Friendly enemies: Student Tolerance in a Liberal University

Abstract

From the early 1920s to the late 1960s a scattering of student groups at the University of Sydney advocated various conflicting, controversial, political and social ideas. These students, often relatively few in number, voiced their commitment through specialinterest clubs and societies, such as the Labour Club, the Frcethought Society and the Student Christian Movement; through student self-governing organisations, such as the Students' Representative Council; at general meetings of the student body, called to consider major policy matters; at Union Night debates, held weekly in the Sydney University Union Hall; and in student publications, such as the student journal, Honi Soit, or the university magazine, Hermes. Most of these institutions appeared as student enrolments and staff expanded after the university revised its matriculation requirements and expanded its curriculum between 1907 and 1912, and created six new faculties in 1920. A new pattern of student life appeared, the essential features of which lasted some fifty years. Its passing in the late 1960s and early 1970s was heralded by a student revolt which marked the disintegration of the western cultural tradition of liberal humanism, a changed pattern of social classes, and the advent a new multicultural, pluralist, society. A new university and a new student world appeared. From the 1920s to the 1960s student activists pursued their philosophies within a broad cultural consensus. Beneath this umbrella, their commitments traversed a range of beliefs: reformist laborism, socialist Iaborism, Christian socialism, Stalinist Marxian communism, Trotskyist Marxism, and Freethought Andersonianism'. A few eccentrics claimed to be anarchists. In the 1940s Catholics became vocal, presenting the distributist ideas of the Campion Society and the social justice doctrines and anticommunist values of the Catholic Social Studies Movement, founded by B. A. Santamaria in 1943. These activists resided particularly in the faculties whose constituent disciplines impinged on social questions and where academic demands offered enough leisure for student activity. These included Arts, Law (at times), and in the 1950s (when its daytime courses expanded) Economics. In general, student controversies proceeded in a formal, regulated, manner. 'Correct procedure' usually prevailed. Mostly a tolerant spirit, a reasoned civility, permeated student politics at the University of Sydney and certainly in the Faculty of Arts. Tolerance seemed to be a natural concomitant of the liberal climate pervading university life.