2.2 Violence/knowledge: knowledge, universities and capitalism

Monash students in 1968 were no strangers to the excitement of a good row, with their reputation as a “hotbed of radicalism” and sometimes violent protest.[1] University discipline was the first issue against which Monash students were mobilised – an issue that Mick Armstrong, in his history of student movements in Australia, considers to be a distraction from “real” concerns.[2] But we should note that the escalation of the library fines protest at Sydney was related to university discipline and discipline was a focus of protest at other universities as well.[3] Students, if not Mick Armstrong, obviously saw university discipline as a “real” issue. This is because the university was perceived by students to be a microcosm of society. If the university was hierarchical and unjust, asserting power over the powerless, this was a reflection of a society that also functioned this way, in the student view.[4] Protest against university discipline was largely because discipline was understood to be representative of all that students perceived to be wrong in the relationship between the university and its students – a university that was authoritative and undemocratic, “treating students like morons”.[5] Graduates of the university were inserted into the unfair hierarchy with an unfair advantage, according to Monash students who burned their degrees:

I am burning this degree as an expression of opposition to the belief that this piece of paper should make me a privileged person … that because I have met certain formal requirements set by the establishment, I should earn $60 per week while the broad masses should subsist on a basic wage or a pension. I dispute the belief that this degree makes me more human, more intelligent, more moral.[6]

Knowledge, understood as a type of cultural capital, was seen to grant power and privilege to its possessor.[7] This event didn’t get a lot of media attention, according to Perry, might be because the administration thought burning degrees was an improvement on the year before, where students had awarded a Monash degree to a pig.[8]

As well as reflecting, structurally, what students perceived to be wrong with society, students saw the university as explicitly complicit in supporting the structures, systems and policies of a flawed and immoral society. Some university-based knowledge contributed to the manufacture of weapons used in the Vietnam War, for instance.[9] Some senior academic staff even had financial interests in companies that supplied weapons.[10] University councils and senates contained members who were also in government, industry or in some other way representatives of “the establishment.[11] Broadly, the universities trained people to conform to society’s dominant values and used knowledge to distract them from the “real” issues confronting the world:

Any university library contains learned articles on, for example, Napoleon’s mistress or the frequency with which Shakespeare used certain words. Although these are not directly useful even to capitalism, anyone who has spent several years cultivating this sort of rubbish can be relied on as a loyal ‘bourgeois academic authority’ unlikely to encourage rebellious thoughts in his students.[12]

The act of knowing could also be construed as an act of power or violence in an epistemology where knowledge is imposed on reality, rather than reflecting it, and the idea that knowledge was always political in one way or another was gaining strength.[13]

At Monash, students were convinced that they needed to claim some of the same power that the university possessed and redirect it for the purpose of social change. Universities, according to this thinking, would then support revolution rather than capitalism. In this spirit, a few years later at La Trobe University, students took over the Careers and Appointments office that had been used for military recruitment and redirected its resources to “the revolution”.[14] At Monash in 1968, the debate within the student movement, according to Perry (whose first-hand account – like many others – tends to focus on which segments of the student Left believed what) was about violence. Student violence, like student power, was seen as a claim on the types of violence asserted by society, a violence that was not only understood as physical force:

Violence is being used … against the vast majority of the people, to maintain the privileges of the minority. That people are hurt is not  a good thing. A society like ours is continually hurting people in their minds and in their bodies … many people will have to use violence to defeat the violent men who are at present violently preserving their power.[15]

The type of “abiding oppression in everyday life”[16] that Monash students felt was related to the possession of knowledge. Possession of knowledge was linked in students’ minds to the application of that knowledge through a range of institutions, including the university, to control (or repress) individuals.[17] The university, through exams (which will be discussed later) and by declaring what knowledge is and who can have it, asserted its power over students, and was thus a repressive organization. This is what led Foucault to say that his analyses of power finally had a political movement to which they tangibly applied when student uprisings began in the late 1960s.[18]