2.5 Regulation 3.3.18: accessing knowledge

A student and non-professorial staff alliance was similarly formed at the University of Melbourne over the issue that became known as 3.3.18. 3.3.18 was the numeric reference to the admissions regulation at the centre of the dispute that dominated Melbourne University in 1971.[1] The University of Melbourne was not, typically, a centre for student radicalism, certainly not in the way that Monash was and La Trobe was to become.[2] Perhaps this explains why 3.3.18 started as a Monash issue.

Albert Langer was an activist at Monash who was excluded after being “found guilty of misconduct in obstructing a meeting of the Council of the University and in failing to leave an office when directed to do so” – a finding that was confirmed by a State Supreme Court injunction that restrained Langer and his wife from entering the Administrative building of Monash University.[3] Langer then applied for admission to the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne but was rejected by both due to his earlier exclusion.[4]

At Melbourne the rejection of Langer’s application was achieved under regulation 3.3.18 – the first application of this regulation in a decade.[5] Students occupied a Professorial Board meeting at Melbourne University in 1970 to protest the exclusion of Langer on non-academic grounds[6] and the Professorial Board then formed an “unofficial subcommittee” to review 3.3.18.[7] An unofficial draft of a revised regulation was leaked from this unofficial subcommittee and, since it still contained ways that potential students could be excluded on political grounds, a student general meeting was organised.[8]

On 6^th May 1971, 1000 students agreed to march from their mass meeting to the administration building to “protest against politically repressive admissions clauses adopted by the University’s Council”.[9] They locked in the Vice-Chancellor and around 200 staff for five and a half hours by bricking up the entrance to the building and creating other types of barricades.[10] Staff attempting to leave were repelled with streams of water from fire hoses and one angry staff member threw a brick at students.[11] Victorian Premier Henry Bolte was so appalled at the event that he planned on attempting to ensure protesting students lost their scholarships to attend university, saying “I am getting sick and tired of the taxpayer carrying a lot of no-hopers”.[12]

For students, 3.3.18 was a symptom of a university that was protecting old knowledge and failing to move forward to produce new:

Rather than face the challenges of new ideas and dissent, Melbourne University has decided that one of the ways to keep the dull old place ticking over is to empower itself to exclude “outside agitators”.[13]

Securing student participation was important if it was to be part of the creative and active process of learning:

We are asking that the university experience cease being one of passive knowledge gaining and that staff and students can be creative and responsible for decided what should be learnt and how it will be learnt, free from the present stultifying nature of this university.[14]

Students were not alone in feeling that the university’s hierarchical structure and mode of decision-making preventing them from being active and creative within it. 3.3.18 prompted university staff as well to take an increasingly active role in university government. Melbourne University News was established soon after the 3.3.18 lock-in, by staff who were frustrated that only the Vice-Chancellor had the ability to broadcast news. The trigger for the News was when the Vice-Chancellor used his monopoly on information to ask staff to assist in preventing student protests – non-professorial staff who were ordinarily excluded from university governance were irritated to nevertheless be asked to participate in its reinforcement.[15] The News was a means of claiming knowledge and the associated right to communicate it.

Melbourne University students started to find similarly constructive mechanisms for directing their new-found interest in university administration. A Planning Group was established to investigate university governance, on which representatives of all types of staff and student served, with students elected by the student body. Simon Marginson, then Arts II (Hons), in his policy speech seeking election for a position in the Planning Group, said that the planning should contribute to a restructuring of the university that follows a change in priorities – priorities that should reflect a re-orientation of courses and enhance the capacity for the individual to have increased control over their learning and their learning environment.[16] In 1972, Melbourne students established their own Working Party, to which anyone was welcome, which looked at issues of university governance and administration and made recommendations to the University.[17] Mick Armstrong is of the opinion that these activities were designed to distract students from dissent and in fact achieved nothing – the only opinion possible if dissent is also the measure of success.[18] Transfer of the control, responsibility and possession of knowledge can be effected through a range of mechanisms. Indeed, for transfer of the ownership of knowledge to take place, the cooperation of staff and, eventually, institutions was needed. But in the early 1970s, professors were in a difficult position. Their explicit responsibility to protect knowledge contradicted student demand to possess it.