KNOWLEDGE AND POWER:

THIRTY YEARS OF IDEOLOGY IN CANADIAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

By
Jacques Poitras, B.J.





A Masters Research Project submitted to
The School of Journalism
In partial fulfillment of
The requirements for the degree of
Master of Journalism







Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario
August 5, 1991





















CONTENTS


Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION: Dj vu

ONE: CUP Today

TWO: Before radicalism

THREE: A Hint of Revolution

FOUR: Understandable and Necessary

FIVE: CUP weathers the Me Decade

SIX: Reaganomics 101

SEVEN: Agents of Social Change or Agents of Spare Change?

CONCLUSION: The More Things Change

APPENDIX: A CUP Chronology

SOURCES

















ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


This project could not have been started, never mind completed, without the help
of John Montesano. John gave me full access to the CUP files without ever attaching any
strings or trying to affect the end product. He let me borrow key documents on the 50
th

national conference, which he could conceivably have needed as he settled into his job,
for six weeks. When the finish line was in sight, John tracked down four or five phone
numbers that allowed me to fill in the last gaps on my interview list. Thats why Im
giving John the discretion to send a copy of this MRP to any student newspaper, whether
or not its a member of CUP, that he feels might learn something by reading it.
My advisor, Peter Johansen, put me through a rigorous approval process that
ensured I was on the right track once I got started. After being appointed acting head of
the School of Journalism, he still managed to provide quick feedback. On at least two
occasions, he apologized for the slow turnover that wasnt slow at all.
Treena Khan let me borrow The Charlatans extensive CUP files from the 1970s
and 1980s for most of May, June, and July.
Katie Swoger encouraged me by looking me in the eye whenever I was bothering
her with a new irrelevancy and asking, Dont you have an MRP you should be working
on? My roommates Monique Beaudin and Samantha Cohen showed considerable
patience when I would talk about the project, and now that its finished, theyve even
expressed interest in reading it.
Rita Nigam, my roommate for the summer in Kingston, let me use her computer
to write the damned thing.
Finally, I owe a debt to a lot of CUPpies. The departed ones, who fought the
ideological battles documented in this project gave me plenty to write about. More
importantly, todays CUPpies, by showing an interest in the project and asking me for
copies, convinced me that it might contribute something and avoid more of the same in
the future.












The pen is mightier than the sword.
- Edward George Bulver-Lytton,
Richeliu


You should be making the news, not just reporting it.
- Doug Saunders, 1990-91 news editor,
The Lexicon, York University
INTRODUCTION:
DJ VU

The letter that came over the fax machine last Nov. 28, 1990 opened the same
way that many other letters with the same purpose had begun: Dear Canadian University
Press, it read. It is with profound regret that The Sheaf declares its intention to pull out
of CUP.
It continued: As one of the founders of the oldest student newspaper organization
in the world, its not a decision we take lightly. However, both financial considerations
and significant philosophical differences necessitate our departure at this time.
The letter, signed by the Sheaf collective, took three pages to elaborate. The
cost was too high, it said, and what the paper was getting in return did not justify the fees.
The stories on CUPs national wire service had too narrow a focus, dealing with left-wing
causes. The stories failed to look at national trends. The Sheafs own resources meant it
didnt need CUPs legal and journalistic advice. CUP conferences, a significant part of
each papers membership expenses, were overly bureaucratic, too political and
sometimes petty. And finally, CUPs Statement of Principles was open to too much
amuse; the letter cited a case at The Sheaf during which some staffers tried to use the
SOP, as its called in CUP jargon, to censor a letter to the editor.
In closing, the writers stressed that The Sheaf was not a right-wing newspaper and
the decision was not rammed through the staff. The decision and the text of the letter
itself were voted on at well-advertised staff meetings, it said, and Preston Mannings
picture is still firmly attached to our dartboard.
With that, The Sheaf, the student newspaper of the University of Saskatchewan
which helped found CUP in 1938, had officially left the organization. It had joined some
of the best-known and best-respected student newspapers in the country: The Queens
Journal, the University of New Brunswick Brunswickan, the McMaster Silhouette, the
University of Calgary Gauntlet, the University of Alberta Gateway, the Guelph Ontarion
and the University of Western Ontario Gazette.
The word crisis always treatens to be overused in any discussion of Canadian
University Press, which operates a wire service, support network and national advertising
agency for about 45 university and college newspapers across Canada. After all, since
leaping into its modern era in 1958, CUP has spent most of its time trying to deal with
financial problems, member withdrawals, and bitter ideological feuds. But crisis is the
best word to describe the state CUP finds itself in once again and it enters its 54
th
year.
The Sheaf was only the first paper to withdraw in 1990-91; in February, The
McGill Daily voted to leave. The Dailys vote was even more of a psychological blow
than the Sheafs. The Daily, another founder and the paper that carried CUP into the
radical era in the 1960s, had been one of CUPs most ardent supporters. Frequently
dogmatic, it nonetheless almost always be counted on to act pragmatically, in the best
interests of CUP, during a crisis. The Daily was always ideologically at home in CUP,
and its departure was based more on issues of inefficiency than on the views the co-op
espouses. It was the first withdrawing paper to complain explicitly about structure rather
than ideology, a move that confused many members.
After the school year ended, word came from Simon Fraser University that The
Peak, another big CUP booster, was also on its way out. The Peak was angered by what it
saw as a rightward drift, and its departure, so soon after The Sheafs, illustrated just how
hard the search for middle ground could be.
These withdrawals damage more than morale. Whether there are 60 member
papers scattered across the country or six, it still costs about the same to rent an office
and pay the salaries of the president and the national and regional bureau staff who
provide the services that are the backbone of the organization. The corollary is all too
familiar to CUP fans: if papers withdraw, the fees for the remaining members must
increase or the services must be cut.
The current crisis couldnt be seen coming when CUP papers gathered on Boxing
Day, 1990, in Abbotsford, B.C., for their 53
rd
annual conference. After eight days of
debating and deciding, the delegates left uneasy over the divisions in the organization,
but relieved that it had escaped the meeting relatively unscathed.
The Sheaf had sent a pair of delegates to what would be its last conference, and
one fo them, Alex Taylor, was even happy with what he was seeing. There seemed to be
some support for change. But Taylor held firm to the papers objection to CUP politics.
Theres a difference between being an agent of social change and approaching a point
when youre alienating certain people, he said.
The phrase Taylor used agent of social change goes to the very core of the
political dynamic of CUP. It is the most contentious phrase in CUPs Statement of
Principles, a constitution-like document that is supposed to codify the ideals in which all
CUP members believe. The SOP is a lengthy document but the key points are in the
opening clauses, which states that the members affirm holding the following principles in
common:
That the major role of the student press is to act as an agent of social change,
assisting students in understanding and acting against oppression and injustice, and
emphasizing the rights and responsibilities of the student;
That the student press must, to fulfil this role, perform both an educative and
active function, and critically support the aims of groups serving as agents of social
change.
The statement, and an appended code of ethics and statement of purpose for the
national news exchange, goes on to stress the importance of fairness and accuracy (but
not objectivity, a deliberate omission). It also endorses the autonomy of student papers
from school administrations and student governments. Despite these sentiments, there
remains enough in those first two clauses to enrage any advocate of an unbiased press.
The SOP has gained almost mythic status in CUP. Most newspaper staffers who
get involved in the organization hear the stories, passed down from previous years, of big
and costly battles over the SOP. They learn that any attempt to change it opens a
Pandoras Box that might not be closed. On the other hand, some members cite the SOP
as if it were their Bible. During philosophical discussions, snippets of it can be heard in
their words. They clutch it close to their hearts and oppose any thought of changing it.
So it comes as no surprise that shockwaves rippled through the Abbotsford
conference when a rumor began circulating that a committee was looking at completely
doing away with the SOP. This would not be a change but a total elimination. Even some
left-leaning CUP people had come to support such a move, believing that their papers
could act effectively as agents of social change without it being written down.
In response to the rumor, several papers held heated discussions about how they
would vote if a motion to eliminate the SOP came to the floor. At least two British
Columbia papers decided almost instantly to pull out if the SOP died. One delegate
reportedly burst into tears at the prospect.
By the next day, the truth was out: the long-term planning commission, sensing
that CUP was in need of reform, had asked for ideas on how to make it a better
organization. Nothing is sacred, they had declared, and somehow, that invitation
evolved into a rumor that the SOP was on the table.
The sudden, visceral reaction to the rumor was telling, especially considering the
conference was CUPs final chance to woo back The Sheaf by moderating its politics.
The British Columbia papers knew this, yet they had no intention of budging. In essence,
they were saying an abstract statement was more important than the membership of a
founding paper of the organization.
There had been a significant compromise by the B.C. delgates, however, on a
structural dispute that became the focal point for the conferences divisiveness. The
cleavages left Deanne Fisher, CUPs president in 1989-90, comparing the state of CUP to
the state of the country. The entire conference has been analogous to Meech Lake,
Senate reform (and) western alienation, she said after one particularly grueling plenary
session.
The B.C. papers, led by The Peak and The Ubyssey from the University of British
Columbia, wanted CUP to retain its identity as a grassroots, bottom-up, collectively-run
organization, in which all decisions are made by all members. Others felt it was time
CUP create a mechanism to deal with routine administrative problems so that the national
conference could shed that burden and spend more time on more philosophical and long-
term concerns. The entire membership does not need to decide whether to buy a fax
machine for the national office, Fisher said and yet some papers had been angry that
decision had been made the previous summer without extensive consultation.
The proposal on the floor was for a committee, with equal representation from
CUPs four administrative regions, that would meet several times during the eyar to make
spending decisions and other decisions that could not wait until the next years
conference.
These conflicting ideals spring from the ways the different papers run themselves.
The Ubyssey, for example, claims to avoid hierarchical structures by electing a five-
person editorial collective. All decisions are reached by collective consensus or, in many
cases, by the consensus of the entire staff. The University of Toronto Varsity, on the
other hand, uses the traditional division of labor of the mainstream press, electing various
individuals to specific posts. For The Varisty, the Ubyssey model is inefficient and
unrealistic. For The Ubyssey, the Varisty approach endorses the type of power structure
CUP is trying to eliminate.
In the end, the B.C. papers gave in, but only after the western region of CUP got
two seats on the committee (compared to one for each of Ontario, Quebec and the
Atlantic). It was not a hard concession for the rest of the country, because in many ways
the west operates de facto as two regions already. British Columbia has its own news
bureau, for example.
There was one other key division in Abbotsford, and it was tied to the SOP rumor
and the Sheaf pull-out. Although it did not surface in debate, it was perhaps the most
crucial sub-theme of the conference, because it reflected more than anything else the
central dilemma of CUP. Earlier in the year, the House Organ, CUPs newsletter, had
taken a cursory glance at the debate in an issue titled Reform and Recruitment. John
Montesano, who was elected CUP president for 1991-92 in Abbotsford, thinks the
organization has to lure big papers back in so that it will have the resources it needs to
improve services, and thus be more palatable to even more potential papers.
Montesanos task is formidable, because what he wants to do, in essence, is
reverse a trend that has existed in CUP since 1977, when The Queens Journal, The
Brunswickan and the Western Gazette left. A cycle developed, slowly but surely:
departures necessitated service cuts, or higher fees, or both which led to more
departures. Since 1977, CUP has not been able to break out of that spiral for more than
two or three years at a time, and it has never reversed it. Yet Montesano is optimistic.
Hes willing to consider changes if that will bring in members.
Paul Reniers, a delegate at Abbotsford from The Peak, said at the time he was
against such changes. Were running a student journalism organization, not a popularity
contest. He knows that luring back big papers means watering down CUPs ideology.
He thinks CUP should instead consolidate what it has and make it better for current
members, rather than change it for papers that might join. If the consolidation gives all
papers a real voice, he said, CUP will eventually appeal to non-members. Among the
changes Reniers feared were amendments to the SOP, which did not surface in
Abbotsford.
The issues that face CUP today can be traced back to 1965. It was then that the
Charter of the Student Press in Canada later renamed the SOP was amended to say
the student tpress should act as agents of social change. (At the time, it was one of the
major roles. It only because the major role two years later.)
A quarter century later, CUP still grapples with the contradictions of practicing
what it preaches. It is constantly attempting to justify its political stances, and member
papers frequently contribute to the very ivory tower isolationism they purport to
combat by adopting the perspectives that alienate a majority of readers. As well, as
evidenced by this years structural squabble, CUP finds it difficult to run its affairs
pragmatically when that pragmatism conflicts with the ideals it espouses.
CUPs problem is its inability to reshaped the ideology it adopted in the late
1960s, when it played a key role in campus upheavals. Through the years, the tiniest shift
away from radicalism was condemned as a sell-out. Individual papers could adjust, but
that only led to a chasm between the members and their on-paper beliefs. The problem is
even more acute now as CUP strains to remain viable to those members, who
increasingly question its value, while non-members say how nice it would be to join if
it wasnt for the radical stigma and the high fees that intransigence have created.
The following chapters look at the last thirty years of CUP history. Although
founded in 1937-38, CUP remained fairly static under the 1960s, when it was swept
along in the radicalization of the student population. The focus, then, is on the evolution
that began in the early 1960s. Because that evolution is tied to the general campus
climate, a separate chapter looks at the student movement itself. The 1970s, a relatively
apolitical time for students, do not earn a similar separate chapter. Student political
history and CUPs history are folded into a single section. With renewed political
polarization on campuses in the 1980s, the new right is examined, followed by an account
of CUPs reaction to conservatism up until the present.

CHAPTER ONE: CUP TODAY

Canadian University Press is the epitome of a bare-bones organization. Despite
the impressive-sounding title, the national office (or CUPOtt, as it is affectionately
known) is a cramped fourth-floor suite in an office building just outside Ottawas Byward
Market. The president, elected at the December national conference, serves from May to
May, with the other two full-time national staffers starting their terms in August. Three
quarters of the CUP budget -- $190,000 in 1991-92 come from members fees. Most of
it goes towards paying the staff and covering the costs of their office rents, mailings, long
distance phone calls, computer links and the link.
One of those staffers is the national bureau chief, whose chief task is the
compiling, editing and distributing of a weekly news exchange. Of all of CUPs services,
the news exchange is, for member papers, the most tangible. It usually includes 15 to 20
stories each week, most filed by member papers. Stories from the larger papers usually
require minor editing, but those from small, less-experienced papers need major work.
The national bureau chief is also expected to write one story a week for the
exchange. Usually, its a report on a federal government action relating to post-secondary
education. For example, the bureau chief will cover the Throne Speech and the federal
budget for their impacts on education. The Canadian Federation of Students, with its head
office close by, is the main student voice in such stories. The news exchange is sent out
by modem to member papers every Friday morning. The few papers that are not on-line
receive a print version by special delivery mail.
The third staffer has a more fluid job description. In some years that have
followed significant withdrawals, there has been no third staffer. In 1990-91, the
individual was a conference organizer and fundraiser. It was a response to the previous
year, when funds were tight and the two lonely national office employees had to organize
the national conference on top of their other duties. In 1991-90, the job will revert to its
traditional role: vice president/features writer. In the first role, the vice president will do
much of the national conference organizing. In the second, eh will write a weekly in-
depth feature for the news exchange. The decision in Abbotsford to bring back the
features writer was significant, because features are the most difficult type of story for
small papers with limited skills.
The three staffers are paid an appallingly low rate of about $15,000 per year,
which is less than the editors of the larger student papers get.
The bureau chief and features writer are not the only contributors to the news
exchange. There are also five regional bureau chiefs. Chief is a misnomer since he or
she is the only staff in the bureau, which is located in the office of a large paper in the
region. Last year, the bureau chiefs were paid half-time and were expected to file one
story weekly. Their nominal 25 hours a week allowed them time for other jobs, but they
generally worked closer to 40 hours. In 1991-92, theyll earn three-quarters time, which
will allow them to financially justify the longer hours.
The bureau chiefs are elected at the regional conferences. The regional executive
are also elected at the time usually in March composed solely of volunteers. The co-
presidents do the small amounts of administration, which mostly involves organizing
three regional conferences annually. One of the co-presidents is also regional
representative on the newly-formed consulting committee. The other voluntary positions
are the womens rights co-ordinator, who monitors papers for sexism and deals with
womens issues; the human rights co-ordinator, who deals with race, gay and lesbian and
disabled issues; and the Campus Plus board representative.
Campus Plus is the last piece of the CUP organization. It is the national
advertising co-operative that CUP set up in 1980. Rather than sell their advertisements to
individual student newspapers, national advertisers deal with Campus Plus. The
advertiser selects the papers with which it wants to advertise and Campus Plus calculates
a rate. Campus Plus staff solicit most advertising, although the company is known in
advertising circles through industry publications and word of mouth. The big advertisers,
like breweries, movie theatre chains and the federal government, know it represents the
simplest route to the student market. There is no boycott list; that decision is left to
individual papers.
The company operates as a separate corporation from CUP, but it has the same
shareholders, the member papers, and CUP national conferences serve a dual purpose
as the legally-required annual general meeting for Campus Plus. Non-member papers,
including former members, are on the companys rate card, but they get no vote at the
conferences. Between conferences, the company is run by its own staff and by regular
meetings of its board, which includes the Campus Plus director, the CUP president and
the regional representatives. Campus Plus is a big revenue-winner for CUP, providing the
remaining quarter of its annual budget. It is a crucial rock of financial stability, especially
during crises.
CUPs biggest products for the members are the news exchange and the
conferences. Different papers use the exchange to different degrees. Generally,, CUP
copy is used most often as filler in larger papers with the ability to generate a lot of copy
on their own. (That doesnt mean, however, that a major story from CUP like cuts to
funding wont make the front page of these papers.) Among smaller papers, copy from
the exchange can make up a majority of stories. Even if these smaller papers may not be
as left-wing as the stories indicate, they are often desperate enough for copy that theyll
run many CUP stories. But most of these stories come from the bureaus and not from
fellow papers. Without CUP, most of the smaller papers would not be able to deliver
important national and provincial stories to their readers, and many would have almost no
news copy at all.
The annual national conferences, larger and longer versions of the regionals, are
the annual general meetings of the corporation, where the owners elect officers (the
three national staffers), draw up a budget, approve new members and make other
decisions. About three of the seven days are devoted to such decisions. The rest breaks
down into two types of sessions: skills development (writing, editing, photography, and
so on) and issues discussions (the new right on campus, the white male bias in sports
coverage, etc.) A frequent complaint is that its too much of one and not enough of the
other.
Although many do have their consciousnesses raised at the conferences, its
more common that editors complain they arent learning enough about how to put out a
paper. At the same time, other editors say they know the skills and want to talk ideas.
On average, papers send one to three delegates to national conferences; they can
afford to send more to regional meetings. The main difference between the nationals and
the regionals is the nationals are also the annual general meetings of the corporation,
where decisions are made.
The CUP structure today works reasonably well, and its rare that the structure
itself is blamed for CUPs woes. Still, it is vastly different from the CUP that began
operating in 1938, and the story of its evolution is the story of CUPs developing
ideological identity and its place in the political culture of Canadian universities and
colleges.

CHAPTER TWO: BEFORE RADICALISM

Few documents exist for the period of CUPs history from its inception on Jan. 1,
1938 to the establishment in 1959 of a permanent national office. There are enough
records from the 1960s to allow one to establish a reasonably conclusive chronology, and
it seems no one threw anything away from about 1974 on. But there is virtually nothing
for its first two decades. Thats not surprising considering the CUP national office
rotated among papers during that time and the large number of files would present
logistical problems. Nonetheless, a few sketchy histories have been put together.
According to Dan OConnor, a CUP vice-president in the late 1970s who did
research on the student press, papers throughout North America were mailing to each
other before the First World War. But the papers of that time were less news-oriented.
They had a literary bent, featuring short stories, poems, essays, travel pieces and
occasional news of great import. Many papers features exchange pages, where editors
would comment on other papers theyd received. Through these pages, editors could
converse for months at a time.
After the war, the literary focus faded and a greater emphasis on news emerged.
Although contact with the American papers faded, Canadian papers continued to mail to
each other. The exchange pages disappeared as campus news grew with the expansion of
Canadian universities in the 1920s.
In 1926, the National Federation of Canadian University Students was founded,
and there was finally some national student news to write about. Universities began to
co-operate in many areas, founding bodies like the Canadian Interuniversity Athletic
Union. Within two years, NFCUS was calling for a national newspaper organization, but
the attempt didnt get off the ground. In the early 1930s, The Queens Journal, The
Varsity, and The McGill Daily later known as CUPs golden triangle formed an
association, but no one else joined and it died. With the Depression casting a shadow
over society, NFCUS was inactive and there was little to write about. It was only in 1935,
with the rise of the student pacifist movement, that NFCUS was revitalized, sending
petitions, holding conferences and staging model League of Nations meetings.
By December, 1936, NFCUS was ready to again attempt to forge a national
student newspaper group. At their annual conference held between Christmas and New
Years, the federation laid the groundwork for the organization. One year later, Canadian
University Press was founded in Winnipeg when student newspapers joined student
government leaders at the NFCUS conference that straddled 1937 and 1938.
From the beginning CUP was closely tied to the national student body. In fact, up
until the early 1960s, NFCUS paid some of CUPs bills. CUPs treasurer had a small
office at The Queens Journal, from which stories would be telegraphed at NFCUSs
expense, but the governing of CUP was done by an executive paper that was elected
each year. That papers staff was responsible for running CUPs affairs organizing
conferences, ensuring papers mailed to each other, etc. and the editor of the paper
became the de facto CUP president.
The early years of CUP were dominated by conservative-thinking white men, who
were the vast majority of university students. The papers of the 40s show a mix of glee
club reports alongside news of the war, Valerie Mansour, a CUP fieldworker in the
1970s, wrote in one review.
The papers were sort of Eisenhower right-wing, recalls Don McGillivray, who
served as editor of The Sheaf in 1950, when it was CUPs executive paper. They didnt
question the foundations of society.
In those days, newspapers werent asserting their independence from student
governments, which not only owned and published the papers but appointed most editors
as well. This close relationship gave rise to a passive, clubby form of journalism. Social
events on campus were big news Glee club plans Christmas concert was a typical
page one story in The Queens Journal on Nov. 19, 1946 and banner headlines devoted
to the annual model parliaments convened by the youth clubs of the federal parties were
usually the big political stories of the year for many papers.
McGillivray thinks the conformism of the student press in the 1940s and 1950s
had a lot to do with the climate in the country. The Cold War made world affairs easy to
understand and people were prosperous. The country was growing and the economy was
growing, he says. There were problems in the world but they werent visible. CUP,
which had about 15 members when McGillivrays Sheaf was in charge, rarely featured
any kind of in-depth political analysis, although newspaper autonomy and censorship
occasionally arose as issues.
In 1951, NFCUS set up a national office and CUP was given some space, further
cementing the ties between the two. There was no mission at NFCUS, nor was there one
at CUP. It was a light-hearted time, Peter Gzowski, the editor of the Varsity in 1956,
told Valerie Mansour. It wasnt a place to carry out a cause because there werent any.
And so it went. Yet only two or three years later, the first signs of the coming
upheaval were becoming apparent. Again, it reflected a shift in society as a whole. Jake
Doherty, who edited the Xaverian Weekly at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish,
Nova Scotia in 1957-58, says North America was turning a corner. Certainly we were
aware the world was changing around us, he says. The emergence of the civil rights
movement in the United States and Diefenbakers defeat of the Liberal dynasty in Canada
signaled an end to post-war complacency. After almost 15 years of basking in the warm
afterglow of victory, it was time for society to move on.
Still, Doherty said, campus politics and student newspapers remained fairly
docile. The big problem was where you could find your booze on a dry campus, he
says. CUP was examining some funding issues, like the Duplessis governments refusal
to allow the federal government to fund universities in Quebec, but for the most part,
student journalists were just like the rest of the people on campus: ambitious to get ahead.
They were relatively conformist, straight-laced, he says. People by and large still
joined the large institutions when they graduated . . . the sense of individualism just
wasnt there. In keeping with that, their papers tended to emulate the big dailies. They
were by and large still our role models, he says. Newspapers as part of big business
were not seen as the enemy.
Doherty sees the fault line as 1960. The post-war euphoria was gone and a mild
recession in the late 50s forced people to sort out their values. Better communication
made for a smaller country, which was also better-educated and more likely to ask
questions. It was becoming apparent that people would not be forced to live through a
depression like their parents, and it was also hoped that maybe just maybe people
didnt have to fear a nuclear war the way they had in the 1950s. People could afford to
take some risks, says Doherty.
And take risks they did. Soon, parents, university administrators and government
officials would wonder whether the society with which theyd grown up would be left
intact at the end of the then-new decade. The 1960s changed everything in North
America, and although the wave seemed to have been delayed by one or two years in
hitting Canada, its impact was not softened. CUP would be carried along with that wave.

CHAPTER THREE: A HINT OF REVOLUTION


Canadian University Press and the dramatic changes it went through in the 1960s
cant be studied in isolation. Its impossible to understand why CUP members voted to
define themselves as agents of social change without first knowing about the patterns
of social change that were already establishing themselves on and off North American
campuses. Internationally, the American civil rights movement and the eventual
breakdown of a consensus about the Vietnam war helped fuel the momentum of student
power. But Canada had its own tumult. The rapid growth of post-secondary education in
the 1960s meant a dramatic shift in on-campus demographics as enrollments soared. And
in Quebec, the Quiet Revolution was wakening an entire population, including students.
Their fellow students in English Canada looked on with envy, and, eventually, with an
urge to imitate.
Events moved rapidly. By 1970, the movement had collapsed under its own
weight. Already stumbling because of exhaustion, economic recession and internal
division, student radicals lost the will to go on when the Kent State shootings in the
United States and the October Crisis in Canada seemed to indicate that theyd crossed a
line. Those events marked the climax, and the beginning of the decline, of the student
movement. But the political culture of campuses, and their student newspapers, would
never be the same again.
According to Cyril Levitt, who wrote the Canadian section of the Student Political
Activism: An International Reference Handbook, some student political organizations did
exist before the 1960s. Besides the youth wings of political parties and religious groups,
there had been a handful of reform-minded student groups. But they were a tiny minority
and they had no impact on campus life. The only significant exception was the Combined
Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, formed in the late 1950s. At the end of
1964, it broadened its scope and renamed itself the Student Union for Peace Action,
taking its cute from the Students for a Democratic Society in the U.S.
Murray Ross, then the president of York University, told student Arta Zoldners
that students were revolting because they were caught in a contradiction. Students were
taught about a revolution that was a healthy one, about the value of elections and free
speech; they are even taught that the best students are those who speak out. But all
around them, they see a society that is just stifling these ideas, talking about them but not
acting on them.
Seymour Lipset, in his book Rebellion in the University, theorized that there were
three main reasons for growing student unrest in the early 60s: changes in child-rearing
and educational practices had created a generation with egalitarian beliefs and a need for
instant gratification; the growth of post-secondary education meant larger, impersonal
classrooms, causing students to feel shortchanged; and world events like the Cuban
Missile Crisis provided a catalyst, sparking concern and, eventually, debates and
demonstrations.
Students for a Democratic Society, in its milestone Port Huron Statement, said
universities should provide a critique of society and a development of new attitudes.
Instead, education only socializes people to believe in the stock truths of the day.
As would happen into the 1970s and 80s, Canadian students were following the
lead of their American counterparts. Some students lamented that, despite the appearance
in Canada of protest groups like SUPA, this country was lacking a catalyst to spark a real
revolution. With one eye surely trained southward, Ken Durshka, the editor of the Varsity
in 1963-64, told a student writing an honours research project that we have the leaders
but there is no tangible problem . . . Canada has no tangible crisis. Student potential in
bringing pressure on various groups in power is just now being realized.
This has been blamed, among other things, on the splintering of the National
Federation of Canadian University Students. Until 1963, NFCUS had dealt with the same
problems as Canada: how to afford bilingual services for its members, how to ensure that
the presidency alternated between Anglophones and francophones, etc. But when the
Quebec members left to form lUnion Generale des Etudiant(e)s du Quebec, English
student activists were faced with a void. For the first time . . . problems were not
discussed in the shadow of bilingualism and bi-everything, wrote Quebec author Daniel
LaTouche. The traditional Quebec scapegoat having been eliminated, hardcore problems
came into the open, including the difficulty of self-definition, he wrote.
Given the considerable impact of American culture on Canada, it was perhaps
inevitable that students here would draw inspiration from their U.S. counterparts. This
tendency probably hurt Canadian groups. Gerard McGuigan, Canaidan author of Student
Protest, argued that SUPA should not have been looking south. Rather, it should have
tried to become the logical heirs to Canadas activist tradition, represented by such
groups as the community movement for medicare in Saskatchewan.
SUPA proved short-lived, but the gap was filled in 1965 by the Company of
Young Canadians. Ironically, it was created by the Liberal government in an attempt to
harness (or co-opt, depending on who one believes) the youthful energy that was making
itself evident. The program funded community projects, but it was cancelled within a few
years when the government got nervous that radicals were taking leadership roles at the
local level.
CYC was not the only mainstream institution to be radicalized. The Canadian
Union of Students, the new name given to the English remnants of NFCUS, moved left in
1966 with the election as president of Doug Ward, a former Unviersity of Toronto
student council head. Three years earlier, Ward and students at U of T were merely
worrying about Canada. Over 2,000 students held a march for Canada to Queens Park
and presented Premier John Robarts with a brief on the national unity question. Within a
few years, students would be looking at bigger issues, like tearing down the very
structures they had dutifully appealed to. They would not limit their goals to providing
suggestions to a provincial premier. By 1968, CUS had declared its revolutionary
intentions.
Within two years, however, the revolution had ended before it could begin. CUS,
for one, could not bear the strains of feminism, the drug scene and the challenges of older
leftist organizations. A grassroots backlash grew, beginning at the August, 1968 congress
at Guelph, when many delegates felt motions were being railroaded by the left. Students
opposed the Vietnam war, but resolutions condemning the Canadian government and
praising the Vietnam government (which was not, after all, perfect) went too far for
some. Resentment against the larger, more radical bit universities grew. Campus radicals
began questioning gthe top-down style of CUS, and a total fo 28 student governments
held referenda in 1968-69 on whether to stay in CUs. Many campus leftists refused to
work for the yes sides because they felt alienated from the leadership. Only 10 student
bodies voted yes, while 18 voted no. CUS was determined to push on, but the 28
th

referendum, a no vote at the University of British Columbia, was a psychological blow,
and the union unraveled.
Ultimately, wrote author Cyril Levitt, there were several reasons why the student
movement lost momentum. For one, a recession began in 1969, and many students began
to wonder if a university degree would still guarantee them a job the way it had their
predecessors. As well, many students were co-opted because there were actually some
victories: universities did allow student input and governments were searching for some
diplomatic solutions to the war in Vietnam. So while the die-hard radicals stayed with the
movement, their numbers in relation to their student bodies dwindled.
Campuses, however, had evolved a great deal. Sexual norms were changing, the
Protestant work ethic was eroding and the status of women and minorities was
improving. While the political dynamic of universities seemed determined to shift back
towards a more self-centered, apathetic culture, CUP was determined to stop it.

CHAPTER FOUR: UNDERSTANDABLE AND NECESSARY

Canadian University Press is unlike most other student groups that existed in the 1960s.
For one thing, it still exists. For another, it has maintained the key elements of the
ideology it adopted in that decade. By the time the decade ended, CUP believed in social
change with a passion. But it began the decade very quietly, adding the national bureau
chief job to CUPOtt and otherwise tinkering.
About the only inarguably political thing that happened in CUP before 1965 was
the withdrawal of French university papers. Le Quartier Latin from the University of
Montreal and Le Campus Estrien from the Univesrity of Sherbrooke dropped out in
October of 1961 and the final two, Le Carabin from Laval and La Rotonde, the French
paper at the University of Ottawa, withdrew in December, 1963.
They, and others, joined Presse Etudiante National, which had already adopted a
political tone. Roger McAffee, the president of CUP the year the last papers left, wrote in
a report: Translation is not the main problem. It is content. We have been told in the past
by delegates from French-language papers that they produce a different type of paper . . .
a means of fundamental action for the progress of the student condition.
CUP was willing to recognize Quebecs special needs and realized the papers had
a right to go their own way if those needs could not be met. But beyond that, CUP
remained very non-political and still closely tied to NFCUS. In fact, as late as September,
1963, the federation which was about to rename itself CUS was still preparing CUPs
budget.
In a March, 1964 memo, however, CUP president Sidney Black wrote that this
year, for the first time during our national office operation, CUP hopes to have a clear
account with CUS. Within another two years, Jim Laxer, the 1965-66 president, was
reorganizing the CUP finances, getting the national office in order and giving CUP some
of the stability it needed to exist as an autonomous organization in its own right. Despite
the links with CUs, there had been sloppy accounting, no audits and poor communication.
He had, I think, made some progress in straightening out the mess, says his successor,
Don Sellar, who completed the process.
It was in Laxers year that CUP began its great march leftward. Just a year earlier,
at the conference where he had been acclaimed, there had been a motion to set up links
with the Canadian Daily Newspaper Publishers Association, because student
newspapers and professional newspapers could each be improved through close relations
with each other. It was not long before CUP would turn its back decisively on any such
links.
Mainstream daily papers had been awarding trophies and prizes to the best CUP
papers for years. In fact, at the 1959-60 and 1960-61 national conferences, delegates
spent most of their time discussing the trophies whether there should be three judges or
five, whether papers should keep them only for a year or permanently, how to get more
papers to sponsor more trophies, etc. By 1967-68, the trophies were eliminated. They
now collect dust on a shelf in CUPs national office.
Although one might expect it given Laxers later role in the Waffle movement of
the New Democratic Party, it was not he who put the radical stamp on CUP that year.
The most significant change, the one that was lasted the longest, came from The McGill
Daily and its colorful editor, Patrick MacFadden.
Harvey Schachter, who was a commerce representative on McGills student
council during MacFaddens tenure at the Daily, remembers the paper well. It was
inextricably tied to the leadership of swelling political ferment at McGill. The Daily was
the energy of the movement, it was the mouthpiece, the clarion call, he recalls. The
best and the brightest tended to be involved in some way with the Daily.
MacFadden, for his part, doesnt deny anything. We self-consciously took the
view that the paper should not just replicate the consensus, but that it would indeed lead
and shape opinion on campus . . . we made no bones about it. That attitude led to several
reprimands from the university administration, and occasional attempts at firing him by
the student council, which claimed that, since all students paid a fee for the Daily, it
should not reflect such a narrow ideological focus.
Although he still recalls MacFaddens brilliance with visible admiration and
respect, Schachter agreed with many students that the Daily was not reporting enough on
McGill. A lot of good journalists at McGill would not work there because of ideological
intimidation, he says. You had to be a Marxist if you wanted to cover anything other
than sports. Schachter eventually set up a rival weekly paper, run by the student council,
that he says had a better pick-up rate than the Daily.
Despite the passing of time, MacFadden is not apologetic or embarrassed about
what the Daily was doing. People forget how snobbish McGill was at the time, how
completely out of touch it was, he says. He calls the pre-1960s McGill a finishing
school for Westmount girls and says the social life revolved around fraternities. He
recalls with contempt how English students pelted the St.-Jean Baptiste Day parade with
bananas one year, and notes McGill had quotas on Jewish students up until the previous
decade. I think what we were trying to do was much more understandable and
necessary.
In the late fall of 1965, MacFadden and his Daily colleagues prepared to bring
their revolutionary fervor to CUPs national conference. As they looked about for aspects
of CUP they could change, their gaze settled on a staid, bland document called the
Charter of the Student Press in Canada. The charter was basically a statement against
censorship by any on-campus bodies, saying that the role of the student press is to assure
that the students have a mode of communicating their ideas to other students and to the
nation. It also said that it must present the varied opinions of the students it serves
irrespective of the papers editorial opinions and must present news fairly and without
bias.
This must surely have elicited a chuckle or two from the Daily delegation.
A few weeks before the national conference, the Daily with the help of the
Georgian at Sir George Williams University and the Loyola News circulated a
discussion paper. The charter is a graveyard, it stated. It is now time to go out and cut
the grass. The paper argued that the mass media must provide a means for the student to
fulfill his or her social goals, which included democratization, self-conceptualization,
and so on. These lofty goals, if achieved, would turn students into truly aware citizens.
The paper questioned CUPs obsession with autonomy from student government. When
we say, for example, that the student press is free, must this very valuable concept
continue to relegate us to the passive and sterile role of resting on laurels which have long
since withered? How long are we to continue thinking solely in terms of what we are free
from? When may we begin thinking in terms of what we are free for?
The result: an amendment, brought before the plenary at the conference. It deleted
the second paragraph the one concerning the role of the paper as a mode of
communication and replaced it with the following:
That one of the major roles of the student press is to act as an agent of social
change; that it should continually strive to emphasize the rights and responsibilities of the
student as a citizen, and use its freedom from commercial control to examine issues that
the professional press avoids.
Although many of the member papers were not as radical as the Daily the
amendment passed easily, with 23 papers in favor, one opposing (its name is not
recorded) and one abstaining.
The paper had another amendment, to add this paragraph to the charter: That the
Canadian student press should incorporate as its primary purpose an educative function
which is vital to the development of the student-citizen. This time, 22 papers voted in
favor, three were against and one abstained.
The Daily would later complain it had failed in provoking discussion. This lack of
debate was part of the problem. According to Sellar, most papers didnt devote much
thought to the changes and didnt change their content overnight to reflect the
amendments, even though they were willing to vote in favor of them. While CUP was
declaring its members to be radical, many papers remained quite moderate.
The notion of student as citizen that the Daily brought to CUP from Quebec
sprang out of the syndicalist philosophy behind many of that provinces student
movements. It, in turn, had been inspired by La Charte de Grenoble, a student statement
from post-war France. As Daniel LaTouche saw it, the syndicalist thesis defined the
student as a young intellectual worker and its most significant axiom was that there was
no such thing as a student problem, only student aspects to socio-economic problems.
CUPs pledge to defend the student as citizen, then, meant it would look beyond
the campus to the world around it. The educative role sounded like a classic
knowledge is power theory, which holds that the citizen, with enough information
presented to him or her, will have the awareness, and ultimately the power, to act against
oppression.
The ease with which these changes passed does not mean they had wholehearted
support. Sellar, the editor of the University of Calgary Gateway [sic] who was elected
CUP president at that conference, wasnt enamored with it, but wasnt too concerned.
Social change is a pretty broad phrase, he says. I never had a whole lot of trouble
with that charter because I thought it was so general.
Peter Calamai, the editor of the McMaster Silhouette who ran against Sellar,
doesnt recall it as especially significant either. It was hardly unusual for a student
newspaper group to become politicized at the point in the milieu it was in. One would
have expected that. But Calamai, who was president of the Ontario region the year the
Daily changed the charter, stresses that even then, the document did not necessarily
represent the views of each paper.
Theres CUP, and then there are student newspapers, and theyre two different
things. CUPs role as a mentor or a leader of the student press was much overstated. For
long periods of time, we didnt know CUP existed, and it meant nothing to us . . . they
were just people spending money. Because the money they were spending, membership
fees, was much smaller proportion of the papers budgets than it is now, CUP could
literally afford to not quite represent all its members politically.
Indeed, at the time, most papers in Ontario seemed to be more in tune with their
regional president than with the delegates from Sherbrooke Street. Calamai prepared a
report, The Purpose and Goals of a University Newsletter, that, with hindsight, seems
oblivious to what was about to happen. Eight of ten Ontario papers agreed that the
campus paper must strive in the best tradition of journalism to be as objective and
impartial [as possible] in its coverage of the news. Its primary role was to inform, the
report said, and if it had a secondary role, It was to be a workshop for students interested
in journalism careers. That kind of attitude soon became known as careerism.
But despite the reservations, CUP was on its way. Sellar was elected president in
what he recalls a completely non-ideological election. And his most pressing task was
non-ideological, as well, because while Laxer had begun the task of getting CUPs
financial house in order, a lot of work was left to be done.
In his first report to members, in September, 1966, Sellar told them there had been
no financial records kept in the past two years and no audits, CUP was again in dept to
CUS, the national office was understaffed, the services were inadequate and there was
poor communication. Sellar, in effect, completed CUPs entry into the modern age. Its
no wonder he doesnt recall much concern about ideology.
Rather than adopt his energy on politics, he convinced members to adopt a new
per-student fee formula that boosted revenues. The money went towards a bigger office, a
full-time bureau chief, incorporation, and a telex system that allowed rapid transmission
of stories. A news exchange of five to 10 stories plus sports and features was sent out
every day. By the following fall report, president Lib Spry was able to tell members: We
have now reached an important stage in our development. We are now a financially
independent, democratic and viable organization linking universities and colleges across
Canada.
Nonetheless, Sellar recalls feeling he was on the cusp of something. I knew that
things were probably going to change, he remembers. You could feel the activism sort
of building. CUP itself was changing, too, electing Spry as its first woman president.
We had gone beyond the old clubby stuff, says Sellar, who remembers feeling good
that a woman was succeeding him. You felt that change was occurring, and it was good,
good for CUP.
The internal evolution continued during Sprys year when the organization passed
an amendment to the charter, which had been renamed the Statement of Principles,
declaring that the editor of member papers should be elected by the staff and that overall
policy decisions should be made by the staff. This emphasis on democracy remains one
of CUPs successes in putting its ideals into practice.
The 1967-68 year was also the year CUP discovered that there was no longer
much point in pretending we could write unbiased copy, according to president Kevin
Petersons 1968 fall report. Petersons fellow staffer in the national office, former Daily
editor Elly Alboim, recalls that revelation. The feeling was there was no point in doing
what the commercial media did, so it (CUP) really saw itself as an alternative press. But
there wasnt a unanimity of purpose among all the papers . . . CUP itself was not
radicalized the way many of the papers were.
Alboim was responsible for packaging the daily news exchange, so if CUPs bias
was going to be apparent anywhere, it would have been in his work. But he says the
exchange was not as radical as some of the CUP rhetoric. I think it (CUP) was generally
left, but the news coverage was pretty straight. It did have to tow the line pretty well
between the various newspapers, because they all had a vote, and the radicalization of the
student press was not really uniform across the country.
The exchanges were sent out C.O.D., so if a member paper didnt like what it was
getting, it could refuse to pay and stick the national office with the tab. Because of the
mix of campuses and campus papers, we actually had to file reasonable interesting
material that was of broad interest to all of the campuses and wouldnt alienate any of
them. So in fact the executive of CUP was a lot more sensitive to the national concerns,
and finding some sort of political middle, than it might have been in subsequent years.
Alboim says member papers were dealing with accusations that they werent
representing the broad spectrum of opinion on campuses. But the non-campus issues they
covered included the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement issues that he
locates at the centre of political debate on campuses, and thus meritous of coverage. As
well, there were large sports and arts sections, he says.
The agent of social change phrase was thrown around a lot. Remember that
anti-war movement at the time was not in the mainstream, he says. The civil rights
movement was barely in the mainstream. So when students were defining themselves and
student papers as agents of social change, they were arguing for things that now seem
commonplace.
Stewart Saxe would be the last CUP president of the 1960s, his term ushering in
the 1970s. Saxe had been elected on an openly radical platform; in February of 1970 he
would tell the Davey committee on mass media, which was investigating concentration of
ownership and other media problems, What I am calling for is some sort of revolution.
But in his report to the membership in the closing weeks of the 1960s, Saxe had not
stressed what was supposed to have happened revolution but what had actually
happened: a lot of questioning.
I do believe that in an essential way the student press has become more radical
this year, he wrote. Radical in a very basic way a way that isnt defined by the
publishing of Che Guevaras collected works or headlines using the word Fuck but a
way that insists on dealing with the surroundings the paper exists within and a way that
approaches these surroundings with a very important question WHY?
It would be a question that CUP would be forced to ask even more of its
surroundings and of itself in the decade to come.
CHAPTER FIVE: CUP WEATHERS THE ME DECADE

If CUP thought it had a lot to question in the 1960s, the 1970s proved to be an
even greater challenge. The progress that student activists felt theyd made began to fade
into memory as the average student, content with the gains made, stopped protesting and
got back to the work of worrying about his or her own future. CUP found itself trying to
figure out what had pushed students back to the middle of the road and, more
importantly, how to either reverse the trend or accommodate it.
Protests didnt suddenly stop on January 1, 1970. One-fifth of U.S. campuses
surveyed by the Berkeley professor Richard Peterson were shut down by protests for at
least one day in 1970. But participation began to wane. The death of four students at Kent
Sate and two at Jackson State sapped the enthusiasm of more moderate students, and in
Canada, the imposition of the War Measures Act in October forced students across the
country to confront the reality that activists in Quebec were being thrown in jail,
sometimes for acts no more subversive than having their names on the wrong lists. Other
factors, like an economic recession, caused many of the moderate activists to focus their
priorities on their immediate concerns.
The nature of the activism that did persist was different from that of only a few
years earlier. The big organizations, like Students for a Democratic Society and the
Canadian Union of Students, were gone, replaced by self-interest advocacy groups which
pushed for more respect for natives, visible minorities, and gays and lesbians. The focus
of the demonstrations included issues like sexism, abortion, nuclear waste, university and
college funding and fees all problems that affected students on a more tangible,
understandable level. And the tactics, too, were new. Although demonstrations continued,
they were smaller, as students used some of the representation theyd gained at the
administration level to lobby for change. In other cases, they took their university to
court. An essay in The New Republic in 1973 said the militants had been replaced by
cool young politicians who choose their fights carefully and who know more about the
use of conventional tools like lawsuits and press releases. In other words, they were
working within the system. Authors Peter Segal and Robert Pickett believe two
movements uncoupled in the 1970s. The new social values of students, like sexual
liberation and freedom of speech, held fast, but the radical component faded.
According to Arthur Levine, who prepared a report for the Carnegie Council on
Policy Studies in Higher Education, societies go through cycles of expending energy and
then resting. Wars, for example, are times of great energy, often followed by quiet times
in which people get their own lives in order. Levine considers the 1945-1960 period as a
time of rest, after which society was ready to expend energy once again. Inevitably,
another period of rest would follow. That, he said, was what the 1970s were about.
Students still wanted change, but because the explosive ferment was over, he wrote, they
adopted a quieter way of seeking it. If there was a 60s-style demonstration like a four-
day student strike at Brown University in 1975 which was approved by 75 per cent of
voters in a referendum that drew two thirds of the student body it was over more selfish
issues like cuts to student services.
During the first half of the 70s, when all this retrenchment was going on, CUP
seems to have been unsure of what was happening. The overall impression is of a child
lost in a supermarket, searching the aisles for its mother. The perspective remained
definitely left. It amended the Statement of Principles again in 1970, adding a clause
which holds that, as an agent of social change, the student press had to support groups
serving as agents of social change. But the number of such groups was falling and there
was no longer a broad, over-arching societal struggle of which Cup could be a part.
That doesnt mean CUP wasnt reacting to the changing campus situation, but
the first reaction was structural. In 1971-72, members scaled back the news exchange to
three days a week. Jennifer Penney, the president, argued that because demonstrations
and the pace of developments on campuses were slowing down, there was less need for
spot news coverage of, for example, yet another demonstration.
The important activity of our time, in this country, is not taking place on the
visible surface very much of the time, Penney wrote. Therefore important journalism
becomes a lot harder than churning out descriptive articles about an immediate situation.
Relevant journalism requires background knowledge, research and analytical ability that
is not easy to come by. But this is the only kind of work that can both tie the immediate
events together and make some sense out of them. The demands of a daily exchange,
she argued, worked against that kind of analysis, which CUP needed to counter the
perspective of the bourgeois press.
What CUP could not grasp quickly enough was that global concerns were no
longer student concerns to the extent they had been. A November, 1973 House Organ that
summarized the contents of the news exchange so far that year revealed that out of 107
stories, only 11 dealt with student issues. Those stories included a report on a student
power symposium, a look back at education policy under the CCF in Saskatchewan, pro
and con pieces on grading, a student strike, repression at a Chilean university and
something called Joe Student in Labrador. Feature topics included student power,
Chile, racism, natives, Cambodia, labor, apartheid, Palestine and the RCMP. In other
words, CUP was doing plenty of analysis, but not much of it was about students.
This fit in to the educative and active role of striving to emphasize the rights
and responsibilities of the student as citizen, prodding student readers to look beyond
their campus. A letter from The Lance at the University of Windsor in January 1974
provided a glimpse of what would come of this perspective. While The Lance doesnt
agree with the politics of most of the papers we saw at the conference, J.C. Sargent
wrote, we intend to do our part to make this co-op work. CUP would later wish that
kind of attitude had lasted.
At the half-way mark of the decade, the move away from politics of the 1960s
was virtually complete. The right-wing National Review in the U.S. gloated in 1975, It
is clear that the tranquility signals not merely the absence of ugly conflict, but a
promising new thrust by college students. Although some of the issues had been
different between Canada and the U.S., the general trend knew no border. In both
countries, student reps on college and university senates and boards working within the
system meant fewer opportunities for mass participation. The radical days were really
over.
If one is to believe many of the documents from the mid-70s, CUP was entering
an identity crisis. The reduction to the frequency of the news exchange was providing
analysis, but some were plainly not satisfied. Doug Coupar, editor of The Martlet at the
University of Victoria, saw it as part of a larger problem. He wrote in January 1975 that
UCP papers were becoming grey and dull.
Is it possible that we have traded in controversy for credibility? . . . Do we now
see ourselves as weekly versions of the commercial press? he asked. The letter referred
to the 1974-75 national conference which had been held in Montreal and accused some
delegates there of coming off like small-time reactionaries. Coupar complained that
there were Martlet staffers who just werent educated enough. They had no
understanding whatsoever, he wrote.
This letter, and the shift in CUP that prompted it, can be seen as a turning point.
Five years after the death of a wide-scale student movement, the impact was finally
filtering down to CUP. Some recognized it. A joint proposal from The Manitoban and
The McGill Daily (in one of its more moderate years) suggested that CUP focus on
educational issues. Known as the Pink Proposal, it had appeared in 1974 and was
revised and circulated in January, 1975, the same month as Coupars letter. (Its unclear
whether one was a direct response to the other or whether they were both manifestations
of the debate and happened to appear at the same time.) The Pink Proposal suggested a
new opening for the Statement of Principals: Whereas the role of the student newspaper
is to inform the university community and since our readership is students and their
experience and immediate day-to-day concerns revolve around education-oriented . . .
The proposal went on to suggest an array of topics on which CUP might focus.
They include hiring policies on campuses, education and women, student housing,
unionization of university staffs, student aid, U.S. influence on Canadian education,
sources of research funding and others. Despite retaining a leftist edge, the proposal
represented a significant shift away from what CUP had been doing up to that point.
Other papers sounded similar sentiments. The Ubyssey, in a paper for the 1974-75
conference, said CUP had to look at the limitations faced by papers. We feel its not
humanly possible for people to put out a first-rate paper and run ever progressive activity
on campus as well, it said. Therefore, what The Ubyssey suggests is that student
newspapers act as instigators, investigators, presenters of alternatives. They should
criticize and comment. But they shouldnt go beyond and do the work themselves. In the
60s, there had been a lot of cross-over between papers and activist groups, but that was
becoming more difficult. The problem was symptomatic of a larger trend on campus. As
the number of progressive, active students declined, those who remained found
themselves having to take on a larger proportion of the workload.
At the same conference, papers like The Ubyssey called on CUP to put a halt to
its consideration of integrating with the alternative and womens press. Underground and
feminist papers were holding conferences on the same site and there had been talk of the
three becoming one organization. The Ubyssey felt their presence distracted from CUPs
attempts to define itself. This is Canadian University Press and our struggles must
maintain priority in the organization . . . So we feel the womens and alternative press
groups must be de-emphasized, not only within this conference, but within CUP, the
position paper continued. Only then can we consider the issues which should stand at
the centre of this conference: how do we fill the political vacuum on Canadian
campuses?
The other papers were instead offered associate membership, and although CUP
never formally voted on a change, it did focus more on campus issues although the
point of view remained decidedly leftist. Rather than write about the struggle for blacks
in society, for example, it looked at the struggle of blacks on campuses. It was this kind
of change that led people like Coupar to accuse CUP of becoming reactionary. In fact, the
organization was reacting with realism and pragmatism to the changes on campus. The
period between 74-75 and 75-76 conferences can be regarded as CUPs zenith. It had
68 members and it seemed to have adjusted as best it could to the new political climate
on campus.
The only major problem seemed to be the low rate of member involvement with
the news exchange, which remained the backbone of the organization. A 1975 report said
that of 389 stories on the news exchange between Aug. 27 and Nov. 27, only 135 were
filed from member papers, representing a drop from the previous year and a significant
decline from the 60s. (Of the remainder, 83 were written by national office staff and 171
were scalped from the enemy the bourgeois dailies.) This, like The Ubysseys lament
about having to do it all, was likely symptomatic of declining involvement with student
papers. It was becoming more difficult to motivate people to work for papers because
they could only devote their limited time to one or two activities.
As a result, all aspects of the papers suffered. Fewer people involved meant fewer
getting to know CUP, and that affected the number of stories filed. National staff devoted
a lot of thought to how to encourage a growing membership to file more stories to the
national office. In 1975, times were good, with plenty of members contributing to a big
budget. A national office proposal in the fall of 1974 had thrown out the idea of regional
offices to act as organizing tools.
So the great expansion plan was hatched the following year, at the 38
th
annual
conference, held in the middle of the 1975-76 year. The services commission, one of the
several committees set up annually at national conferences to draw up plans for the
coming year, recommended a dramatic three-year plan. It suggested that member papers
donate the space for regional bureaus that would be opened in 1976-77.
This would allow CUP to be closer and more visible to the members, who would
presumably be more enthusiastic and thus more inclined to file stories and get involved.
Even more significantly, the plan called for the hiring of regional bureau chiefs and a new
national affairs reporter. Eventually, an education reporter would be added, too. People
wanted to have a more effective news service and support system for papers, says Susan
Johnson, who was elected president at the 75-76 conference.
It would cost money, of course, and fees would have to double. Although CUP
members liked the expansion plan, the cost was another matter. In an extraordinary move,
the membership voted to hold a special national plenary in March, 1976, so that delegates
could consult with their staffs. The Queens Journal, for one, was reluctant. It wanted
changes that would justify the higher fees, including a board of directors to bring more
continuity, an improvement in the quality of the news exchange, and shorter, more
efficient national conferences.
We cannot stress too emphatically . . . that we want to see a dramatic
improvement in the areas mentioned above, wrote editors Sarah Yarnel and Dan
McClelland. For starters, we would like to have these suggestions discussed. We are
willing to help CUP improve the news service and other facets of the organization . . .
This is our first major contribution towards that end. We do not want to have next years
Queens Journal staff decide to drop out.
Despite that ominous note, it was probably too early for CUP to understand the
forces it had unleashed with the expansion plan. The opposition (to expansion) brought
to a head some long-standing differences about how people saw the student press, says
Johnson. A doubling of fees was forcing papers for the first time to question if CUP was
worth the money they were paying. Once such questioning starts, its hard to stop.
Enough papers decided it was worth it to ensure the approval of the fee increase.
But in an organization in which consensus-building had, until then, usually led to little
dissent, the 18-9 vote in favor (with seven abstentions) is telling. (There is no record of
how the Journal voted.) Once that hurdle was cleared, however, the opponents must have
concluded they may as well try to get their moneys worth, because the budget and the
multi-year plan were adopted unanimously. But the organization had started down a
rocky road.
The following year, 1976-77, CUP had to look at hiring regional bureau chiefs
and the education affairs reporter for the national office. But an expansion report from the
national office in November 1976 identified an increasingly bothersome problem,
highlighted by a resignation in the national office: it was becoming more and more
difficult to find people to see CUP jobs. If people had to be cajoled to apply to run, could
CUP be sure it was getting the best people? Again, it was a symptom of more students
wanting to complete their degree as quickly as possible and enter the job market.
More papers were beginning to ask the same questions as the Journal. A letter
from The Gateway at the University of Calgary said the paper had no aspirations higher
than being a community paper for the campus. We didnt set a high goal of being an
alternate newspaper, that is to say a paper which offers alternate coverage on many news
events offered in the commercial media, the staff wrote. We dont think we need
student coverage of national affairs, student coverage of the Throne Speech, student
coverage of off-shore drilling operations in Britains North Sea coast areas. The
Gateway wanted CUP to abandon its role of generating news and go back to being a mere
central distribution point for stories from member papers.
At the 1976-77 conference, a motion on the principle of creating regional bureaus
passed 31-14, with most of the opposition coming from Ontario. As the debate
proceeded, with a variety of motions laying out the duties of the bureau chiefs, the
Ontario papers used procedural maneauvers and obstructionism to bog down the debate.
Stymied, the plenary voted to table the issue and hold another special plenary in March.
A flurry fo mailings followed in January and February, leading up to the March
vote. It was calculated the CUP budget would soar from $110,000 to $180,000 to pay for
the bureau chiefs, meaning another big fee increase would be necessary. More papers got
restless.
The Martlet from Victoria, which only two years earlier had lamented the
reactionary drift, was not calling for a completely objective news exchange. While no
particular fan of the capitalist system in which we all live, The Marlet finds the current
statements (of principles) to be an improper attempt to dictate the individual editorial
policies of member papers of the national office, said the letter. Editor David
Climenhaga, in an editorial, vehemently denounced what he saw as hypocrisy from
CUPs leftists. At the national conference, we were treated to the sight of a large number
of fresh-faced Westmount anglos from Montreals McGill University clad in Yves St.
Laurent tee-shirts, waving a Quebec flag and singing La Marseilleise to the vast approval
of other revolutionaries from places like Mount Royal and Point Grey.
The Gazette from the University of Western Ontario question CUPs viability in
an editorial, and The Ontarion from Guelph mocked expansion plans, too. The Queens
Journal called the Statement of Principles an insult to the intelligence of students. The
Queens Journal now finds itself in the position of being entirely at odds with the
acknowledged principles of CUP, an editorial said. Until our stated principles agree in
spirit, the Queens Journal is a member under protest of the Canadian University Press.
Its difficult to establish whether these views were taken seriously. Evidently,
there were not taken seriously enough, because the special March plenary gave final
approval to the expansion. Since the cost of the bureau chiefs would be covered by
regional fees, Ontario opted to not hire a bureau chief. But other aspects of expansion
meant the national fees for those papers would go up anyway.
It proved too much. The Journal went first, the staff voting 17-2 to leave CUP.
Editor Terry Collins blasted the Statement of Principles and what he saw as completely
uncritical coverage of the National Union of Students, a new national organization. We
believe that journalism is an end in itself; that in fulfilling its duties the press will
facilitate the correction of social inequities and other ills. We do not believe, though, that
reporters should themselves initiate social change through the news.
Collins still remembers the decision clearly. It was a significant one for the
Journal, because the staff knew it had been a founding paper, and Queens has always
had a strong sense of tradition. But delegates had been trying for two years to change
CUP from within.
It was pointless to stay on, he says. We couldnt, in good conscience, support a
co-operative and wire service that was so blatantly political. Collins doesnt remember
much about the fees; its the ideology that sticks in his mind. He says the Journal gave
little thought to the implications for CUP. I didnt think it was going to make a big
difference to them, given that most of their subscribers were in the same frame of mind as
the people running CUP.
While the Journal cant be blamed for what followed, it was the first in a pattern
of withdrawals, cuts and fee increases that continue to this day. The Brunswickan from
the University of New Brunswick voted at about the same time, saying fees were a
secondary issue. We feel that the political dogma, noticeably CUP dogma, has gotten
entirely out of hand.
The Gazette at UWO and The Martlet followed a month later. The Gauntlet from
the University of Alberta took a different tack: it initiated a referendum to repeal the fee
increase, which would, if successful, effectively cancel expansion. The mail-in ballot
passed 18-13 with two abstentions, but because it didnt have the required quorum, it had
no effect.
So expansion was still officially on, but CUP found itself in a money crisis. The
estimates had been off; it would cost $210,000 not $180,000, for expansion, and suddenly
CUP was going to be short the fees of four big papers. The national affairs reporter hired
for 1977-78 was cut, and the hours of a hired business manager were cut in half. The
bureau chiefs were also slashed. What The Gauntlet hadnt done with its referendum
vote, the angry papers had done by withdrawing.
Despite the scale-back, CUP somehow managed to stay debt-free and fairly
productive heading into the 1977-78 conference. The members started to look at some
other issues that were pressing. Youthstream, the company that CUP had contracted to
supply it with national advertising, wanted to re-negotiate its contract. And members
were discussing new services like a photo exchange. But the tone of the discussion papers
on such notions is wistful, the concepts merely two-year-old dreams left over from the
expansion plan. National expansion was out of the question, and for the following year,
delegates would have to settle for a president, a vice-president who took on the education
affairs writer duties, a bureau chief and a part-time business manager. The regions had a
mish-mash of staff, depending on what they were willing to pay for.
The big issue at the conference, however, was laffaire Chevron, as one CUP
staffer called it. Along with expansion, the battle over the student newspaper at the
University of Waterloo had been casting a shadow over CUP for two years, and it finally
climaxed in 1977-78, at the 40
th
national conference.
It had been one of the ugliest episodes in CUP history. Together with expansion,
the Chevron struggle would prevent CUP from looking at any other issues. The paper had
been taken over by a group of Communist Party of Canada-Marxist-Leninist members
called the Anti-Imperialist Alliance, and staff democracy was in shambles.
In September, 1975, the executive of the student government closed the paper,
prompting the paper staff to occupy the Chevron office. A student council meeting,
attended by the Chevron staff and supporters from CUP, overturned the executives
decision and the dispute was back to square one. CUP offered to set up an investigation
commission, a tool it had used over the years when papers were facing pressure from
student governments. Usually, the commissions came down on the side of the papers. But
The Chevron refused a commission.
The following Tuesdays issue included a vehement attack on the student council
president, and this time the council voted with the executive to close the paper. Again, the
staff occupied the Chevron office and CUP showed its support by continuing to service
the paper and giving it financial assistance. We werent willing to give student councils
the authority to march in and close down a paper, says Johnson. However, under our
breath, we were quite able to understand why the student council did what it did. CUPs
national office staffers knew the AIA people at The Chevron were not democratic, but for
the time being, they had to defend the papers integrity.
When the student council began publishing its own paper called The Chevron, the
AIA members launched The Free Chevron. Representatives of both papers attended a fall
conference of Ontario CUP papers. Shane Roberts, the student council president, also
attended, but was shouted down with yells of Lies! Lies! by the Free Chevron staff.
The Free Chevron reps also attacked CUP for allowing the student council people to be at
the conference to tell their side of the story.
Eventually, a referendum was held, with students voting on a series of questions.
They approved a paper, published by the student council, with membership in CUP and a
voting staff made up only of students. (Many of the AIA members at the Free Chevron
were not students.) Fighting back, the Free Chevron staff managed to get the required 10
per cent of the student body to sign a petition and remove the council president, Shane
Roberts, from office.
The Free Chevron again refused CUP mediation. In the CUP House Organ, the
national staff reported that the Free Chevron had accused CUP of distorting coverage of
the issue, being vindictive because the AIA members hadnt supported expansion, and
conspiring to deny advertising in Youthstream, the national advertising co-op, to the
paper.
The CUP national staff still wouldnt yet say it publicly, but they knew they were
dealing with hard-core ideologues. Vice-president Dan Keeton told the 1977 March
plenary that the executive was no longer clear on the facts of the case. As a result, a
mention of full support for The Free Chevron sans a CUP investigation failed. The
plenary broke out into arguments and shouting. Finally, a motion to send a team of three
reporters from CUP papers to Waterloo to file a report passed.
The Free Chevron responded not long after the meeting by distributing a
document titled Clean the Careerists Out of CUP! It accused CUP of wanting the paper
to capitulate the Waterloo student council.
Where the concurrence of the views of CUPOtt [CUPs national office] and the
reactionaries at UW really stands out is their mutual position on the student press, it
said. In their panic to discredit the line of AIA, CUPOtt throws all of the CUP principles
to the wind and jumps into bed with the fascists.
Included in the evidence that CUP was in bed with fascists were the national
staffs assertions that any group on campus should be able to participate in the student
press and that papers might, on occasion, avoid running articles that they knew would
provoke a backlash.
The document then continued its tirade, adopting tone and syntax that sound like
they come right out of classic Marxist texts: These reactionaries at CUPOtt are the first
line of defense of the Canadian state . . . The AIA hereby calls on all democratic student
journalists to clean out the careerists, opportunists and reactionary elements out of the
CUP national office! It was obvious that there was no longer any opportunity for peace
between the CUPOtt office and The Free Chevron , but there was no evidence the paper
was going to leave CUP. In fact, it seemed to be attempting to mobilize the organization
against the staff.
By the fall of 1977, the situation had escalated with reports of physical
intimidation and violence from Waterloo. There was no semblance of democracy at the
paper, and that meant it was violating the Statement of Principles. At the national
conference, CUP voted to expel The Free Chevron. One might expect the decision would
be difficult in a year of withdrawals and restraint. But Johnson remembers an
overwhelming vote. We were glad to finally be having the battle, she says. We were
happy to distinguish between the CPC-ML [ALA] and the rest of the left. It was a
chance to show that CUP could take a stand against people of its own political persuasion
when those people were going too far.
So CUP headed for the end of the decade exhausted by two very divisive debates.
In his 1978-79 report, president John Wilson predicted that it would be a while before
CUP reached smoother waters. The Chevron challenged CUP from within; they were
answered. The challenge will be repeated from without.
Indeed, it would be. In the U.S., only 20 per cent of students called themselves
radical, according to The National Review, while far more called themselves
conservative, and 63 per cent opposed affirmative action. A trend started by Harvard
back to a basic core curricula did not encounter significant student opposition. In Canada,
meanwhile, Saturday Night featured a major survey of university students. Of those
surveyed, 84 per cent said they were satisfied with their material existence, 93 per cent
were more interested in their personal lives than they were two years earlier, while only
22 per cent were more interested in changing society than they had been two years
before. The author, J. Richard Finlay, believed current university students to be the most
dispirited and disillusioned of any in recent memory. They were cynical and looking for
leadership.
As if that werent enough of a challenge for CUP, many North American students
would, for that leadership, look to a man in his 70s who had not been known to
sympathize with demonstrating California students when he was governor of that state.

CHAPTER SIX: REAGONOMICS 101

Although Margaret Thatcher was elected a year before him, Ronald Reagan has come to
personify the conservatism that swept much of the western world in the 1980s. His
dominance underscored the fact that the United States has adopted an attitude light years
away from what seemed possible a decade earlier. While Lyndon Johnson had promised a
Great Society, Reagan merely wanted to know if people were better off than they had
been four years earlier. It was not the time to care about others and address the
fundamental flaws in society.
What astonished many was Reagans popularity on campuses. Just as Johnson had
grasped at a vision of a better society that did, to a lesser degree, encompass what
students would be agitating for at the end of his term, Reagan too enunciated a
philosophy that university and college students would adopt as their own. Political
activity on the left was rare enough that when it did happen, activists were often painted
as throw-backs to the 60s and anachronisms among their more realistic contemporaries.
One of the many for a for the new right on campuses was student newspapers. In
the 1982 story titled Conservative rebels on campus, Time looked at some of the new
publications that had sprung up over the preceding two years at Stanford, Northwestern,
Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth, among others. Although the papers did find a
wide readership, their appearance, all within a narrow span of time, was not completely
spontaneous. William Buckley, editor of The National Review, backed The Dartmouth
Review. The Institute for Educational Affairs, a right-wing think tank in New York, gave
$100,000 to 15 campus papers between 1980 and 1982.
Most of the papers were distributed free on campus, relying on private donors,
alumni subscriptions and some advertising. The Dartmouth Review received only 20 per
cent of its $70,000 budget from ads. We are here to balance student debate, said Paul
Davies, editor of The Stanford Review.
According to The New Republic, The Dartmouth Review balanced debate by :
running a headline on the cover that read Genocide means never having to say youre
sorry; using a staged photo of a black man in a noose to accompany an interview with a
Ku Klux Klan official; printing slogans like feminism causes warts; and attacking
affirmative action programs using a Harlem-stereotype jargon.
Canada had its own less strident version of such publications, the best known of
which was McGill University Magazine, started by Linda Frum. (She later had to change
the name when McGill threatened to sue over the use of the name McGill University.)
Frum came closest to being the darling of the new right in Canada. Of course, she earned
the scorn of campus leftists, especially The McGill Daily, where her name is still used in
conversation as synonym for devotee of the new right (i.e. the Linda Frums of this
world). She gained further infamy in 1988, when she wrote an article for Saturday Night
that argued universities had become too liberal and were admitting far too many people.
Since the 1960s, universities had been seen increasingly as an asset to society because
they were allowing more and more people to become educated. Frum, however, argued
that such a policy diluted the quality of both student and institution. Her solution was to
limit enrollment to the best students and return to an elite system where the brightest can
become brighter. It can be argued that cuts to post-secondary education funding are,
indeed, chipping away at the mass education of the 60s.
One result of the new rightward thinking on campus was that the left wing, out of
necessity, started to mobilize again. In a sense, the 1970s was a neutral era, when the left
faded but their accomplishments from the 1960s remained intact. With that legacy under
attack in the 1980s, activism started to show up again. It never came close to what
happened in the late 60s, but it had an effect.
Probably the most successful movement was to force university divestment from
South Africa. Although it had been building earlier, this activism really erupted in 1985,
when South Africa declared its state of emergency. It had began at Columbia in New
York, with the blockading of a building to back demands that the university divest any
holdings it had with companies that did business in South Africa. The blockade got
widespread media attention and divestment movements spread across the U.S. and in
Canada. It was successful because it had been pushing for years and the events of 1985 in
South Africa provided a catalyst.
By 1987, 128 American universities and colleges had divested nearly $4 billion,
and representatives of groups from 25 schools were invited to hearings of the United
Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid. In Canada, McGill was the first university
to divest in November, 1985. It was followed by Dalhousie in January and several other
schools, usually after a determined effort by students.
South Africa was the focus of another type of demonstration: holding the speaker
hostage, as Time called it. Glenn Babb, the South African ambassador, faced several
hurdles when he was booked to speak at the University of Toronto. A ceremonial mace
was thrown at his head, cutting short his address. When he tried to return, professors
attempted to block him with an injunction. When he did speak, 300 showed up to
demonstrate.
Again, American students had been the inspiration. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, cancelled a speech at Berkeley and ran into trouble at
the University of Minnesota because of students protesting American policy in Central
America. Smith College backed out of awarding her an honorary degree because it feared
a loss of decorum.
Another favourite cause in the U.S. was demonstrations against CIA recruiting on
campus. This, too, spilled over into Canada when the Canadian Security Intelligence
Service was formed in 1984 and gave leftists the opportunity to suspect that they were
being monitored. Military research, racism, womens issues and gay, lesbian and bisexual
rights were among the other issues identified in Tony Vellelas 1988 book New Voices:
Student Activism in the 80s and 90s.
Gender issues were the biggest causes on campuses in the late 80s. Campus
feminists took to scrawling the names of alleged rapists on the walls of womens
washrooms to alert other women. Demands for date rape education and more personal
safety were often met with backlashes from male students but acquiescence from student
governments and administrations. Women in the U.S. and Canada were also mobilized by
lengthy court battles over reproductive rights. Meanwhile, AIDS and the resulting
resurgency of homophobia have politicized gays. Sarah Ferguson, writing in the Village
Voice this spring, said: Such efforts belie the mass medias effort to write off todays
twentysomethings as an apathetic generation more concerned with career and personal
goals than with overt social change. Thats because most baby boomers who control the
media with their memories of Vietnam protests and ideology dont recognize sex and
gender protests as political. This generation, she notes grimly, is the first to associate sex
with dying. The personal had become political.
Despite this wide array of causes, students in the United States failed in attempts
to form a national political organization. They tended to stay at the local level, wrote
Maria Margaronis in The Nation in March 1988, because they feared taking risks, the
number of non-affluent students in their ranks was dropping and there was no over-
arching issue that affected them all. Left-leaning student leaders held a meting at Rutgers
University in February 1988 and had a constitution ready to ratify when black, Hispanic
and Asian students pointed out that they made up only 40 of 700 delegates. They asked
that no organization be officially formed until activists were more representative, and the
conference ended without a national organization being created.
In Canada, the Canadian Federation of Students has been operating since 1980,
when the lobbyist National Union of Students and the service-oriented Association of
Student Councils fused. The CFS has been middle-of-the-road, being forced to
accommodate center-to-right student councils as much as it can to gain the membership
of as many student councils as possible. Although members must have mustered the votes
to take stands on things like the Gulf War, CFS is always facing a backlash from
members who dont want the federation to discuss non-academic issues, issues that
dont affect students directly.
That tension relates directly to what CUP began to experience in the late 70s,
when withdrawing papers complained the news service was not relevant to the average
student. And although CFS has managed to walk the line until now, CUP has been unable
to please everyone; the vicious cycle begun by The Queens Journal, The Brunswickan
and the Western Gazette continued in the 1980s.

CHAPTER SEVEN: AGENTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE OR AGENTS OF SPARE
CHANGE?

At the start of the 80s, CUP diverted its attention from ideological issues for a
time to worry about what was financially required to stay alive. One of CUPs first acts in
the new decade was to appear before the Kent Commission on newspapers. Approved by
the membership, the brief was remarkably different in tone from Stewart Saxes call fro a
revolution at the Davey committee hearings a decade earlier. It was another strong
critique of the commercial media, arguing that concentration of ownership was
responsible for a lackluster, uncritical style of reporting that ultimately damaged
democracy. But it did not call for a dismantling of the chains. Rather, it suggested that the
government make changes like tax concessions and postal subsidies that would allow
alternative publications (like student newspaper) to prosper and provide a balance to the
bias of the mainstream press. Self-interest may have been a motive, but thats what the
1980s were all about.
The other non-ideological issue that was raging was CUPs contract with
Youthstream. CUP needed a national advertising plan; there was no question of that.
ButYouthstream, set up by CUP a decade earlier and run independently by a man named
Cam Killoran, wanted a new contract. Many members were against renewing because
they werent happy with the service they were getting. Sexism, racism and homophobia
were becoming big concerns and several papers objected to what they saw as offensive
content in many of the ads provided by Youthstream. A commission on Youthstream in
1979-80 had drawn up guidelines for advertising and presented them to the company, but
Killoran bristled. At the 43
rd
annual conference in 1980-81, CUP let the Youthstream
contract expire and set up Campus Plus, its own ad co-op.
Youthstream still existed, though, and CUP was facing a true dollars-and-cents
battle as Killoran tried to get individual papers to stay with Youthstream. For once, there
werent political debates raging in the organization, recalls John Parsons, CUPs
president in 1981-82. It was a taste of the 80s for sure a debate over dollars.
Because Killoran was offering free Youthstream membership (with his revenue
coming from commission) to papers that would have to fork over CUP fees to be with
Campus Plus, it soon became apparent which papers were in CUP for the ads and which
papers really believed in it. The race was on to sign up papers. CUP ended up losing 14
papers, including big ones like the Ryerson Eyeopener, the York Excalibur, the Guelph
Ontarion, and the University of Alberta Gauntlet.
The Gauntlet and many of the smaller papers that left eventually returned. But the
other large papers were gone for good and, with $40,000 drained from the 81-82
budget, cutbacks were needed again. The first thing to go was any consideration of a
CUP-published national magazine, which had been in the works for two years. But
cutting an idea doesnt recover revenue. The only alternative to cuts, according to
calculations by the national office was 69 per cent fee increase, which would clearly
make CUP even less palatable. The cuts to services, at least, were less visible to the
papers, and would be more effective in the short-term at stemming the flow of
withdrawals.
So the vice-president/features writer, which had become the third national office
position, was cut, along with an Ontario regional staffer and the Quebec bureau chief.
(Bureau chiefs had finally been established.) The national office letter to members
explaining the situation said the cutbacks instituted this year are for only one year . . .
Services cut this year will hopefully be reinstated.
In February 1982, another paper withdrew: The Imprint, the new student paper at
the University of Waterloo. Born after the Chevron fiasco, The Imprint had included
many of the moderate-to-left people who had been purged by the AIA faction. CUP had
been its mid-wife, giving it the start-up cash it needed to launch. But it left because, the
staff wrote, it could get its national ads from Youthstream and it could exchange stories
with other non-CUP papers. In other words, it wasnt worth the money.
The McGill Daily responded in a letter to The Imprint. The Daily, too, could
exchange stories and get ads without CUP fees. But theres the rub. For larger papers
CUP benefits are disproportionate to the benefits of the smaller papers. But should we
evaluate CUP on a cost analysis basis? No. CUP doesnt exist to give its members a high
return on their capital investment.
It was arguments like these that would dominate CUP for the remainder of the
decade. A major factor one which had harmed CUP throughout its history but which
was accentuated now was staff turnover at individual newspapers. A paper might be
very pro-CUP one year and endorse a CUP decision that the following years staff
despised. That staff might be sufficiently angry to pull out of CUP. And even if staff
opinion became more sympathetic to CUP again the following year, it was much easier to
leave CUP than to join it.
It was inevitable that the Statement of Principles, which had been the symbol of
CUPs radical tilt when it was amended in 1965 and 1967, would return to the forefront
and once again become the focus of ideological tension in the organization. After the
Youthstream defections, CUPs membership remained relatively stable for a good five
years. With survival not then a day-to-day concern, CUP could afford to elt the SOP
dominate the debate within the organization. While many papers had been swept along
with the excitement in 1965 and had voted for the amendments that year, the trend was
now away from radicalism, and attempt to moderate the Sop were the best way to go with
that flow. Typically, the Daily was the paper to start it all off, at the 45
th
annual
conference in 1982-83.
As it stands, the Statement of Principles is a pretty wimpy affair without much to
say about the political ideas which have united the majority of the student press for some
time, one delegate from McGill told the plenary. That reflects the fact that the student
press in Canada hasnt gotten serious about the politics which underlie its co-operation
since CUP got side-tracked in the mid-70s by the CPC-ML [at the Chevron], the
expansion debate and the Youthstream affair. It was true: the questioning of CUPs role
that had been building up until 1975 had been put aside for more pressing concerns. No
longer.
The SOP, argued the Daily, was not a doctrine to which all papers had to adhere.
It was the end product of discussion and reflected the will of the majority. If it didnt, the
ideas behind it had to change. Those ideas wont be applied back home because they
have to be as conditions of CUP membership. They will be applied because people from
different papers got together, discussed them, and were convinced that they are good
ideas.
The turnover in staff that caused other papers to make dramatic political shifts in
the span of a year was also evident at the Daily. Although it has demonstrated a
consistently high-quality socio-cultural critique since 1965, the paper has, at CUP
conferences, varied from being unco-operatively doctrinaire to incredibly pragmatic.
At the 1982-83 conference, it was the latter. The Dailys SOP proposal was
dramatically different and still very political, but it was, in fact, moderate compared to
the existing document. Rather than trying to define agent of social change with such
stipulations as supporting other agents of social change, the Daily proposed a version of
the old knowledge is power theme. Its draft said post-secondary education plays a key
role in maintaining the existing social order. In consequence, it said, a main priority of
the student press must be to provide students with information and analysis of the nature
and role of post-secondary education within the Canadian economic and social order . . .
and to assist students in mobilizing against that system where it is found to be preserving
the class structure.
In addition, it said papers had to be part of, and relevant to, their student
communities by covering campus news. By doing all of these things, the first section
concluded, the student press acts as an agent of social change. The rest of it was more
or less the same as the existing statement, with even more emphasis placed on autonomy
from student government control.
It was a remarkable document. By putting information in the hands of students,
the papers would give them the tools to work against the system, but only where it is
found to be preserving the class structure. In other words, the system itself was no
logner seen as inherently bad. It merely had flaws that could be correctede without
tearing down the framework itself. A seemingly minor point, but considering that a lot of
time is devoted to just such wording changes, the amendment, had it been successful,
would have represented a significant shift.
It won praise from delegates: Its a joy to read, said the Dalhousie Gazette. The
Gauntlet, which had returned to the fold, called it the clearest definition while the
Simon Fraser Peak called it terrific. A delegate from The Arthur at Trent said, Im
proud of this and I want to stick it to my door. All too typically, however, many papers
wanted to table it, consult their staffs, and vote the following year. The Daily delegates,
probably sensing what would happen, noted the existing SOP had never really been
discussed. They urged delegates to adopt their suggestion now and then discuss it, but
were defeated.
The result, of course, was that the Dailys proposal was lost forever. The
following year, the delegates voted unanimously to keep the SOPs now well-known
opening clauses. The unanimity was remarkable, probably helped along by an
amendment from more moderate papers that brought the doubters on side. The student
press must use its influence as an agent of social change responsibly, it said, presenting
campus, local, national and international news fairly and accurately, and interpreting
ideas and events to the best of its ability. The unanimous vote shows a minor addition
could placate the moderates that year, but without a long-term perspective, it was not
destined to keep them happy forever. The Daily proposal, with its more moderate
language, might have.
The issue faded for a while; for at least two years the length of collective
memory in CUP no one wanted to raise it again. People knew a unanimous vote
deserved some permanence. But some moderating changes took place elsewhere, and its
arguable that they were able to pass because they didnt touch the sacred SOP. Delegates
voted to establish coverage priorities for the national bureau chief: education, Canadian
student concerns, student organizations, and the federal governments youth and post-
secondary education policies. Those were fairly broad categories student concerns,
for example, could include anything under the sun, even the usual agent of social
change material but at least it finally had been codified that the primary focus of
coverage had to be students.
The following year, 1985-86, past-president Andre Picard tried to cut services and
lower fees pre-emptively, despite the lack of a crisis. It was an attempt to rationalize the
organization and look to the future. Picard had a sense of the currents of CUP history and
he believed it was better to make cuts when they would hurt the least, rather than have
them forced on CUP in the middle of a crisis. But he was soundly defeated.
In 1986-87, the SOP reappeared as an issue. The constitution commission
recommended that a code of ethics be appended to the SOP. The code laid out some
fairly standard tenets of responsible journalism, saying it was unethical to report
unsubstantiated opinion as fact, condemn people based on innuendo, distort meaning with
out-of-context quotations or misleading headlines, and accept gives from, or be involved
with, the group one might be covering. Again, it probably forestalled a debate on the
contentious clauses themselves.
It was fairly straightforward, but Lee Parpart, a news editor from The Charlatan at
Carleton University, found the debate oppressive. Papers like the Daily once again cast
in the role of villain opposed any qualification of agent of social change with ideas
like fairness, she says. To me, it looked like a bunch of kids trying to hang on to their
ideals. The code of ethics passed nonetheless, but it showed what kind of opposition a
real SOP overhaul might expect.
Yet thats exactly what happened the following year in Winnipeg, as CUP
returned to the site of its founding to celebrate 50 years as a co-operative. The
constitution committee, for whatever reason (the documents are not clear), decided to
attempt a major overhaul. It was attempting to deal with what it saw as several flaws: the
existing SOP was too long and awkwardly-worded; it didnt draw links between fair and
accurate journalism and social change; it implied uncritical support for activists, and so
on. Their new version tinkered a great deal but did not actually change the meaning of the
sop. It was, however, more concise and accessible.
In another year, it might have passed easily, but at CUP 50, there happened to be
a volatile mix of delegates, and the daily conference newsletter started to fill up with
alternate proposals. The Varsity from the University of Toronto wanted an SOP, but one
that would explicitely not infringe on editorial autonomy. The Atlantic papers felt a
blanket principle of defending human rights, with the specifics to be defined afterwards,
was best. The Daily circulated the statement of principles of La Presse Edudiante du
Quebec, which also held social change to be its primary role. Most ominously, the British
Columbia papers declared they opposed any change while the McMaster Silhouette
wanted the SOP eliminated and replaced with the Code of Ethics.
In classic CUP fashion, the constitution commission recommended tabling the
issue until the following year, when a special SOP commission at the national conference
would propose changes after hearing reports from member papers, each of which would
hold extensively staff discussions. This plan had worked five years earlier; why not try it
again?
But the commission had underestimated the seriousness of the delegates from The
Silhouette, The Gateway, and The Gauntlet, who, according to Charlatan editor-in-chief
Greg Ip, had come to the conference as straw men. They were there to make radical
demands for change that their papers knew would be rejected, giving them the pretext to
leave. Those actions were taken as trying to blackmail the entire organization, Ip
recalls. But he says it wasnt: people stay in organizations they like and leave the ones
they dont, especially when theyre paying several thousands of dollars in fees. The
SOP, says Ip, was the lightning rod for our problems. It represented everything that was
wrong with the organization.
Ip was on another commission, services and finance, the most important one at
the conference. It was charged with drawing up the budget for the following year and
deciding which services would be offered. He knew what would happen if there were
several withdrawals. Ip and the other Charlatan delegates met with The Ubyssey and
managed to put together a compromise.
As usual, the key change was in the opening, which held that the ideological
aims of the student press are to assist students in understanding and acting against
oppression and injustices, and emphasizing the rights and responsibilities of the student;
That the student press, to fulfill this role, performs both an educative and investigative
function, including searching out and exposing inequalities within society.
Compromise was indeed the word. It was quite a step for a centrist editor like Ip
to agree to this; similarly, for The Ubyssey to agree to anything that removed agent of
social change as the major role was significant. It was a step back to the knowledge
is power idea. In the eyes of many, agent of social change had come to mean papers
had to do it; this wording said papers would help students do it by informing them.
Splitting hairs, perhaps, but such is the nature of debate in CUP. The proposal was well-
received, with several of the moderate papers lining up to support it. Even the Gateway
and Gauntlet delegates liked it.
When the constitution commission brought its motion to table to the plenary, a
Charlatan delegate probably Ip but the minutes dont say moved that the Charlatan-
Ubyssey compromise be adopted as an interim statement. The delegate reminded the
plenary that a collective, by definition, incorporates the views of all members. We
should also remember that CUP 51 will be less at least two members if the conference
chooses to table the entire debate. We would then be going against our mandate as a
collective.
A Silhouette delegate sounded the same warning. If something isnt done about
the Statement of Principles this year, papers that want the statement kept the same wont
have any opposition next year when they return but maybe by next year, there wont be
anything to return to. Maybe thats what the people who want the Statement of Principles
kept the same would like. If I dont return to my paper with some indication that CUP is
amenable to change then I wont have any say in what happens to my paper.
The motion to table for a year passed, then the debate on the interim proposal
began. The Daily, supported by the Concordia Link and the Simon Fraser Peak, moved
its own interim SOP, which kept the agent of social change line and moreover
acknowledged our active role in the struggle for the radical transformation of the social,
economic and political structures of our society. The word radical set off alarm bells.
Ip says the Daily proposal was a pure maneuver . . . simply to stop our proposal
dead in its tracks. And it worked, he said. It sufficiently split the consensus on our
proposal, appealing to some papers that were willing to go either way. The Daily
proposal was defeated. The vote on the Charlatan-Ubyssey plan was 16-15 with four
abstentions, but because it was a constitutional change, it lacked the required two-thirds
to pass.
Following the conference, The Gateway, The Gauntlet and The Silhouette made
good on their threats and left, taking along the Saint Marys Journal, The Brock Press and
The Argus from Lakehead. With revenues suddenly down again, another crisis loomed.
The regional presidents met with incoming president Lynn Marchildon in Ottawa and
decided to slash the bureau chiefs, make other cuts and reduce fees by one-third. At the
same time, they came up with a dramatic new scheme that they hoped would make CUP
more attractive: a computer network. The electronic bulletin board system would
encourage papers to file stories to the news exchange with the touch of a button and
would allow them to get the news exchange instantly after its completion every Friday.
The rationalization was approved in a mail-in referendum, getting exactly the
two-thirds of the membership required to overturn a national conference decision. The
lower fees and the computer network, however, lured only one paper, The Argus, to
reverse its decision.
For Ip, Marchildon and others who cared about CUP, the 50
th
annual conference
had been a blow. It sort of broke an illusion that most of us had that CUP was invincible,
that it would never die, says Marchildon. The downward spiral was now definitely a
trend, perhaps irreversible. Its easy for a paper to make a decision to drop out but its
difficult to convince a paper to join, she explains. Its just an infinitely greater amount
of energy you have to spend.
Ip reacted to the debacle with a now-legendary article for the CUP House Organ
titled CUP will be dead in two years.
Maybe itll be more than two years; three at the outside. It could be sooner. The
organization is collapsing under a vicious cycle of increasing fees and declining
membership, a deadweight of bureaucracy, expensive and inefficient services,
hypocritical ideology and a self-righteousness that blinds it to the need for reform.
Ip had hit the nail on its proverbial head. Although cited, the SOP was no longer
the true reason a paper would leave, as it had been when The Queens Journal and The
Brunswickan bolted ten years earlier. Rather, the issue had hardened the organization and
made it more difficult to adapt. It had forced enough papers out to put CUP into the cut
services, lose members, cut services cycle, but that cycle had now taken on a life of its
own. While the SOP was a lightening rod, its conceivable that papers could have
swallowed it if fees had been half of what they were. As well, the SOP debates showed
disenchanted members that CUP was not truly a collective, but a body ruled by a
majority. If a proposal had the votes to pass, the opinions of the minority didnt matter.
That may have always been the case, but the minoritys differences of opinion with the
majority hadnt been as sharp then.
Although correct in his diagnosis, Ip was wrong with his prognosis. Its been over
three years since he wrote his piece, and CUP is still alive. But it has spent the three years
since its last SOP debate just trying to get on its feet again. The following year, a five per
cent fee increase was approved while the national features writer came under the axe
again. Desperate for revenue, CUP took the extraordinary step of allowing non-CUP
papers to sign on with Campus Plus for national advertising. They did not get a vote
that remained the right of CUP members but their presence on the rate card boosted
Campus Plus revenues and allowed CUP a financial breather.
In 1989-90, the organization was able to start pulling itself out of its rut. The
bureau chiefs were reinstated at half-time wages and the third job was returned to the
national office, although it was to be a fundraiser, reflecting again the financial straits. A
spirit of co-operation pervaded the national conference, especially when the papers from
Ontario voted to do without a bureau chief so that the western region could afford two to
cover its wide area, one in Vancouver and one in Winnipeg. There was hope that the hard
times might be over. But the 1990-91 Abbotsford conference, The Sheafs last, brought
the same old issues to the surface, centered around the debate over the consulting
committee, the so-called Triple-E board of directors. It wasnt the SOP, but the issue
still managed to cut to the core of the dilemmas facing CUP.
Without the committee, concluded the report of the long-term planning
commission, CUP will continue to lurch from national to national, with only a vague
sense of what has gone before. If the co-operative is to resolve its identity crisis, it has to
have a memory. The Big Questions are yet to come.
CONCLUSION: THE MORE THINGS CHANGE . . .

Besides its internal problems, CUP faced two major external threats in 1990-91.
The first was the strengthening of The Network, a group of student newspapers most of
them former CUP members that have set up a loosely-knit news exchange. The
Queens Journal, the Western Gazette, The Gauntlet and The Gateway are among the
papers that fax one or two stories per issue to the office of the McGill Tribune, the
Dailys right-wing rival on campus. Someone in the Tribune office assembles them into a
package, and then faxes the package back to each of the papers participating. There is no
editing and the only fee is transmission costs. Some CUP members fear The Network will
become increasingly attractive to CUP papers. The Daily, before it pulled out,d emanded
that CUP change into something similar to The Network, but using electronic mail. And
in an April story, the Dalhousie Gazette reported that the Daily was talking to the
Network about co-operation.
The second threat was from university and college administrators and student
government leaders, who cracked down on several newspapers that ran a controversial
article called A Gay Mans Guide to Erotic Safe Sex. It features graphic descriptions of
homosexual acts that incorporated safe sex tips, to show that safe sex can be erotic. The
feature originated at The Muse, the CUP member paper at Memorial University in St.
Johns. When The Muse was threatened with closure and obscenity charges, the piece
was placed on the news exchange and other papers started running it to show their
solidarity with The Muse. The predictable happened: the Dalhousie student government
threatened to take away the Gazettes funds, the University of Winnipeg student council
tried to fire the editor of The Uniter, and The Cord at Wilfrid Laurier University, which
had left CUP but got a copy of the article, was actually shut down for a week until the
editors pledged not to do anything controversial again. Other papers faced similar
intimidation. CUP papers were mobilized, in a way that hadnt been seen in CUP for
some time, to write letters of support.
On the surface, these two problems make it seem as if there had been little change
in the student press. On the one hand, The Network is picking up popularity doing
exactly what CUP did before its modern era swapping stories, nothing more, nothing
less. And the furore over the safe sex article makes it seem as if little has changed in the
tendency of campus bodies to want to censor the student press.
But there are differences. The Network is not democratic; one paper does the
work. The person or people at The Tribune are not elected and papers that subscribe do
not vote on policy. If it grows, will it continue to fax out everything it receives? If not,
who will be held accountable for the decisions? In that regard, CUP still has the
advantage of a democratic structure, despite its inefficiency.
And the Muse story was different from the kind of material that used to get
censored. In the late 1960s, for example, the McGill Daily reprinted a satirical article
from an American publication that described Lyndon Johnson performing necrophilia on
the corpse of John F. Kennedy. Administrations would react against that, while allowing
student papers to objectify women by putting the best-looking froshette on their front
page. Intentional provocation is rarer today, as is sexist, racist and homophobic content.
The article that caused so much trouble for papers in 1990-91 was an educational article
about how to have safe sex. It was a public service for members of the community who
werent getting the information elsewhere. In both cases, its demonstrable that a flawed
CUP is better than no CUP.
The Muse controversy does raise another important issue, however, that ties into
the trend of political correctness on campuses. In general, the measures that go hand-
in-hand with PC are things CUP papers have traditionally supported: affirmative action
hiring; changes to curriculum to balance out the male Eurocentric bias; and disciplining
of students who are openly sexist, racist or homophobic.
But student newspapers must be wary of the regulation of speech, because it is
reminiscent of the concept of in loco parentis that universities abandoned in the late
1960s. That principle held that universities could be surrogate parents for students while
they were on campus, regulating behavior with alcohol bans, curfews and the like. The
Village Voice reported, in an article on gender politics on campuses, that Northwestern
University of Chicago now requires non-student proctors at parties.
By calling loudly for more regulation of some aspects of behavior, activists may
be giving universities the license to take away some of the liberties their predecessors
fought for 25 years ago. Indeed, the Muse controversy forced students at many CUP
papers to re-examine their positions. If theyd been demanding that administrations deal
with speech that offered certain groups, couldnt the Memorial University administration
counter that the safe sex story had done exactly that?
The emerging debate about political correctness yet another trend in academia
that emerged in the U.S. and started to seep northward may give CUP an opportunity to
re-examine its political stances. The activist voices it has long allied with have not
received this much attention since the late 1960s, and their supposed victories have been
greeted with a consistently hostile reaction in the mainstream press. The reaction shows
that CUP, a traditional supporter of the newly-labelled PC forces, still has a role to play
in providing students with an alternative perspective.
CUP must first be stable. Three years ago, Greg Ip was wrong that CUP would
soon be dead. People who have made similar predictions this year after the loss of The
Sheaf, the Daily and The Peak may be wrong, too. How can anyone know when the real
breaking point will be? A large organization like CUP develops a certain inertia that
delays even inevitable disintegration. CUP has also adopted measures to make it more
difficult to leave. A newspaper must have two votes on dropping its membership, one in
September and one in March, both well-advertised to staffers 30 days in advance. Even
then, the withdrawal goes into effect only a year later, meaning sudden votes to depart
dont lead to an equally sudden loss of revenue.
Despite this delay, the fees from the three papers that withdrew in 1990-91 will be
gone some day. At that time, cuts to services will again seem like the easy route, since
they are less immediately visible than higher fees. They will, however, catch up and
eventually lead to a less appealing product.
CUP is like Canada, says Dave Naylor, the editor of The Charlatan in 1990-91.
Its incredibly diverse and theres so much potential there, but you have this feeling
well destroy ourselves before we reach that potential.
The solution? The key is bringing fees down, says John Montesano, the 1991-
92 president. That may mean some cuts, but its better to make them voluntary than wait
until theyre forced. As opposed to saying, This is what CUP has been doing for the last
ten years, do you want it? we kind of pare it down and say, Get involved, it wont cost
you too much, and lets see what everybody wants, lets see what everybody is willing to
pay for.
Naylor feels that with fees down, CUP would be able to lure members back. But
the political climate would have to change, too. Others agree. As much as I was inspired
by the SOP, says 1988-89 president Lynn Marchildon, I really think that has to subdue
itself and take a back seat to the services. But both the service cuts that would allow
lower fees and the ideological changes are bound to be unpopular, and Montesano,
despite his optimism, might find himself humiliated on the plenary floor with his
proposals in shreds if he attempts them. And CUP would continue to lurch towards the
abyss.
That loss would be regrettable. Even if it downplayed its politics, the need for a
CUP perspective would still e there. Chris Lawson, the 1989-90 bureau chief, is
unapologetic about the political line of CUP. Every newspaper is political. It would be
more descriptive to say it was left-wing. Lawson says the vast majority of stories during
his tenure dealt with education and accessibility to the post-secondary system. Were the
four stories about gay rights in the news exchange in one term too much? He asks. If
there had been no stories on gay rights, would the exchange have then been considered
objective? Lawson says CUP still has a role to play countering the pervasive, but less
obvious, bias of the mainstream press.
That much is true, as evidenced by the mainstream reaction to political
correctness. If CUP could look back to the Dailys proposal for the SOP at the 45
th
annual
conference, it might find the statement that best sums up both its aspirations and what it
actually can do. Good, aggressive journalism can expose the inequities that CUP wants to
eliminate, and putting that information in the hands of students can give them the means
to act. Knowledge is power. CUP may have to settle for nothing more in the 1990s. But it
should settle for nothing less.

APPENDIX
CANADIAN UNIVRSITY PRESS
A CHRONOLOGY

1926: Formation of the National Federation of Canadian University Students.

1938: CUP formed at NFCUS conference in Winnipeg.

1958-59: Doug Parkinson elected to serve as first full-time CUP president.

1959-60: CUP establishes permanent national office in Ottawa; drafts the Charter o the
Student Press in Canada (later to be renamed the Statement of Principles).

1963-64: Le Carabin from Laval and La Rotonde from the University of Ottawa, CUPs
last two French papers, leave the organization.

1965-66: The charter is amended to read that one of the major roles of the student press
is to act as an agent of social change.

1966-67: Telex is introduced to allow rapid story transmission.

1968-69: CUP eliminates the post of honorary president. Canadian Union of Students
loses 18 on-campus membership referenda and dissolves.

1969-70: Youthstream, the national advertising co-operative, is established.

1971-72: The news exchange is cut back from six to three times a week to allow for more
analytical reporting.

1975-76: CUP rejects membership of non-student papers and approves, at a special
March national plenary, the first stage of an expansion plan.

1976-77: Phase two of expansion is approved at another special March plenary. The
Queens Journal, the Western Gazette, the UNB Brunswickan and the UVIC Martlet
leave CUP over politics and fees. With the expansion plan in tatters, CUPOtt makes
drastic cuts.

1977-78: News exchange cut to once a week, the Chevron at University of Waterloo is
expelled after two years of control by members of the Communist Party of Canada-
Marxist Leninist.

1979-80: Youthstream contract cancelled and CUP establishes Campus Plus, its own ad
co-op. CUP loses 14 members to Youthstream and cuts the VP/Features writer and some
staff.

1983-84: After discussions at member papers staffs, the Statement of Principles is
unanimously re-adopted. CUP conferences adopt alternating speakers lists.

1986-87: Fieldworkers are cut and their duties are assigned to regional co-presidents. A
code of ethics is added to the Statement of Principles.

1987-88: The great SOP debate. The issue is tabled; an interim SOP gets a plurality but
not the required two-thirds majority. A budget that includes provisions for withdrawals
fails. The Gauntlet, The Gateway, and the Silhouette leave CUP. A referendum ratifies
emergency cuts, including the loss of regional bureau chiefs.

1988-89: Computer bulletin board is established. Desperate for revenue, CUP lets non-
member papers allowed to join Campus Plus without voting power.

1989-90: CUP 52 opens two weeks after Ecole Polytechnique murders; two papers, The
Cord and the Argus, are reprimanded for sexist content. The Cord later withdraws.

1990-91: Half-time bureaus are back as well as third CUPOtt position. The Sheaf votes to
leave. CUP establishes consulting committee. McGill Daily and SFU Peak vote to leave.

SOURCES

1. INTERVIEWS

ALBOIM, ELLY. CUP national bureau chief, 1968-69. By phone May 8.

CALAMAI, PETER. CUP Ontario regional president, 1965-66. In person May 12.

COLLINS, TERRY. Editor, the Queens Journal, 1976-77. By phone June 17.

DOHERTY, JAKE. Editor, the Xaverian Weekly, 1957-58. In person June 19.

FISHER, DEANNE. CUP president, 1989-90. In person Jan 3.

IP, GREG. Editor, The Charlatan, 1987-88. By phone June 10.

JOHNSON, SUSAN. CUP president, 1976-77. By phone June 28.

LALONDE, MICHELLE. CUP national bureau chief, 1987-88. By phone June 27.

LAWSON, CHRIS. CUP national bureau chief, 1989-90. In person June 19.

MACFADDEN, PATRICK. Editor, The McGill Daily, 1965-66. By phone June 16.

MARCHILDON, LYNN. CUP president, 1988-89. By phone June 11.

MCGILLIVRAY, DON. Editor, The Sheaf, 1950. By phone June 6.

MONTESANO, JOHN. CUP president, 1991-92. By phone June 16.

NAYLOR, DAVE. Editor, The Charlatan, 1990-91. By phone June 16.

PARPART, LEE. Member, constitution commission, 1986-87 CUP conference. In person
June 21.

PARSONS, JOHN. CUP president, 1981-82. By phone June 17.

RENIERS, PAUL. Editorial collective member, The Peak, 1990-91. In person January 3.

SCHACHTER, HARVEY. McGill University student council rep, late 1960s. In person
June 12.

SELLAR, DON. CUP president, 1966-67. By phone June 6.

TAYLOR, ALEX. Staff member, The Sheaf, 1990-91. In person Jan 2.

2. BOOKS

Altbach, Phillip G. (editor). Student Political Activism: An International Reference
Handbook. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Howe, Irving (editor). Student Activism. Indianapolis: Bolls-Merrill Co., 1967.

Levine, Arthur. When Dreams and Heroes Died: A Portrait of Todays College
Student.San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980.

Levitt, Cyril. Children of Privilege: Student Revolt in the Sixties. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1984.

Lipset, Seymour Martin. Rebeillion in the University. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1971.

McGuigan, Gerald F. Student Protest. Toronto: Methuen, 1968.

Peterson, Richard. May 1970: The Campus Aftermath of Cambodia and Kent State.
Berkeley: The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1971.

Segal, Peter and Robert M. Pickett. Student Political Involvement in the 1970s. Port
Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1979.

Vellela, Tony. New Voices: Student Activism in the 80s and 90s. Boston: South End
Press, 1988.

Verzuh, Ron. Underground Revolutionaries: Canadas Flower Child Revolutionaries.
Toronto: Deneau Publishers, 1989.


3. ARTICLES AND TEHSES

Banowsky, William S. Finally, some good news, in The National Review, July 18,
1975.

Bell, Joseph. Silence on Campus, in Harpers Magazine, March, 1976.

Brown, Nancy. A General Analysis of the Student Power Movement in Canada. Carleton
University: Honors Research Project, 1969.

Crosby, Louise. Bygone bylines: Prominent Candians recall days as student journalists,
in The Ottawa Citizen, Dec 26, 1987.

Davis, Robin. Rag-time at Dartmouth, in The New Republic, Aug 16-23, 1982.

Fennel, Tom. The Silencers, in Macleans, May 27, 1991.

Ferguson, Sarah. Sex on Campus: How Making Love Became the Vietnam of the 90s,
in The Village Voice, April 9, 1991.

Finlay, J. Richard. The strange skeptical mood of the campus, in Saturday Night,
October, 1979.

Frum, Linda. Reaching for the mediocre, in Saturday Night, September, 1988.

Henry, William A. III. Conservative rebels on campus, in Time, Nov 8, 1982.

Kesler, Charles R. The movement of student opinion, in The National Review, Nov 23,
1979.

Marchard, Philip. The destruction of the universities, in Saturday Night, October, 1976.

Margaronis, Maria. Beyond the Fragments, in The Nation, March 26, 1988.

Marshall, Eliot. Money on campus: The latest student unrest, in The New Republic,
Oct 27, 1973.

Morrow, Lance. Holding the speaker hostage, in Time, April 11, 1983.

Poitras, Jacques. Collectivism at work, in Content, January/February, 1991.

Verzuh, Ron. CUP as crucible, in Content, March/April 1988.

Voitk, Inger. Student Ideals in Canada. Carleton University: Honors Research Project,
1964.

Weissman, Stephen R. No retreat from commitment: The less militant campus, in The
Nation, June 18, 1973.

Wierzynski, Gregory. The students: All quiet on the campsu front, in Time, Feb 22,
1971.

Zoldners, Arta. North American Student Demonstrations in the 1960s.Carleton
University: Honors Research Project, 1966.

______. Budget cuts: The new campus issue, in Time, May 12, 1975.

______. Pulling back on permissiveness, in Time, March 27, 1978.

______. University paper service moves to sell ad space, in The Globe and Mail,
February 11, 1981.

______. An outbreak of activism, in Macleans, Feb 24, 1986.


4. CUP DOCUMENTS
(Some documents identified in the text are not listed here because they were not part of
House Organs or similar packages, which are listed here.)


A) With authors identified:

Black, Sidney (CUP president). Memo to Dave Jenkins, president, Canadian Union of
Students. Sept 9 1963.

Boylan, Sharon. Democracy in the Student Press working paper for 33
rd
national
conference. December, 1970.

Calamai, Peter (Ontario regional president). The Purposes and Goals of a University
Newspaper. Report to the 28
th
annual national conference. December 1965.

Chudos, Robert. News: A non-novel fiction. 1972.

Coull, Gary and Ron Dodd. The Pink Proposal. January 1975.

Coupar, Doug (editor, Martlet). Open letter to CUP papers. January 1975.

Diemer, Ulli et al. What should CUP be doing in the period ahead? Position paper
presented to the 37
th
national conference. December 1974.

Dufort, John (CUP national secretary). Annual fall report. 1967.

Ip, Greg (Charlatan editor). CUP will be dead in two years. Spring 1988.

Mansour, Valerie (Atlantic fieldworker). Knowing our past. (Five-page CUP history
circulated to members.) Undated.

Mitchell, Paul and Keith Reynolds. Regional Bureaus. National office fall report. 1974.

OConnor, Dan (CUP vice-president). Untitled historical review, 1976.

Peterson, Kevin (CUP president). Annual fall report. 1967.

Saxe, Stewart (CUP president). Annual fall report. 1969.

Sellar, Don (CUP president). Annual fall report. 1966.

Smith, Cathy (National bureau chief). End-of-year report. April 1981.

Willick, Liz (CUP president), et al. National office report to 34
th
national conference.
December 1971.

Wilson, John (CUP president). Presidential report. 1978-79.

Yarnel, Sarah and Don McClelland (editors, Queens Journal). Letter to CUPOtt.
February 1976.


B. With authors unidentified (listed in order of publication).

National Office bulletin no. 2. Sept. 9, 1963.

Conference report, 27
th
national conference. December, 1964.

The Charter of the Student Press in Canada. 1964-65 version.

Canadian University Press-Presse Etudiante Nationale joint brief to the Royal
Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Sept. 1, 1965.

Constitution commission report, 28
th
national conference. December, 1965.

McGill Daily/ Georgian / Loyala News discussion paper on the Charter of the Student
Press in Canada.

The Charter o fthe Student Press in Canada. 1965-66 version.

Constitution commission report, 31
st
national conference. December 1968.

Legislation report, 31
st
national conference. December 1968.

The Statement of Principles of the Student Press in Canada. 1970-71.

Conference report, 33
rd
national conference. December 1970.

Conference report, 34
th
national conference. December 1971.

News service proposal from CUPOtt to 34
th
national conference. December 1971.

House Organ vol. 36, no 4. November 1973.

House Organ vol. 36, no. 9, January 1974.

House Organ vol. 37, no. 2. October 1974.

On the question of membership, the alternate press and parasitism. Position paper by
The McGill DailyMarxist-Leninist delegation to the 37
th
national conference. December
74.

Ubysseyposition paper on the alternative press, presented to the 37
th
annual conference.
December 1974.

National office fall report, presented to the 38
th
national conference. December 1975.

Membership report, 38
th
national conference. December 1975.

Minutes, 38
th
annual conference. January 1976.

Minutes, special national plenary. Mach 1976.

House Organ vol. 39, no. 1. October 1976.

House Organ vol. 39, no. 3. November 1976.

Minutes, 39
th
annual conference. January 1977.

House Organ vol. 39, no. 5. January 1977.

House Organ vol 39. no 6. February 1977.

House Organ vol. 39, no. 9. March 1977.

A summary of regional expansion proposals. Prepared for special national plenary,
March 1977.

On CUPs ethics and principles. Prepared for special national plenary. March 1977.

This years expansion: A review. Prepared for special national plenary. March 1977.

Minutes, special national plenary. March 1977.

Clean the careerists out of CUP! By The Free Chevron. April 1977.

House Organ vol. 40, no. 1. April 1977.

House Organ vol. 40. no. 2. June 1977.

House Organ vol. 40, no. 3. July 1977.

House Organ vol. 40, no. 10. Undated. 1977.

Executive report, presented to 40
th
national conference. December 1977.

Services commission report, presented to 40
th
national conference. December 1977.

House Organ vol. 40, no. 11. Undated. 1977.

Minutes, 42
nd
national conference. January 1980.

Canadian University Press submission to the Royal Commission of Newspapers.
December 1980.

The cutbacks are here. National office report. Undated 1981.

Letter of withdrawal to CUPOtt from The Ontarion. February 19, 1981.

Letter of withdrawal to CUPOtt from The Gauntlet, March 2, 1981.

House Organ vol. 44. no 1. October 1981.

House Organ vol. 44. no. 3. December 1981.

Services commission report to 44
th
annual conference. December 1981.

National executive report to 44
th
annual conference. December 1981.

House Organ vol. 44. no 4. February 1982.

House Organ vol. 44. no 5. April 1982.

House Organ vol. 45. no 1. September 1982.

Minutes, 45
th
national conference. January 1983.

House Organ vol. 46. no 3. September 1983.

House Organ vol. 46. no. 9. February 1984.

Minutes, 47
th
national conference. January 1985.

Minutes, 49
th
national conference. January 1987.

Nightly newsletter, 50
th
national conference. December 1987-January 1988.

Constitution committee report to the 50
th
national conference. December 1987.

The Charlatan-Ubyssey Statement of Principles compromise. Presented to the 50
th

national conference. January 1988.

Another view. McGill Daily position paper on the Statement of Prinicples, including
proposed redraft. Presented to 50
th
national conference. January 1988.

Minutes, 50
th
national conference. January 1988.

National office and regional reports, prepared for 51
st
national conference. December
198.

Statement of Principles commission report to 51
st
national conference. December 1988.

Synopsis of events, 51
st
national conference. January 1989.

Staff Handbook, 1989 revised edition.

Staff reports to 52
nd
national conference. December 1989.

Minutes, 52
nd
national conference. January 1990.

Letter of withdrawal to CUPOtt from The Sheaf. Nov 28, 1990.