelphia High School, and they arc in 10th or 11th Grade, mostly aged sixteen or seventeen. They come from the black areas of the city. Most of the tutors are from Philadelphia, some black, some white and all young. The organizer is a large, dynamic woman from Spanish Harlem; she can look ruthless and talk like a dictator, but usually she's jolly, vividly dressed and wearing many dilferent wigs as there are days of thc^week.
We tutor individually, four days a week in the basements of the University of Pennsylvania. Three days ago. a storm flooded one corridor where they paddled about in six inches of water, as it came gushing up through the floor. Some days it is so hot and humid that the kids escape with their transitors to the campus lawns, or the Botanical Garden, where there is a wide waterlily pool, surround with trees and full of goldfish and frogs. At other times, concentration lags, and they climb out of the windows to visit the class next door, or to get a drink from the refrigerated water fountain. Aretha Franklin rings out from a class tutoring Spanish; two girls are stretched dozing on couches in a typewriting room, and a boy swings past with his radio and a sombrero. . . .
There is a problem which we are all aware of, in spite of the transistors and records, the flooding, the humidity and all the other excuses for poor attendance. With gross overcrowding at .school, and the difficulties that come from being part of a depressed class. 75% of negro children in the city graduate from High School as 'functional illiterates'. This is a typical situation in the cities of the North, made more explosive now that black militants and students are pressing for more University places for negroes. The elite Universities are in some cases embarrassed by the trivial proportion of blacks among their students. . . .
Danny is a sixteen year old who wants to go to College. He has played truant too often from school to pass the grading exams. On Tuesday, he did not appear at all. The previous Friday, he went early, suffering from too much of a hangover to work; another morning he turned up in a dazed state after taking his pregnant girlfriend. Jo. to the hospital with stomach pains, in the middle of the night. On Tuesday, he appeared in court on a gang murder charge. He had already spent a month before trial in two of the city's prisons: the Youth Study Center for Juveniles, and another familiarly known as the Creek. He had seen a lot of fighting in prison, and talked about the homosexual rape which, according to the newspapers, reached 'epidemic' proportions in Philadelphia jails. Danny does not dramatise the situation; he has been acquitted, and he talks about prison with less interest than he would talk about a ba.seball game. Sometimes he stops to write 'Danny loves Jo' on the cover of his algebra-book and ask what time it is. It is a year since the killing; the victim was a young door-attendant. beaten to death because 'they must have thought he was a white'. Another time it is a boy from another gang, shot in the middle of a skating-rink in the presence of a hundred or more people. In some areas of the town, police-cars whine to and fro throughout the nights.
Politicians are trying to harvest votes from the situation; they talk of legislating to outlaw gang-warfare. They make wise noises about 'the racial problem', and they diagnose too little for young people to do in the ghettoes. There is little talk of the degrading conditions: the areas where there are as many houses and parts of houses dilapidated and boarded up as there are u.sable; the pavements poking up weeds, and piled with cans and chicken bones, rags and paper; the .streets covered with bottle-glass, and in wet weather, torrents carrying rubbish along between the derelict cars. The well-off Whites tend to retreat to the suburbs, out of reach of the flying glass and the ugly people on street corners, and out of the awkward paradox presented by their well-ordered homes and the dirty dishevelment of the poor.
American wealth and poverty are the two sides of the coin of competition which underlies social and economical life. The ideology which the ghetto-boy gives me is the same as for the middle class white boy, beach-partying on Long Island: "If you've got it up here" (pointing at his brain) "you can do anything." Whether you make it or not becomes entirely your own responsibility. Success means facing up to the realities of the struggle: there is no wine without treading grapes. As a corollary of this, identifying too closely with the lower income groups may suggest 'sour grapes', an envy coming out of personal failure — and Americans are sensitive to the packaging of even their own product. They must market themselves in their talk and dress, their cars and homes, or they too may got trodden on. and their family with them.
In Philadelphia, as in New York, and many other Northern cities, the white middle class has left the centre, where the taxes and tension are high. A ri.sing tide of negroes from the
South, where wages are lower, and where de-segregation is still an uncomfortable imposition on the children of slaves and slave-masters, has filled their place. The towns groan under their education programmes, and under the taxes which are meant to cover them. Public services: the street-mending and cleaning, fire and police services, fail like cells in a dying body. The skin of town-life is erupting in fires and thefts; it agoni.ses in gang warfare, and random violence against individuals. Trying to legislate against the disintegration is a kind of juridical faith-healing, becaues it refuses to recognize the rotting in the vitals of the system. In Philadelphia, although they
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aim to legislate against gang warfare, they cannot legislate against illness in the ghettoes, and they have not faced the realities of the situation in which many people cannot afford to be ill. or to pay for the medical treal-nient which they need. DifTerent hospitals charge different fees, but forty dollars a day is not unusual, and people can run into grave debt during the course of an illness.
Even in this situation, the hospitals of Philadelphia maintain that they are facing a grave crisis. Since City and Federal funds have been cut, they threaten to close their emergency rooms, until they are subsidised. The City itself pleads poverty; it has already assured its citizens that in the crisis affecting public services, police protection will be the last benefit to go, but if the hospitals carried out their threats and close their doors, the police would be in the embarrassing position of having nowhere to take casualties. The people, pawns in the struggle between power groups, hear it on the radio stations, read about it in the Bulletin, and wait.
In New York City and in California, the administration has come face to face with opposition to its high-handed methods in the ghettoes. through the militant action of University students. On several occasions, the appropriation of land for the LIniversities has been called into question, and violently opposed. In Berkeley, it was a question of the People's Park; in Columbia, it was land in Harlem taken to build a gymnasium. which provoked a violent confrontation between police and students. When, early this year, the University of Penn.sylvania. in Philadelphia, propo.sed to build a research block in an area of black housing, students organised a Sit-in, but their efforts were dissipated by black negotiators, who aim at working with the established powers for gradual reforms. Meanwhile, no alternative housing project materialised for the evicted tenants, and the ghetto continued to simmer. Police Commissioner Rizzo. who advertises jauntily for people to join his 'team', and reputedly aims to be mayor of Philadelphia sometime, has made it plain that any riot in the city will be put down with the utmost .severity. "It will be the shorte.st riot in history." he says.
No one is going to be unfriendly in the city of brotherly love.
JACKIE SARSBY.
ACADEMIC FREEDOM
Dick Atkinson, once of LSE and now ex-lecturer of Birmingham, begins the analysis of this myth. Reported from Redbrick, Birmingham University.
ACADEMIC freedom is a term in frequent and current use concerning the activity of students and sympathetic staff. But it is used by difTerent people and in different situations to convey separate and, often, quite contradictory meanings. The consequences are very confusing, even to those involved.
For historical reasons. Universities in this country are formally self-governing. Despite this, we can, today, disitinguish four main areas of informal constraint by which opinion and activity is limited with Universities.
Firstly, the social areas from which Universities recruit students, staff and administrators constitutes one way in which they have never been and can never be fully free. Thus, say, the student's home and school background, his general social experience and beliefs, means that he will come to University with preconceptions.
The same applies to staff and administrators. But their preconceptions and degrees of flexibility are radically difTerent from the students'. Such ideas and consequent activity limit the exercise of freedom in the University. To give an example, the altitudes of members of committees governing stall appointments and student admissions are crucial factors which further determine the composition of assumptions and shape what can be freely said or done.
Such committees are now rigidly defended and criticised by respectively, administrators and students, for they have different conceptions of who should come to University and what a University should be like.
The second area of constraint involves the activity of industry and commerce. Seventy years ago these pressures were vital factors in the creation of the Red Brick Universities. The notorious Courts of Governors and their powerful working committee, the University Councils (at the L.S.K. it is called the standing Committee of the Court) owe their existence to the original source of university power and finance: local men of industry and commerce.
Such individuals, acting within the form of University decision-making, are now, perhaps, less prominent. Certainly their contribution to the typical University budget has dropped from 90 per cent, to less than 5 per cent. But the part which organised industry and commerce plays remains important. Itesearch grants for particular projects, the employment of staff, even the creation of department and, often, grants to students, all crucially alTect a range of formal and informal decisions within the University.
Industry, after all, has an interest in certain areas of knowledge, and the kind of person which it requires to develop. It therefore attempts to exercise control over these factors.
A third area of constraint has been steadily expanding during this century and has proceeded apace since the recent expansion of higher education, and its redefinition as a national, economic and technological asset.
Each succeeding wave of politicians and governments has sought to increase its control over all levels of education. It has done so with the purpose, amongst others, of relating education to economic and technological development. This has met with some resistance within the Universities. We must widen our scope and refer to the state sector of higher education before we can see how the Government is countering this resistance.
Technical colleges and colleges of art, including the proposed new polytechnics (there are to be : 30 of them), are not autonomous. For the Government control them through the D.K.S. and the L.K.A*.
The reasoning behind the new polytechnics and the Binary System, by which the Government formally segregated the previously informal distinction between the colleges and Universities, seems to be the creation of an even more powerful, state-controlled, sector of education capable of diminishing the traditional educational dominance and autonomy of the Universities.
Meanwhile, the U.G.C., the opening of University finance to the Auditor General, and, say, the raising of overseas students' fees, constitute a frontal attack on the "autonomy" of the Universities. Similarly, those academics who thought the recent P.I.B. report on their salaries was instituting a threat from student control must think again. The reasoning of the report is clear. In an attempt to tie I salaries to a particular conception of productivity, the threat comes not from student power, but from governmental and technocratic power.
Focusing the argument to an understanding of why different groups in the University define fret- ; dom differently, we must ask why they see students, not the three constraints mentioned, as the main threat to that freedom.	i
We have already said that the titular heads of the Universities are the Courts of Governors. They ' predominantly comprise outsiders: the nobility, industrialists, and so on. Their active power lies in their main working committee, the Council, which takes major financial and developmental decisions.
Here again, the lay representatives usually cimprise the large majority. Strictly academic control. though limited by the control of Council, is dispensed by Senate. This body normally contains I most, if not all, professors. Through these lx)dies—Court, Council and Senate—the senior professional and academic administrators exercise a fourth and, often, decisive constraining force on the freedom of the majority in the University—the staff and students. That is to say, the students and staff have no formal means of controlling or shaping their teaching and learning environment.
Partly because of this power structure, and ths experience of those whose lives and activity give it the form it takes, there exist at least four definitions of the same term: academic freedom.
Continued on page i
BEAVER
3
UNIVERSITIES
FOR THE 1970's
"M-'B ivelli was a thousand times right in maintaining that the exW.nce, prosperity and power of every State must be based upon crime. The life of every individual State is necessarily a series of mean, foul and criminal acts against all alien people and also to a much larger extent against its own toiling people. It is a never ending conspiracy against their prosperity and freedom."
The Anatomy
of a Student
On 12 October The Sunday Times begins an eight week investigation into higher education and careers. It begins with a survey of 5,000 students; the higher education they chose and why; the guidance — and misguidance — they received, and how they feel about it today. It continues with a dissection of 44 universities and 30 polytechnics; their strengths and weaknesses, their courses and conditions. The inside story on careers that the glossy brochures gloss over — from TV and foreign service to management and teaching. An exhaustive eight part survey that asks the whys, whats and hows — and answers them. The Anatomy of a Student is about how it is. It's about you.
The Sunday Times
Next week's issue of
The Listener
October i6 is a special
Universities Number
with particular reference to the teaching of Communications
Teaching Journalism: Sussex and Africa by TOM HOPKINSON
Teaching Television in American Universities by KENNETH ADAM formerly Head of BBC Television
University Radio York by PETER NICKOL
University Magazines by MARY-KAY WILMERS
The Scientific Pretensions of Sociology
by GEOFFREY HAWTHORN Lecturcr in Sociology, University of Essex Interview with Walter Gropius A conversation recorded shortly before his death with the late Emeritus Professor of Architecture,
Harvard University
A BBC Publication. Is. 3d.
THE LISTENER CONCESSION SCHE.ME FOR STUDENTS Registered students can obtain The Listener at a spcci; rcduccd rate of pd. per copy. For details, please write to Circulation ^lanager, BBC Publications^ 35Marylcbonc High Street, London, WiM, 4AA.
REPORT FROM THE FRONT
Reports that large numbers of police are attending the LSE this year are being strenuously denied by a police spokesman. He counter-claimed that large bands of guerrillas controlled by 01 Fatty were infiltrating the Senior Common Room and trying to subvert the legally appointed government by talking to the occupants.
These raids follow the re-opening of the Connaught zone to the students of the occupied territory, although under close surveillance. No clashes have been reported in the now de-segregated lift despite the unease of many professors at the close proximity of students. Reacting to the possibility of desegregating toilets and restaurants one senior don said " Students are all right, good and bad like everyone else, but they have different needs and standards to us. It is only sensible that there should be patterns of separate development."
!
Connaught House's New Surveillance Kquipment for the School
This important weekly series of feature articles discusses the vital issues:
Education for What? How Many Students? How do Universities Differ? Learning and Teaching Methods. Student Participation. Authority and Discipline in the Campus. The Open University. Levelling Up or Levelling Down in Higher Education ?
FROM OCTOBER 17 IN THE
NEW STATESMAN
From all good newsagents every Friday is 6d,
or by subscription at 78s a year (39s for 6 months)
STUDENT CONCESSION Students can get the NEW STATESMAN for only 52s a year (26s for 6 months) — one third below full rate. Use the coupon below.
Tv^ NEW STATESMAN, Great Turnstile, London WCi
(Delete as applicable and use block letters please)
Please enter my subscription to the NEW STATESMAN for 52/26 weeks at full/student rate. I enclose 78S/39S (students 52S/26S)
NAME.........................................................................................................
ADDRESS......................................................................................................
STUDENTS please complete: COLLEGE.........................................................
COURSE	FINAL YEAR
It's nice to know that Paul Boscher is still admired by his workmates, particularly those that presented the administration with a petition. it demanded his removal as a trouble maker and was signed by most of the senior porters whose right wing clique still control the union branch.
This is only one of the nice things going on in college — no wonder they need their PR man. For instance a list of undesirables has been sent to each lodge so that their movements can be checkcd on by those of the porters who are willing to spy.
Our ever vigilant reporters have uncovered the campaign plans of the LSE High Command under their War Lord Robbins. After acrid debate with his staff and extensive discussions with the government a new plan has emerged.
Basically it is this. An apparent air of liberalism, strengthened by the gracious decision not to dismiss Laurence Harris, is designed to divert attention from the suppression of last year and the new rules of this. The coming Select Committee report will push the NUS lin ; and it is hoped the so-called radicalism of Jack Straw will divert enough people from supporting the real threat to the existing university structure.
At the LSE we will be allowed to sit on lots of committees.
Bring your grant cheque to the
Midlamd
Use it to start a bank accomit with the JVlidland. Then we'll very quickly give you a cheque book with which to draw cash or pay bills.
It's nice to know your money is : ' absolutely safe. But a bank account with us promises you something more. A chance to budget your money each term; and the right to go to your
bank manager for advice — and help — on your finances. And while you're a full-time student, you won^t be asked to pay a penny in charges, provided you keep your account in credit.
Give your local Alidland manager a ring—his number is in the 'phone book—or go and see him about opening an account. Do it now.
Midland Bank
The Listener
4
BEAVER
ACTION FOR PEOPLE'S JUSTICE
The Pattern of Repression
Squatters/Ilford; a number are charged with 'stealing Council property' (they took wood from a building already smashed up by the Council to repair the one they were squatting in), 'assault', we all know what that means, and 'obstruction'.
Punfield & Barstow Strike; ten men on a picket line during a 13 week old strike are arrested en masse for obstructing 'the public footway'. They were in fact sitting down on private property. In court weeks later the police changed the charge to obstruction of officers in the course of their duty.
Irish Demo/Aug. 17th; among the 12 arrested at least 2 comrades are severely 'worked over'
in West End Central Police Station, before being charged.
London Street Commune; over 50 squatters are being held in prison until their trial because the police either objected to bail sureties or the magistrate deliberately fixed the sureties at an impossible price. They are being punished before trial. A number were 'badly handled' at the police station.
Black Militants
Tony Sinaris Soares; hurriedly convicted and jailed in January for 2 years for 'incitement to
riot'. The charges related to a leaflet distributed before the Oct. 27th demo.
Pete Martin, call(5 to the police station for questioning, then charged with 'insulting words' and granted bail. Later the police, with Special Branch co-operation, further charged him under the Race Relations Act. He is refused bail and awaits trial in Brixton.
Lester Springer; is taking photos of police trying to wrench a placard away from a peaceful demonstrator outside the Magistrates Court where Pete Martin is appearing. Plain clothes cops arrest him for 'obstruction' and his camera is 'dropped' on the floor of the police station.
Folkestone Commune
May, High Street Revolt; 17 arrested, one youth (first offender) is jailed for 3 months. Harry Brunt, 28 year old bystander, is arrested, waits 3 hours to be charged with insulting language and 'obstruction', and then a week later with 'incitement to riot'—he is fined £100 plus costs.
Sept. 27th; arbitary police action provokes spontaneous march to the police station. Geoffrey Daniels who while celebrating his wedding has been punched in the face by a Folkestone pottery trader, is arrested at the demand of his assailant. Of the 15 subsequently arrested only 2 are granted bail. One girl is hospitalised for cuts and facial bruises. She unwisely returns to file a complaint on 2 officers who had smashed her through a door. She is arrested for 'assault'.
Squatters/Fulham; on Sept. 22 over 100 police barricade both ends of Rumbold St., to evict squatters who had occupied a house for 2 months. Only 2 squatters are inside, and having poured a bucket of water over the 40 odd police assailants, they come out with their hands up. Both are charged with 'obstruction' and 'assault' and are released on bail. But 5 days later, with 4 others, they are charged with 'conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm'. They await their trial in prison.
Street Theatre; 5 comrades are trying to put on a play for kids outside a school in Holborn. 'Obstruction' and 'insulting words' are the charges for all except one. His hair was a little longer than the others', so he receives special treatment and is charged with 'violence in a police station'.
agro - agro - agro - agro - agro - agro - agro - agro - agro - agro - agro - agro - agro - agro.
With the gathering momentum of the revolutionary movement in Britain, we must expect a corresponding hardening of the position from the Establishment, and from its right wing in particular. The further we escalate the struggle in terms of direct action, so we must expect an escalation of the repressive forces of the State. The strategy of the enemy for the present— and for a while to come—is, and will be, to use all its powers of propaganda to isolate each particular struggle, and having done so, to move in and smash it with its forces of Law and Order. This is true of Northern Ireland where the issue is made out to be one of outdated religious conflict. It is true of the wildcat strikers who are made out every time to be 'tiny wrecking minority'. It is true of the students and schoolkids who are accus^ of 'threatening the interests of the majority'. It is true of the black workers in the struggle against a racialist society. And it is true of the London Sreet Commune who are smeared by the Press as 'those irresponsible layabouts who have nothing to do with the legitimate(!) squatting movement.'
The potential energy of these movements is enormous, but so long as they remain isolated from one another, they cannot present a serious challenge to the existing order. Ways must be found to constantly fight this attempt at fragmentation. Efforts should be constantly directed to finding the links between one struggle and another, in the same way as Powell has provided a clear link between Black 'aliens', Irish 'aliens', and the 'alienated' youth, so the machine of 'legal' repression (courts, police and prisons) is making increasingly clear the fundamental unity of purpose of those who threaten the existing order. Whether they are 'demonstrators', 'blacks', 'hippies', 'agitators', all are equally experiencing police frameups and thuggery, magistrates 'justice' and political detention in Her Majesty's Prisons.
Let us clear away the remaining illusions any of us may have about that renowned institution, the 'British Law'. British legality is a superb machine for the preservation of the British Ruling Class. It is a superb machine for the suppression and oppression of working people in general and for those who positively reject class society in particular.
The struggle is beginning to leave the lecture halls, sectarian polemics and empty rhetoric of armchair revolutionaries far behind. We must face the FACT not the THEORY of repression. It is this fact which has brought together a number of comrades—some of whom are currently facing charges—^who feel that there is an urgent need for an organised reply to the highly organised machinery of Law and Order. Securing the release of comrades on remand, ensuring that they have the legal aid neces.sary to defend themselves, circulating relevant information of concern to all activists, have become daily tasks. However, this would all be pointless unless this work is inseparably linked to a constant exposure of the real function of the legal system—the preservation of the ruling order—inside and outside the courts.
Support is needed for this type of work to become something nrore than an ad-hoc formation during 'hard times'. Apart from the obvious importance of a fund for bail and for fines, financial support is necessary for the running costs of such an organisation. We are appealing to all individuals and active groups who see the need for collective action in this field to contact us.
Action for Peoples' Justice, 45 Fairmount Road, London, S.W.2.
We will be holding a Public Meeting in early November where we hope that all groups and individuals affected can work out a collective response to the fact of mounting repression. Details of time and place will be announced shortly.
ALL FOR ONE
GEWERKSCHAFTLICHE STUDENTENGEMEINSCHAFT ,
LANDESVERBAND BERLIN '
Secretary : Edgar Zimmer, 1 Berlin 31, Tharandter Str. 2 Jo
the President of London School of Economics Students' Union,
Mr. Chris Pryce,
St. Clements Building, Clare Market,
London, W.C.2.	|
Sept. 22nd, 1969
Ref.: Your letter dated 29th May/Visit of our group at L.S.E. on 28th July	'
Dear Mr. Pryce,	;
We should like to refer to our visit at L.S.E. and your behaviour tov/ards us. We write this in order to clear possible misunderstandings, i.e. we do not want that i one might perhaps conclude from the events then that our group behaved badly or improperly. For we are interested in good relations to L.b.E. Students' Union. Therefore we send a copy of this letter also to members of L.S.E. Students' Union and ask you at the same time to inform your staff about this letter.
We asked you to send us a mere formal invitation but at the same time were , interested in real contacts (our letter dated 22nd May). In your letter dated 1 29th May you were as kind as to send us this formal invitation and you even promised to support us in making contacts.
Thereupon we gave you our London address and wrote to you that we should I like to contact you after our arrival in London (our letter dated 24th June). But when our group went to see you at L.S.E. in the morning of 28th July a series of events happened which we cannot only call misunderstandings. Our group was not allowed to enter L.S.E.—probably because of the situation then—before the leader of the group, Mr. Heinrich, had shown your invitation-letter to the door keepers. You welcomed the group in the entrance-hall. Mr. Heinrich asked you as a representative of a students' union to speak with us about your tasks and about the problems of the University of London. You invited us to have a cup of tea. The discussion, however, turned out—at least we could not but conclude this from your short and extremely unsatisfactory answers—that you were not ready or not able to enter into an extensive discussion. After five or ten minutes you even asked us to leave L.S.E. at once without explaining to us for what reason we should leave. You appeared rather excited. But we insisted on continuing the discussion and wondered why a students' representative, who at the beginning was ready to contact us, now wanted to turn us out. You even went so far—in our | opinion too far—as to threaten to call for the police who should not only throw us out of the University area but also, as you told, should deport us. After some confusion you told to be once more ready to discuss about L.S.E. Students' Union and your tasks and now even about the part you are playing politically at London School of Economics. But at last you did not do so. After this we left L.S.E.
With this letter we hope to have contributed to clearing possible misunderstandings between L.S.E. Students' Union and our students' organisation " GSG ", especially as we suppose that these misunderstandings should not be attributed to our group or simply to L.S.E. Students' Union but alone to your incomprehensible behaviour We like to add that something of that kind never happened to us during all our previous contacts and visits abroad.
Yours sincerely RAINER HEINRICH (leader of the group)
EDGAR ZIMMER
(Secretary)	I
Continued from page 2—' Academic Freedom '
Firstly, most Governors, Councillors and senior administrators see themselves as reflecting Ihe | traditional interests and pursuits of the University The decisions taken by this small group of men | is, they feel, just, if undemocratic, and Lheir power to take them is rationalised in traditional, authori- I tarian, terms. Any attack on their power or control, therefore, is defined as an attack on "academic freedom
They do recognise government, though usually not industry as a threat to that freedom. But now they tend to use the students' activity alone as a blanket scapegoat and as a far more dangerous threat.
Secondly, professors have traditionally seen both the Council and non-professorial staff as a danger ' to their own "academic freedom." This is defined as what they themselves practise as heads of departments and, collectively, as Senators. But students are now seen in terms of the same scapegoat j picture which the administrators have. When facing students these two groups usually form ai i unwritten alliance.
Thirdly, the non-professorial staff, recognising that most real power lies with Council, Senate and the heads of their departments, see the student as a final threat to what little control is left to them. This resides in the lecture hall and examination room.^ This fact partly accounts for the outburst again.st, and misunderstanding of, the P.I3. report. Students are again a scapegoat, though recently some staff have been won over to the student cause.
Fourthly, students have a totally different definition from the three previous, each of -which p» eludes students from the right to academic freedom. Consequently, one dimension, the students' concept, is defined negatively, in terms of freedom from those constraints which the article has indicated.
The present University power structure is therefore seen as an additional constraint. All constraints are seen as educationally destructive. As students have no constitutional means to affect changes, they are driven to direct action to achieve results. On another dimension, students define freedom positively, as the freedom to enlarge and shape their educational experience. In the process they hope to build a constructive alternative structure through which all, .staff and students together, may gain democratic control over their joint work situation.
They further feel an alternative would be able to curtail exactly that extension of Governmental and industrial control which the present structure has been powerless or unwilling to prevent
It seems that academic freedom would more properly be called academic power or control. As such, it resides, with different meanings, in a rightly hierarchical structure. A person's definition of it depends, in part, on his place in that structure, on whether he does or does not control his worl situation, and on which group he identifies as a threat to his control, or the cause of his lack of it
Further, all definitions, except the students', are regarded by their advocates as having univetsaj validity. "They consequently attempt to get the other groups to agree that their definition is the only legitimate one, and any challenge to their concept becomes an attack on academic freedom in general.
Continued on opposite pajt .
I
BEAVER
WASTED-
one centre threequarter
DESCRIPTION : 5 ft. 10 ins., 158 lbs. — wearing one dirty rugby shirt, and boots with worn down studs. Dozy expression and shifty eyes.
Dazzling sideslip and exciting outside break.
GARSTIN WHERE ARE YOU?
Anyone seeing a person answering this description should phone 405-4936 and ask for Brian.
Such is the strength of the rugby club this season, that all we need is Michelle (he's French by the way) to make us into a match winning side. Most of last year's players have returned for another two terms of ribaldry before a few exams in June — that is if our dear
Wally will leave the School open. We have been assists by an influx of rugby playing freshers (whether we have R. Satchwell, Esq., to thank for this we will never know) so many of them come from the valleys that Dan Joi^s is thinking of making this a purely Welsh speaking club.
The trials at Maiden revealed one or two of them as
good socialisers as well as good players. As yet of course
without a ball being kicked—we can't tell whether our
motley collection of individuals will blend into a matra
winning formula. However what we can say is that Satch-
well's Strollers may at last turn out with 15 clean fit and
healthy lads (altho' not if Satchwell has anythmg to do with
it). With a membership of 70 at the 'ast count-we^^
more—how can we go wrong—BUT hOR (jOUJ>
COME BACK GARSTIN!	„ , „ .u n
B. J. Rothwell
London University Women^s Golf Club
Have your photograph taken on your Degree Day. No appointment necessary.
Portrait Studio Swan & Edgar Ltd.
Piccadilly, W.l.
SEVEN AGES OF MAN by
Stan Traccy Stan Traccy Big Band 16th October, 7.30 p.m. Old Theatre, LSE Students 10/-
Any women students — undergraduate or graduate, including freshers — interested in playing or learning to play golf, are invited to become founder members of a new London University Women's Golf Club, now being formed. The initiative of forming a club was taken last term by a Westfield student, who placed an 'ad' in Sennet, the University paper; since then, she has been in touch with a group who are keen to start a club, but at least 20 members are needed for it to get financial backing from the University.
We therefore urgently need new members, anyone — however inexperienced — who would like to play, either occasionally or regularly. This offer is open to research and admin, staff, and teachers, as well as students; I myself am on the research staff, and can therefore only play occasionally (and I am still only a beginner at the game).
In case anybody thinks golf is stuffy and class-ridden, which is some people's view, let them note the changes that have been going on in the game in recent years. More and more people, especially men, in all walks of life, young and old (but, increasingly younger), play on public courses or are joining the less exclusive clubs. This has been a reflection of the success of young British professionals like Tony
Jacklin. What is more, golf provides a marvellous way of getting exercise and fresh air, usually in lovely scenery, without exhausting oneself too much. Similar changes are taking place in women's golf, as in men's; the average age of women golfers is much lower than it was, and more women are playing. A group of top women professionals, formed not long ago, includes Vivien Saunders, a recent psychology student at University College.
There is already an active men's club in the University, and some of the facilities they enjoy will be extended to a new women's club. Some games will be played jointly with the men's club, and there will be shar^ social activities. Men outnumber women enonnously, on the golf course!
If, therefore, any women at L.S.E. would like the chance to play (or learn) golf with fellow students, at concessionary rates, and with the chancc of entering competitions, would they please send their names and addresses to me, Carol Wain, at Room C 342, L.SJ:., giving details if possible. A meeting will be called later in the term when any replies have been received. People willing to share in some of the future organisation (whether experienced or not) will be especially welcomed.
Continued from opposite page—' Academic Freedom
As all other groups agree that student activity	threat to
their particular control, they argue, in tacit alliance, that students violate freedom.
Through publicity in the mass media, this blanket condemnation, by everyone from iMr. Short, through the V.-Cs and professors to leader-writers, means we should not be surprised that "public" has largely accepted this view.
Two years ago it was sufficient to denounce students verbally in this way. Since then it has become necessary for Mr. Short to sueeest marginal reform, before threatening studenls_with withdrawn grants, for administrators to tighten control over admispons, to recognise the official N.U.S. and agree to minor reforms in an attempt to capture the moderate students before using writs, police, discipline in general and, finally, sacking two sympathetic statt—pour encourager les autres. All these stages in control and repression—there have been many others—have clearly been taken in step with the growth in the student power movement.
At first merely an inconvenience, it has become a serious challenge to those who occupy it and intend to retain positions of real control. Simply, the time has been reached when the student movement can no longer be tolerated. It has to be attacked.
So far students have only attained the negative POwer to prevent those measures taken to control or repress them. They do "ot yet have support or power to implement features \vhich are to do with the positive dimension of their definition of freedom. These involve changing and democratising the whole structure and content of education, and its relation to the rest of our community.
Mr Short the V-C.s and Lord Kobbins clearly have a right to be worried,' particularly now that the second main constituency of the University, the ordinary staff member, knows what it feels like to be a powerless and victimised student.

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6
BEAVER
OCTOBER
As Rhodesia hardens its resolve to become a fascist Republic the Universities' harden in their resolve against student militancy. This parallel development is not altogether surprising as both protect the same interests, and in fact collaborate in perpetuating each others systems worried by the threat in Ulster, wildcat strikes and growing active opposition to exploitation.
As Beaver revealed last year the principal of London University visited Rhodesia in March to aid in preparing policy for University College, Rhodesia as Rhodesia prepares to become a racist bastion for South Africa. He was accompanied by the deputy chairman of the University Grants Committee, the policy making body for British University development, the role it was given by Lord Robbins.
UCR has had much turmoil in the past few years but since Miller resigned as principal during the summer (he said it would be like working in an occupied territory—and he was appointed to introduce discipline in the college) there has been peace. During all this the University of London continued to authorise UCR's issuing of London external degrees. They even assure prospective students of UCR that there will be no trouble in their gaining London degrees just because Rhodesia is becoming a fascist Republic.
Indeed so fond of the bleached pure atmosphere of Rhodesia are the London administrators that several will visit the country in the next few months.


I h

DO YOU SUPPORT THIS?
If you do not then take part in a demonstration to demand
i)	Sir Douglas Logan's resignation;
ii)	the severing of all London Universities' links with UCR, Rhodesia and S. Africa;
iii)	the resignation of all administrators, governors, etc., of London University or their selling of all investments in, or companies trading with, Rhodesia, South Africa, Angola or Mozambique;
iv)	the boycott of all London exams until this is achieved.
Meet outside the University of London Union in Malet Street at 3.30 on Tuesday, October 21st and march to Senate House to forward these demands.
U)
0^ UJ
CO
O
H U
O
21 St
The university administration of your university are happy to put their seal of approval on the last stage of one of the most iniquitous education systems in the world. Although 95 per ccnt of Africans attend primary school in Rhodesia, this usually meaning no facilties and learning to read, write and subtract by pre-workhouse methods, only 5 per cent go on to secondary education. Of these a few trickle through to UCR, generally being those from the more well-off families. Here they are segregated for almost everything and subject to constant police raids—and often beaten up. Your degree will be a London degree—a degree that openly supports racialism—issued by the bureaucrats that sit in Senate House, to guard the interests of the capitalists who run your university.
Birmingham Protest
Birmingham University, which helps run UCR Medical Faculty and whose Pro-Chancellor is chairman of Rover-Rhodesia, presented the reactionary Sir Humphrey Gibbs with an honorary degree on Monday, September 29th. Students tried to prevent this farce but were prevented from doing so by heavy security. Birmingham University has its own police (and since the protests last year has copied LSE in appointing a PR man). Even the President of the Students' Guild (Union) accused the administration of backing the Rhodesian regime by this award.
The occasion marked the introduction of orders to the campus police to deal forcibly with any protestors. However to ensure full security several high ranking Birmingham City officers were invited on campus — a move condemned by the students.
Gibbs has to pick up another degree at East Anglia.
The Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham, Dr. Brockie Hunter, not such a good traveller as our Douglas Logan, makes up for this by putting forward the administrators view. He regards Gibbs as a hero who helped maintain academic freedom at UCR (in between police raids that is) — even before UDI this was a joke. But Dr. Hunter goes farther. In July he said:
"We have made massive contributions to the
elite of the Commonwealth and foreign countries;
and are trying to do it in Rhodesia."	\
Further he feels that students display — "a | neurotic concern for the feelings of others" — what a weakness for the master race.
BEAVER
7
ULSTER - CAPITALISM EXPOSED
The events in Ulster have given us a chance to see in relief the methods used to disguise the truth from the public by the authorities.
The Unionist Party has a unique position, one envied by many a government, as being able to quite successfully identify any attack against itself as being against Protestantism, Union with England and 'civilised democracy'—but even this card failed to work well enough this time, or even the horrific Special Powers Act, which has prevented Britain signing the Convention agreed to by ¦nearly every nation in the world.
Thus the well tried techniques had to be fed through the press.
The most ugly feature of the crisis was the Unionists desperate desire to retain piiwer, even if it meant accepting proposals that were anathema to that party. Everything was tried before this however. Simply the Stor-mont govt, had to turn a primarily non-sectarian situation into one in which they could control the conflicting forces. Thus from the very beginning of the Civil Rights campaign attempts were made to ' smear' it as Republican, which in Ulster is synonymous with Catholic.
The more extreme Protest-
ant elements were given their head with active Unionist assistance (Burntollet, Lurgan, etc.) in order to mobilise a mainly Catholic defensive reaction—which could then be labelled unconstitutional republican and papist. O'Neill was not too happy in this position, wishing to make attempts at purifying Civil Rights and London with preconceived reforms. He was soon ousted and Chichester-Clark installed, giving the go-ahead for a determined attempt to crush the Rights movement once and for all.
I his backfired. The purely defensive attitude of Derry. etc.. necessitated the provocation of these areas and appeals closer to Westminster's heart.
Thus the Apprentice Boys' march was allowed to go ahead at a time when no support could rally in England with Universities closed and workers on holiday with much publicity and once the fighting began Stormont had to fan the flames in order to justify the response—which they had decided would be massive.
To Ulster the Unionists pre.sented the events as a Republican-Catholic menace— to Westminster more traditional accusations were made.
Furiously foreign agitators were blamed—haven't we
homes. This senseless attack, for if the police had stopped attacking the Bogside there would have been no fighting heard that before? What was good enough for France. Mexico and October 27 was good enough for Stormont. Police desperately hauled people in until a French and German student were caught to prove thi.s—though no one would deny socialists of every ilk went to help the people—but anyone who comprehends the situation knows the Irish, after 50 years of oppre.ssion, do not need to be taught how to fight, or even io bo 'agitated' to the task. Nonetheless this propaganda continued— "How could so many 'professional ' molotov ccKktails be made so soon? "
[It takes only a few hours to f>crfect 'mollies' and a few thousand people who had been attached to the RUC .several times before were obviously prepared—moreover many men who had served in W.W.II, Korea or the peacetime Army needed no advice on how to resist 'professionally.']
The retaliation came swiftly. Tear gas was poured in-di.scriminately into a small area, not as tear gas is usually used to clear a crowd but to drive the Bogsiders out and away from their
was again mediated by PR techniques.
CS gas, which has been called gas in Paris, Vietnam, Beunos Aires and Amsterdam, suddenly became innocuous, airy, healthy, 'tear smoke' despite the fact that cartridges fired contained five times the amount of those used in Paris—which to my personal knowledge have caused many long term eye injuries. Police ofiicers concern was that "there would have been a great deal of damaged property" [Times Aug. 14]. The "smoke" then became "anti-riot irritant". The ultimate in con. [CS is issued to 36 police forces in England and Wales.]
The 'Times' ran a piece trying to push how human and ordinary the RUC was— and the tears dripped freely a Sergeant said:
"What really hurts is when you hear criticism of police action. We are as restrained as possible, and when allegations arc made against you, you sort of lose faith in people."
[Read the report on the police riot in the Bogside when drunken RUC beat a man to death and beat up women and children—or the Cameron reports comments.]
RUC spokesmen expressed concern that 'law and order' were not being maintained on the other side of the barricades—a rather late, if not unwelcome, concern for this aspect of their duties. Thus giving them justification for repeated attacks—and people were still, are still, being arrested for protecting them-.selves—even though it had become obvious that the arresting forces were not reliable and u.scd arrest as just another weapon to attack political opposition.
This is the last refuge of the established order—the continuity of law. [Even when troops arrived it was still to ensure that Unionist laws were kept and that the RUC could prosecute/pcrse-cute with impunity.]
Whether the 'B' specials were the last desperate fling of Stormont or forced into action by understandable Westminster reticence to
making such an obvious connection by becoming involved until everything had been tried—they became in action an attempt to prove there was a Republican insurrection and to wipe out as many dissidents/Catholics as possible. Thus with, nominally, Protestant, Fascists they burnt out areas and fired madly about them knowing that even if Protestants were hit they could blame the 'Popeheads'. With guns in use it was necessary for the resistors to arm themselves as best they could—and this proved the IRA was 99.9 f)er cent myth.
At such a point even the Labour govt, couldn't look the other way and thus in came the troops—not to establish a new order but to re-enforce the old, albeit in a subtler form.
Thus Chichester-Clark and Co. began back peddling like mad in order to show they were in agreement with the new spirit and to prove they could still master the problem they had created.
It must be stressed that many of the demands were for the govt, to actually adhere to the constitution under which it worked—and thus Stormont backed by Westminster's troops were resisting what would normally topple a govt.
Ths technique of Stor-mont's in identifying with the
established order one Party and combining this with managing to be identified with one religion is what has been the aim of cliques for centuries. In England the technique is more subtle. One party does not identify with the established order—the whole of Parliament does. Her Majesty's Government and Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition (the Oueen represents established order). In Westminster they realise that whatever party they are in they represent the same interests, albeit in different forms.
In France during the Heugenot wars and in the emergent Netherlands this was the policy of, again what each side lal^lled thf other. Catholics and Protestants— though as in Ulster being a rather spurious title for either group. The French example is be.st, showing each group trying to kidnap the king, assassinate heirs and attack any sign of opposition constitution breaking in order to be identified with legally established order. The Unionists achieved their political hegemony by being colonial exploiters who wished to give a veneer of democracy to their estates — to prevent any difficulties. The Tory Party has backed thpm in this up to the hilt—after all they are Tory estates, relations, pals, school chums in Ulster.
For Visitors
The accepted form for all beginning of term ofTerings is a faintly patronising attitude introducing' the new student to the 'fun' of collcge life. This tone has been set by university authorities and rapidly adopted by student oflicialdom and even the Soc-Soc old guard. It is an attempt to confer an inferior status on freshers', the denigrating title given to some-one new to the college, so that they will keep their place and to ensure others treat them as such.
It has perks for the established members of our great 'academic community'. There are plenty of girls to get laid— they looking just for communication, to gain status via their partners, some even awed by the 'figures of note' that haunt the college. Thus the men are happy with their greater status and any evening can be heard giving forth in the bar to impress the 'talent' with their long phrases.
This is Just one tiny aspect of this status game—played equally well in Soc-Soc or in the less introspective groups like Lab-Soc or Con-Soc.
The main thing is to foster the notion that 'freshers' are really not fully human beings and not to be trusted in making decisions. This effectively reduces their troublesomeness for nearly a year — and there are few ways of helping to break this pre-ordained life — style with the restraints of society.
With the school-like lectures and seminars the sixth form outlook is maintained. Societies tout for membership in an atmosphere of jolly camaraderie with in-jokes to keep the newcomers at a distance. In the Union, with all the pre-con-ditioning of the college and its inmates, it is no wonder the same people speak — and speak and speak.
This is Professor Robert .McKenzie. Do not be alarmed by hint. Ills occa.sional meteoric visits to the college at iiioiiients of crisis crying " I have the answer, I have the .solution—Just look at my .s>vingo-nieter" are (|uite harmless and if one a.sks him to wait a minute he will disappear emitting .steam. .Students who wish to .see him can tune into 24 Honrs nio.st evenings.
The learned professor has never been quite the same since launching into his set piece on how great the American presidency is while SlcCarthy delegates were being beaten up on the TV screen behind him.
His main function is to get jobs for LSE's many experts on news and current affairs programme.s.
BATESON	
SLANEY	
PARKER	
BLACKBURN	DON'T FORGET
8
BEAVER
JAZZ
by Steve Crocker
The autumn has brou^t with it the annual pilgrimage of American jazzmen to these shores. Once again commercial pressure has limited the numbers of modernists, but Miles will be here, as will Monk and Cecil Taylor. The Miles Davis concert
at " Jazz Expo " on November 1st should be especially interesting as his quintet includes pianist Chic Corea and British bassist Dave Holland.
' Solid State ' records have hit on the idea of forming all their working musicians into
a big band, which should be in Britain on tour in November. Freddie Hubbard and Thad Jones will be in the band, but will not, unfortunately, be doing any individual concerts.
The British scene is in its usual transient state. John
Surman has just left the country soon to be followed by pianist Gordon Beck. Don Rendell has also left the scene and split up his long standing Rendell-Carr group. On the credit side there are some new and brilliant musicians in London at present, notably drummer Mike Travis, tenor player John Warren and a young pianist just down from Newcastle called Peter Jacobson. All are well worth seeing.
John Jack's new club 'The Cruciable' in Old Compton Street is, I hear, doing good business with a line up of young modern British groups. The food is cheap, the beer good and it's well worth a visit one weekend.
Good news for fans of pianist - composer Stan Tracey — his new jazz suite ' The Seven Ages of Man' will be premiered at L.S.E. on October 16th; it promises to be the most interesting of Stan's many works.
Finally, if it's records you're after, you must get round to hearing Herbie Hancock's latest album ' Speak Like a Child' — beautiful.
FILM SOCIETY
LSE Film Club is so steeped in admass culture that it no longer thinks for itself. Its range of films for this year looks like a Rank release sheet for re-showings.
One or two of th films rate re-showing, like 'Zulu' or 'Guns of Navarone' but the majority can be seen quite easily or have had wide distribution. With a film club one has the possibily to obtain little circulated films—or films that need re-showing due to their quality or unusualness. The Academy Cinema's can do this job to some extent, but still have to show profits, as does the Everyman. The Classics occasionally have the really good films but the scant number of films that reach the public cannot be much altered by these concerns.
Even such a 'figure' as Godard has small distrubution in this country and most of the tremendous Hungarian, Czech, Yugoslav and Polish cinema is not seen or has one showing at the NFT.
The Cuban cinema showed its great potential recently but the Cuban Films are quite well oil because of their 'trendiness'. When do we see an Argentinian, Braziliati or Mexican film. China does not exist to our cinema public— nor even the well tried Japanese. The Scandinavian sex money-spinners pack out the so-called 'West End Cinemas, and occasionally a big release film comes good ('Oh! What A Lovely War', 'Marat/Sade', 'Rosemary's Baby', 'Man For All Seasons', 'Royal Hunt of the Sun') but most of these are plays adapted for film and not straight cinema as such. The prestige cinemas occasionally slip in an 'arty' film, even Bunuel gets a rare showing.
So what do the enterprising Film Soc do. Try and break box office records—next year they'll have 'Sound of Music' and 'Green Berets'. Be entertained, soak in the attitudes unconsciously and become a zombie. Do not think — or make use of opportunity.	H.G.
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9
THE RELEVANCE OF HISTORY
A view from Professor James Joll as History faces the ever growing challenge from the Social 'Sciences'
At the end of the nineteenth century there used to be a great deal of discussion as to whether history was an art or a science. And even if, in those terms, the question was some-wiiat naively formulated, it serves to illustrate the ambiguous position history has always occupied in relation to tiie social sciences. There have of course been historians — especially in the second half of the nineteenth century — who claimed that it was possible to ascertain the truth about the past with the same certainty as the natural scientist establishes the truth about our environment, though this view of a strictly scientific history has been under attack for over half a century. And there have been other historians — the most famous of whom in our own day has been Arnold Toynbee — who believe that it is possible, by the study of the past, to establish laws or construct models which will enable us to predict the pattern of the future. However, not many historians today would, I think, accept either of these views; they would not agree that our knowledge of the historical past is exactly similar to the knowledge of the natural world provided by the scientists; and they would question the possibility of establishing laws of historical development that will enable us to predict the future in the way that scientific hypotheses do.
This appears to put the historian in a position of some difficulty when confronted by his colleagues in the social sciences. Some of these — in the field of Social Administration, for example— are firmly rooted in the practical realities of day-to-day life. And even the more abstract branches of knowledge, such as theoretical economics, are concerned with the construction of models which should, in principle, be applicable to the real world (even though, to the lay eye. they often appear to break down when so applied).
Any course in the social sciences ought to include a study of history; and equally the historian needs to learn to use the methods of the social scientists in his own work. There is a tendency among some social scientists to think of the history component in a university course as simply a dry but -necessary way of giving the student some basic facts which he can use elsewhere in a more rewarding context. But a study, even a brief and superficial one, of history should provide much more than this. History shows how men behaved in actual situations. The historian, that is, has to explain as best he can how particular men behaved on particular occasions. This may, of course, suggest factors which are common to similar situations at different periods; but the first object of study for the historian must always be the individual event, the unique situation. A study of the origins of the French Revolution, for example, and one of the origins of the Russian Revolution may well suggest that there are common features which tend to produce a "revolutionary situation"; and when confronted by a contemporary situation such as that in France in May, 1968, we can see whether such factors are present and venture to predict whether or not a revolution will take place. But the historian's study of a particular situation in the past, his detailed account of the peculiar features of the French or the Russian Revolutions, are an essential preliminary for any such process of analysis or prediction.
It is his obstinate insistence on the individual fact, the unique event and their links with other facts and events that makes the historian rather an awkward partner for, say,
the sociologist. Historians are repeatedly irritated by the way some sociologists simply omit or overlook historical facts which do not fit their models; and sociologists are often mnoyed by what seems to them the unnec-issary pedantry of historians who insist on tressing a particular episode which may irrelevant to the general pattern which e sociologist is trying to establish. Yet it is just by this insistence on the particular that the historian is of value to the sociologist,
constantly providing him with new material and constantly supplying him with awkward facts which he has to assimilate. What is impressive about the great sociologists of the past — Max Weber or Emile Durkheim, for example— is the breadth of historical refer-
ence and understanding which they brought to their sociological generalisations; and it would be a pity if contemporary sociologists were to lose the historical perspective which gives their predecessors' work so much value to the non-specialists.
Ori the other hand, the historian needs the social scientist. Detailed historical research has its own fascination; and it is very easy for a historian to immerse himself in details and to act as if all facts were equally interesting. He may become so involved in his study, say, of Nuns' Knitting in 13th century Shropshire, that he loses interest in the wider society or the more important developments in the period he is studying. The importance of the social scientists to the historian is that he is constantly suggesting new types of explanation and directing attention to new areas in which the historian might look for the answers to his questions. To take two famous and obvious examples, Marx, by drawing attention to the way in which economic factors condition political and intellectual developments, has had an enormously fruitful influence on historical writing and on historians wiio are by no means Marxist in other respects. Max Weber, by drawing attention to the links between religious beliefs and economic activity started a whole new movement in the study of the period of the Reformation, and inspired a series of studies of major historical interest. Even if the sociologists or the psychologists or the anthropologists cannot themselves provide the precise answers to the historians questions, they can at least suggest where he might look for them and, more important still, draw attention to new questions which he might ask.
No historian would, 1 think, be content with a justification for the study of history which simply stressed its importance to the social sciences; and he would rightly want to defend the pursuit of history for its own sake. Some people might argue that if you don't enjoy studying the past anyway, then no amount of reasons why you should do so will make you feel any differently. But as most of us spend much of our time at school and at the university studying history (and some of us devote much of our life to it), we should be prepared to offer some explanation of why we do this. Here I have only space to suggest two lines of thought, one in connection with the study of history in general and the other with the study of sjjecifically modern and contemporary history — with the period, that is, since the French Revolution opened a new political era in Europe and since the industrial revolution began a new technological age. Each of us in our own lives has a limited possibility of experience. However intensely we may live and however eagerly we expose ourselves to the opportunities of enlarging our experience, however privileged

Mr

we may be in the chances we have for observing different cultures or other societies, these possibilities must necessarily be limited, by time, if by nothing else. History, like art, offers us an opportunity of transcending these limitations and gives us a chance — even if not, as some pliilosophers of history have maintained, of directly experiencing the past by thinking the thoughts of past people — at least by trying to understand how people in the past thought and why they thought the way they did, and what were the social, economic and political factors which led them to do so. In doing this, we not only enlarge our experience of how people behave and of the nature of man and society, we also learn the controlled use of our own imagination. To understand the past it is not sufficient to establish the facts (though this is often extremely hard). We must also evaluate and interpret them; and this can only be done if we can judge them as nearly as possible as their contemporaries did. History is a continuous exercisc in the stretching of our own powers of understanding and provides the possibility of a constant enlargement of our own limited experience.
All history, Benedetto Croce said, is contemporary history. The attempt we make to recreate the past is inevitably conditioned by our present circumstances; and each generation will interpret the past in a different way in the light of its own experiences and presuppositions. But there is another sense in which all history is contemporary history, since our view of the past is bound to affect our view of the present, and each of us has a half-conscious store of historical knowledge or received opinion which conditions our judgement. This is especially true of our knowledge of the recent past. During the past two centuries the world has changed more rapidly than in any previous period; and in the last thirty years development have been so rapid that we feel ourselves, whether we like it or not, breathlessly engulfed in the stream of history. (This may incidentally be one of the reasons which make people want to "opt out" and to live their lives undisturbed by these potent historical processes over which they have no control). If we are to begin to understand what is happening to us, some knowledge of the recent past is essential. To take two examples: a knowledge of the historical development of Marxist ideas is essential for the understanding of the language of contemporary politics from Moscow to Peking or Havana; a study of the development of nationalist movements in nineteenth-century Europe will help us to understand what is happening in Israel or among the black people of the United States. Politicians are themselves again and again influenced by their own ideas — often erroneous or misconceived — about recent history. Eden's policy towards Egypt in 1956 or, indeed, U.S. policy in Vietnam would have been different if it had not been for the prevalence of the view that it was "appeasement" which had been responsible for the Second World War.
I said earlier that history resembled art in its function of enlarging our experience. There is another sense in which history resembles psycho-analysis and can have a comparable therapeutic effect. Just as the psychoanalyst helps us to face the world by showing us how to face our own motives and our own personal past, so the historian helps us to face the present and the future by enabling us to understand the forces, however shocking, which have made our world and our society what it is. To perform this role, the historian needs the materials on which to base his analysis and the imaginative insight to comprehend what he finds. The search for those materials and the exercise of that insight provide at least one justification for the pursuit of historical studies.
JAMES JOLL
10
BEAVER
WHO MOVES WHO
As one enters the LSE this year it is impossible to avoid noticing the air of tension. For those who were here last year this is easily understood—^and for those just entering the college the events of last year cannot have passed unnoticed.
One may believe that one is entering into "the wonderful adventure of learning" but into a sordid production process enlivened by political overtones of great weight. To aid those who wish to understand the LSE there follows a guide to the people who run your college and the motivations behind their political acts.
LSE students are involved in a very tense political battle— played for high stakes—^and although it is comforting to slip into liberalistic aloofness at what superficially appear idea-logical excesses this is a great danger—^as the other side are fully aware what is at stake.
The School is controlled by the Court of Governors which comprises about 90 members. On this body sit many famous personages, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Vic Feather of the TUC, and Baroness Sharp—but ithis body plays only a rubber stamping role, providing a liberalistic screen for the men who really run things. This inner group are the members of the Standing Committee of the Court— which handles week to week control and is rarely challenged by the court as meetings are badly attended with enough of Robbin's supporters to carry the day.
Below these are the various committees and administrative staff, led by Walter Adams, the Director and Secretary to the Governors. The organ of the staff as a whole is the Academic Board, but this is effectively controlled by the staff structure and wage control, with the extra precaution of Adams as Chairman.
It is the Standing Committee which must be understood if one is to understand events at the LSE. Lord Robbins as chairman is recognised in academic and political circles as the controller of the LSE's destiny. Further his stature as the country's foremost expert on further education, established by the Robbin's Report, is on trial with his performance at the LSE. The fact that it is Robbins leading the fight against the student movement is not an accident. A powerful man had to do the job, what better person than the man who re-moulded official thinking on universities and had the most to lose in these threats to the smooth achievement of "Robbins expansion".
Again Robbins would not have risked his status if he had not been sure of his® personal power and official backing. This power was cemented by the contracts he had made in
his academic career and incredibly strengthened when he was writing the Report. Every major university figure in the country was anxious for Robbins to accept his views — a quick way to build a friend fund. Moreover he became the confidante of leading politicians (ties strengthened through the governors) a fact shown by Edward Short's hurried support for the school's closure. The following speeches hy Wilson and co, showed that Robbins had got the go-ahead for a showdown with the so-called "militants"—a decision he had advised them to make. It was only due to the great displays of solidarity from Essex, Warwick, Sussex, etc., etc., which showed the "militant minority" were of dangerous strength, that made the government avoid a state versus student conflict (May being imprinted on their purses) and just gave tacit support. This did little to reduce Robbins strength. Chairman of the "Financial Times", member of the massive S. Pearson combine (probably the most powerful and certainly the biggest company group in this country run by Lord Poole and owned by Lord Cowdray), one time board member of Shell, owed great debts by the members of the University Grants Committee to whom he gave a new powerful role in policy making in his Report and who are now the main guides of government policy.
But Robbins is backed by more than himself—^he was the previous chairman's man and thus inherited Lord Bridge's incredible backing, which comes from his Treasury stint and from his connection or work with Carr-Saunders in establishing universities in the colonies. For today's battles Bridges left Robbins one invaluable contact—Harold Wilson who worked for Bridges at Oxford just after the war.
This contact is kept fresh by way of Lord Goodman, the PMs solicitor and legal adviser to Robbins (in the minutes of the Standing Committee of Feb. 25th. "Lord Robbins said that he would speak to Lord Goodman regarding the possibility of introducing legislation in parliament at an early date to amend the laws relating to trespass on premises such as those of the School" i.e. anti-demonstration repression). Still think its not a battle, that its just left propaganda?
Thus this legalistic hermit, he hates to be interviewed, described as the first model in this country of the American "fixer" lawyer—^the preparer of new legalities to coincide with government policy—^by the "Times", keeps the vital channel open. Goodman has however other qualities. For instance he brought the LCC and Harry Hyams together enabling Hyams to overcome certain planning restrictions and build that great philanthropic work—Centre Point, vacant now for over three years.
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Ctlertion

Hon VP Column
SATCHWELL RESIGNS
There is absolutely no truth in the rumour that Robert Satchwell has resigned as General Secretary merely because the Freshers' Conferences are over, there are plently of other opportunities for him to get drunk and be generally obnoxious. Although in his letter to Chris Pryce he gave the cause for this action as a desire to do some academic work there were hints of much more interesting reasons.
Perhaps we should try to work out what these might be . . . Everyone knows that there has never been much love lost between the Gen. Sec. and the President; but who could possibly want to get on with Pryce? No one has ever tried to pretend that Satchwell has ever had any principles and he certainly had none which could have led to his resignation. Perhaps he is frightened that a new lot of Soc.Soc. bureaucrats would be worse than the last or on the other hand perhaps he just can't manage without the revolutionaries who used to control Pryce. Then again perhaps he thinks that it's about time Pryce did some of his own groundwork ... If this is the case one can only hope that Pryce can do this at the same lime as making love to the image he has of himself.
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
The rewards for Presidents who serve the LSE loyally are not to be sniffed at. Moreover their fate indicates the growing liberalism of this famous radical forcing house. As Robin Blackburn vacates his lectureship in Sociology due to his being victimised for actually supporting the students, Colin Crouch fills it, and for all the things that could be said about Colin he could never be accused of supporting the students.
This attitude is in the tradition of student politics and is ably exemplified by our last two Presidents. The LSE is also a good place to become President (if you help the administration quiet the plebs) for the men that run this academic community are not without influence and some, we are led to believe actually own more of Britain than the Queen, God help us!
Thus Colin may yet find his seat in Parliament, especially if Wilson stays in — but as Chambers, Robbins, Caine and Co. also back the Tories he can't lose. The only door really closed now is the NUS bureaucracy which is now controlled by a new faction.
If Pryce keeps up his work he can soon join Arnie Wein-stock and start creating redundancies for the good of the nation. If not there's always ICI, Shell, or perhaps a job on the Observer, newsheet of the LSE for placating the middle class.
For a faithful helper of the ruling class there are any number of opportunities and this is by no means confined to holders of the presidency and so we look forward to keen competition in the coming elections.
We expect that there is no truth in the rumour that the demise of Blackburn was precipitated by the fact that the phrase was constantly on the lips of our governors as they reviewed their investments and contracts in South Africa and Rhodesia.
Cljirb Car panb



Your Local Bookshop
SIMMOHDS
UNIVERSITY
BOOKSELLERS
IB FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.4
Ever since the Webbs opened the L.S.E. as an intellectual first aid station for the socially wounded the college has been a centre of controversy and trouble. Of course in those days the controversies were always well bred and clean cut consisting mainly of aspic charges hurled against a phillistine society by academics trembling behind the safety of their strawberry tea barricades in their fourth floor club. Not surprisingly the college fossillised, ex-colonial administrators came and went, and a drowsy numbness pained the senses. The college wrapped itself up in its own reputation and went to sleep.
When I arrived here three years ago, things had already started to happen. The stuffed apes had been dusted out of the main hall and respectful whispers were starting to turn into wholly justifiable demands for a better college and a better society. The college lumbered out of its long sleep and woke like a paleolithic beast in a bad temper, only to find its defences outdated, and its reactions so slow, that it was easier to use prejudice as a weapon, than intelligence.
It is only by seeing the L.S.E. in such a light that one can begin to understand the whole conflict of the last three years. How else could the college get so angry about a boy writing a letter to the Times, so panic struck when his union actually defended him from suspension, and to be so absurd as to erect those infamous gates in reply to a peaceful sit-in over the hideously unjust war in Vietnam? Simply the college had lost its knack of coping with radicalism, the very thing on which it was founded, so it blew it's cool. There are I think many lessons to be learnt here, primarily the one of how an institution begins as a radical base and ends in lethargic slumber, only to be woken again by the next cycle of radicals, and when this happens one will always have to put up with shrieks from the Right wing press to outlaw political activity by students, or absurd statements from Education Ministers acting like academic skinheads looking for a bit of political agro. Our masters must leam that respect, unlike their positions in public life, must be earned, not inherited.
Over the last three years a word-smog has descended over Houghton Street and it is just beginning to lift, and one can see that a dreadful wrong has been perpetrated against the traditions of this college. The sacking of Mr. Blackburn on those charges is absurd. Of course he is guilty of speaking at a public meeting and talking on T.V., but since when in this country have such acts, if not slanderous, been criminal? No wonder the Ashes of Laski have been locked in Connought House. It was the only way of stifling the screams of rage emitting therefrom. When the dreadful hysteria which racks tihis college eventually, if ever, subsides, it will be seen as a decision which is totally indefensible. It leaves open so many questions, one which springs to mlind who is safe to speak at a public meeting or on T.V.? Even the question am I allowed to write this column? As I said there are too many questions unanswered.
As to freshers, now that you have won your place in the State's educational lottery, welcome. If you do involve yourself in political activity, and you should, know that the school porters are nobody's ' B' Specials. We have a great respect for you and the last three years have added to it. We who spend a minimum of forty hours a week within the college see a great deal more than those who spend forty hours a month in it.
Anarchy Monthly and Freedom Weekly from
Freedom Bookshop, 84a Whitechapel High St., E.C.4.
Fire?
The concern of the authorities for our safety is indeed touching. We no longer are satisfied with one fire door per corridor — in the new building we have ;three. Two are of steel and lock down in such a way they cannot be breached, except with an oxy-acetylene blow torch and for add^ protection their is a wooden door, possibly of oak. This great concern grew for some reason as student militancy did—but sorry the ]irs\ doors were gates to protect paintings—or was it toilets? Ah yes they were anti-student gates and we took them down and they were replaced by fire doors of oak.
So we are back to fire doors again. And there are three at the end of each of the new building's corridors —^to stop fires.
Published by London School of Economics Students Union. Printed by F. Bailey & Son Ltd., Dursley, Glos.