2.4 Student participation in knowledge: the Victoria Lee Case

Victoria Lee was given some bad advice when she was at school, when her careers advisor told her that studying maths for her high school matriculation was unnecessary, since she wanted to study anthropology and archaeology. Upon application to the University of Sydney in 1969, however, she found that, although she had the required grades, she did not have the required maths. Victoria Lee then enrolled at Macquarie University and took the anthropology and archaeology she needed at Sydney, having them credited to her Macquarie degree. She did this on the understanding that Sydney accepted students who had successfully completed a year at another NSW university. After her year in exile for the crime of failing to take maths at school, she reapplied to the University of Sydney in 1970, only to find that the Professorial Board had changed the rules and students from other universities were no longer eligible for admission. Victoria Lee’s polite letter to the University’s Senate explaining all this was reprinted in Honi Soit – for students were deeply concerned about the fact that the Professorial Board, as they explained to the distressed Victoria Lee, had decided to change admission requirements but had forgotten to publish the change in the University Calendar or anywhere else. Victoria Lee felt that her only chance was to appeal to the University Senate to ask them to make an exception in her case.[1]

What Victoria Lee probably didn’t expect was that a thousand or more students would support her. The worrying precedent of the Professorial Board implementing unpublished decisions made students and the Student Representative Council realise that they really needed representation on the Professorial Board as a means of ensuring students interests were heard and that decisions could be communicated back to them, in the event the Professorial Board forgot. Student Representative Council president, Percy Allen, wrote a very polite (but unsuccessful) letter in which “the Student Representative Council humbly submits that the Professorial Board recommend and the Senate accept two or more students on the Professorial Board”.[2]

In analysing the case for Honi Soit, student John Maddocks was generally supportive of the Professorial Board’s policy, which was obviously designed to “keep out inferior students”:

…to ensure that there is not a flood of applicants to enter Sydney University from people who have completed first year at NSW and Macquarie. The resolution was not passed to exclude a student like Victoria Lee who had easily made the quota for this university.[3]

Students were as capable of elitism as professors – but were also supportive of a student who they perceived to be one of their own. The same issue of Honi Soit reports that 1000 students had protested within the previous week over the Victoria Lee case. These 1000 students had voted to support student representation on the Professorial Board, publication of the agendas of the Professorial Board and Senate well beforehand, opening the meetings of the Professorial Board with decisions displayed around campus, and that no major decisions be made during students’ exams or vacations.[4] These resolutions all say the same thing: students wanted increased participation in university decision making and demanded communication from the decision makers. Feeling silenced, overlooked and frustrated, Maddocks, concluded, “it appears that direct action by the student body is the only way to confront the administration”.[5] One week later, on 25 March 1970, the front page of Honi Soit reported a 3-day student occupation of the administrative offices in Sydney’s Main Quadrangle in support of Victoria Lee and increased participation in University government.

The Fisher sit-ins had been quite effective, eventually, so students had reason to believe protest could well produce the desired result. Decisions made by the university after the Humphreys affair were just about to be implemented in 1970, so that soon a number of students were soon to be admitted to the disciplinary body known as the Proctorial Board. The Proctorial Board was, at this point, quite busy. “Names taken” during the occupation of the administrative offices were being investigated and students appearing before them. One of these students was Gregory O’Connell whose brother, Chris O’Connell, was not only a very vocal leftist editor of Honi Soit that year, but also happened to be the nemesis of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bill O’Neil.

Chris O’Connell and O’Neil had been sparring for some time, both preparing articles intended to provoke or correct one another using their respective publications, Honi Soit and the University of Sydney News. In these articles both disputed facts about protests – for instance, they debated the significance of an incident where a protesting student threw tomatoes, one and a half of which struck the visiting NSW Governor.[6] As Deputy Vice-Chancellor, O’Neil was involved in everything in the early 1970s – University records, publications and personal papers all show that where there was something controversial, it was consistently O’Neil’s job to try to solve it. The O’Connell brothers might well have been concerned about the ability of O’Neil’s Proctorial Board to dispense real justice in Gregory’s case – extending, possibly, to the other students whose names had been taken. Gregory O’Connell and the other charged students wrote a letter of concern about this to the Vice-Chancellor, Bruce Williams, pointing out that, in a democracy it is normally considered to be just that people be tried by a random selection of their peers:

We neither accept these regulations, which have been set up to protect those who hold power in this University from challenge, nor do we accept that we have committed any offences …we will be tried by persons whose impartiality is questionable to say the least. Nor in our case is an open hearing or presumption of innocence to be allowed.[7]

Students were clearly rejecting the paternal mentality that had informed university disciplinary procedures[8] seeking instead systems of justice understood to underpin democratic societies. That is, one of the features of student movements is the removal of the authority of a university hierarchy and the autonomy of its governing bodies, in favour of a system that resembles and aligns to a democratic society seen (or hoped for) beyond the university. Articles in Honi Soit, many of them by Chris O’Connell, discuss the lack of legitimacy of the findings of an unjust system – also implying a lack of legitimacy for the structure of the university and of university-based knowledge.[9]

Gregory O’Connell was suspended from the university for his part in the Victoria Lee occupation of the administrative offices as “the Board did not think that Mr O’Connell’s belief in what he was doing exempted him from a penalty for breaching the by-laws” – though his penalty was suspended.[10] This meant that both Gregory and his brother Chris were bona fide students in November when (as the Student Representative Council must have anticipated) the Professorial Board rejected their nominations as student Proctors.[11] The new President of the Student Representative Council, Barry Robinson, wrote to the Chair of the Professorial Board to query this since “I have checked and discovered that they are both enrolled…and therefore eligible”.[12] In an act that can only be designed to irritate students– and which indicates the general animosity between the Professorial Board and students – the Registrar replied that the Board did not say why and “I am therefore unable to advise you”.[13] Eventually, however, the Professorial Board was forced to admit that they rejected Chris O’Connell due to his articles in Honi Soit and Gregory because a suspended penalty was current.[14] The students were very persistent and Chris O’Connell was elected as student proctor, despite O’Neil’s best efforts to point out inaccuracies in his Honi articles as evidence of ineligibility for the role.[15]

This successful challenge to the absolute authority of the Professorial Board – especially as it was articulated through discipline (which had such symbolic value as the authority of university hierarchy) was dealt a further blow that year through the actions of Chris O’Connell. By his own account in the student paper, O’Connell called a Proctorial Board meeting on his own authority, against the wishes of the chair (who was then Professor Taylor, Chair of the Professorial Board). All the student proctors formed quorum, though they were “forced”, according to O’Connell, to eject the (only) Professor who was acting as the Board’s secretary for “offensive interruption of student proctors”.[16] The objective of this coup seems relatively innocuous, for all its drama – the outcome of the coup was a joint Student Representative Council and Staff Association Standing Committee on Discipline.[17]

The enormous struggle it obviously took to wrest any power out of the hands of those with professorial rank demonstrates the weight of the traditional authority they possessed – as well as the determination of the student movement to redistribute it. The character of the new committee the student proctors created also demonstrates the importance of the 1960s and 1970s alliance between students and non-professorial staff in dislodging the ownership of university knowledge and power from its traditional location at the upper level of the university’s hierarchy.