When did Stewart and Dianne get married? My guess is 1972. Brian Cere took several rolls of photographs at the event.

I was there with various Dumont and ex-Chevron folks. Most people were vastly overdressed, if you ask me. Roddy was not overdressed, except perhaps considering the temperature. Ron Colpitts compromised a bit. I remember following Roddy's lead in this respect, which I can demonstrate as soon as I find the relevant image among the dozens that Brian shot.

Found it. What was I thinking?

Other pix:

• Arel Agnew and Brian Iler
• Leslie Buresh, Brenda Wilson, and Liz Willick
• Dianne and Stewart

One of the early treasures of the current People's History project, this half-forgotten and mostly unknown document was discovered in the Dumont Archives just a few months ago. It was written around March 1971 and scanned from the original document in August 2020, and then digitally remastered, edited solely for spelling and punctuation and reformatted for Web publication in October 2020. The Need to Print is a foundational document outlining the process and the vision which guided the establishment of Dumont Press Graphix that same year, and many more after that. The writing of the document was probably a collaborative effort. Gary Robins was one of the co-authors, but beyond that we are just not sure. What we do have here, however, are the roots to the whole Dumont Press adventure.

“How the media withheld the messages”
How Maclean’s obscured the issues

by Steve Izma
from King St. Works, issue no. 1, June 9, 1972

The June 1972 issue of Maclean’s magazine contains three articles grouped under the title “How the Media withheld the message in Kitchener.” The “Chronology of events” reveals an apparent conspiracy among the Kitchener media to keep silent the plans to sell downtown properties to Oxlea Investments, a land-development company contracted to tear down the Kitchener city hall, the farmers’ market, and other adjacent buildings. There is also a “criticism” by Senator Keith Davey who laments the sad conspiracy and applauds the efforts of a conscience-stricken [Kitchener-Waterloo] Record reporter and the student journalists of the University of Waterloo newspaper, the chevron. After these two articles appears a “defence” by the Kitchener media, who claim to have been acting as “good corporate citizens” in keeping the issue quiet.

This whole presentation is supposed to be a searing criticism of the local media. The Maclean’s editorial lends the sense of the articles when it reports: “The relationship between the men who make the news and the men who report the news is never easy. But seldom has it been more abused than it was in Kitchener.... Kitchener journalists made a bad decision when they withheld information vital to their community.”

Yet what is actually presented is a mere slapping of the wrists. By dealing with the wrong issues and sensationalizing much of the events last summer, Maclean’s ignores many questions never answered by the Kitchener media and as well covers up what may well be the underlying intentions of the media concerning the development project.

The presentation of the events together with the opinions of the writers hardly allows readers to deal with the real circumstances and make their own conclusions.

Much of the circumstances surrounding the breaking of the news to the community (before the time agreed upon by the established media) by the chevron is not only false but made into a ridiculous drama. The chevron did not get its story from Record reporter Castillo nor on Maclean’s reported date of June 23. The whole story is dealt with like an afternoon TV soap-opera, as if the only importance to what the chevron presented was the fact that it out-scooped the Record—Laura Secord warning the people in the nick of time.

The most important aspects of the whole situation are ignored—the questions that the chevron asked which both the media and the city council failed to deal with: Will the city be selling the property for less than its worth? Will the city lose money in paying for rent in new office buildings? How is this going to affect taxes in future years? Why does downtown redevelopment depend on the plans of this particular developer (Oxlea)? Were any other developing plans studied? What say do the people in the community have over these decisions?

Maclean’s articles do not deal with the problems Castillo had in trying to legitimately publish details of the development; that is, the connections of persons within city government, media, and the developers. These problems eventually caused Castillo to quit the Record.

There is no mention in the articles that the property values of the K-W Record building would be affected by the project. (The Record will be selling their downtown property soon.)

One of the major buildings of the project is a new Eaton’s department store. The articles did not deal with how the media felt about Eaton’s threatening to move out of Kitchener if the details of the project did not go through, or the loss of advertising revenue that would follow.

In fact there is no mention of any community response other than the actual referendum, which, presented by itself, can be interpreted in many different ways. Why did the media conspire to hide the plans until such time when the project was almost completely approved and when people in the community would have very little opportunity to discuss the above questions (which the media never asked)? Of course, the media gave answers to questions they thought were relevant, but their conspiring attitude towards the project is quite significant in discrediting their intentions. Who was going to allow the people to ask their own questions?

Senator Keith Davey wields a spaghetti-lash on the Record. He presents a few facts implying that those who control the Record have material interests in the development: that John Motz, publisher of the Record is a director of Canada Trust, which owns 10 per cent of Oxlea Investments, the developer (in another article it is mentioned that the chairman of the Urban Renewal Committee, C.N. Weber, is also a director of Canada Trust, and that the vice-chairman of the Urban Renewal Committee, Bill McGregor, is vice-president of Central Ontario Television Ltd., which owns Kitchener’s only TV station and two of its radio stations). Davey also states that the Record considered itself to be acting as a “good corporate citizen” in witholding the information of the project. Yet he discounts, in a rather feeble way, the importance of these connections by talking of his friendship with McGregor, and by merely accepting at surface value Motz’s supposed ignorance of the connections. He emphasises that as a “good corporate citizen” the Record was only identifying as businessmen in their minds and not in their bank books, which is not an easy, off-the-cuff conclusion to come to considering the other material connections suggested. Interestingly, Davey is quoted in the news-breaking issue of the chevron (from his report on mass media) as admitting that media serves those who pay for its services—not the readers.

Senator Davey suggested that Kitchener may have a paternalistic press, “a collection of journalists who can be seduced into the belief that their interests are identical with some congenial part of their community.” This probably applies to most of the staff of the Record, but Davey never asks the question: “seduced by who?” There is an apparent split between most of the staff of the newspaper and the various owners and editors who initiated the policy of secrecy. Whose ideals and values had the upper hand is quite apparent from the problems that caused Castillo to quit and from the efforts of the editors to cover up a phony letter to the editor (written by an editorial writer and signed by the editor-in-chief as “John A. Schmidt”), despite the dissatisfaction of the staff. By stressing Castillo’s role in the situation in an unrealistic way, the Maclean’s articles seem to be implying that there will always be someone within the established press who will make up for its errors—which is not too safe a bet.

In “A Defence by the Kitchener Media” the representatives of the Record and the various radio and TV stations involved claim through the analogy of a “soap bubble” that the project was fragile and had to be protected by secrecy. This again implies that the plan worked out by the “leading citizens” of Kitchener was the only feasible plan, while Oxlea is certainly not the only developer available for such a project.

Considering that it is the nature of the interests of the people who control media that these conditons of restrictive reporting exist, Davey’s solutions to the problems are hardly adequate: he suggests that the Canadian Radio Television Commission and the Ontario Press Council examine the issues and pass judgement on the local media. Since these commissions are comprised of the same sort of people who are involved in controlling the direction of Kitchener’s media it is hardly likely that their values are any different.

But Davey is probably quite correct in thinking that “it will be a long time before Kitchener can trust its newspaper and broadcasters again.” And what about Maclean’s? It happens to be owned by Maclean-Hunter who also own the other two radio stations in Kitchener.

In the editorial of the same Maclean’s issue appears the statement: “Democracy and freedom does not survive where public opinion has no channel through which it can find an outlet.” Very important words, but hardly sincere if Maclean’s purpose for presenting the Kitchener media article is to make itself look like a truly representative publication. By so seriously misrepresenting the situation it falls guilty of the same criticism that it has applied to the Kitchener media.

One of the first steps in establishing Dumont was securing the typesetting contracts that would make the enterprise viable. To this end, Dumont started negotiating in the fall of 1970 with The Chevron, WLU's Cord Weekly, U of Guelph's The Ontarion, and Conestoga College's The Spoke. The first issue of The Chevron to be produced at Dumont was on May 12, 1971. The first issue of The Spoke followed on Sept. 18 and the Cord Weekly on Sept. 28.

Preface, September 2022

In September 1976, members of the Anti-Imperialist Alliance engineered a takeover of the Chevron. A number of us from Dumont were contributing to the paper at the time and had a direct experience of the repercussions of this. But I think we were all surprised when the Federation of Students attempted to shut down the paper entirely and evict the staff from the Campus Centre. It didn’t go over well, and the struggle for control of the Chevron continued for a number of years.

A commission investigating these actions held hearings during the summer of 1977. I don’t recall who set it up, but it had the backing of the University administration. I made an oral presentation to the commission, but I suspect my typeset version of it never made it into the commission’s records. I typeset it because it was much faster for me to use Dumont’s keyboards and the VIP (and then photocopy the results) than to use a typewriter and litres of white-out. In any case, I recently found the paste-ups and scanned them, then ran an OCR program on them and corrected the results. I think this (admittedly very long) report gives a good perspective on all the hassles around the AIA coup and the subsequent Shane Roberts actions in an unsuccessful attempt to kick them out.

Introduction

One of the most unfortunate aspects of the closing of the Chevron in September 1976 was that it occurred at a time when the rejuvenation of the staff through input of new student volunteers looked very likely. For most of the previous year and especially during the previous six months, the staff had been wracked with arguments and sectarian political tension, often expressing itself in personal terms. The most serious result of this conflict was the inability of the staff to operate as a newspaper collective. Since for a large number of staff members this form of operation was a central reason for working on the newspaper, the tension (both political and personal) that existed at the Chevron office made working on the paper intolerable (especially in the case of volunteers, but even among members of the paid staff) and resulted in a much-depleted staff by early September.

The political tensions had external repercussions as well. The student readership made increasing complaints about the political nature of the paper, specifically, content attributed to the Anti-Imperialist Alliance (AIA). It became apparent to many of the non-AIA staffers that it was the paternalistic and dogmatic language of the AIA stories that angered the students more so than the political nature of the articles. Political features had survived in the Chevron since 1968 and had generally been an acceptable aspect of the paper. By early 1976, however, the AIA style had become identified with politics in general and this escalated the conflict between AIA and non-AIA staff members. (See Appendices for examples of student and staff complaints in this area). By the summer of 1976, it became clear to the non-AIA members of the Chevron staff—who found it increasingly necessary to confront the AIA members over their use of language as well as their political relevancy to students—that the AIA was not interested in working with the rest of the staff to alter the situation.

In the offices of the Federation of Students, where there were no AIA members, there was, just the same, political conflict developing around the apparent increasing influence of the AIA in the Chevron. Many council members, irritated by the AIA’s activities and their contributions to the Chevron, began to identify all left-wing politics as being linked to the AIA. A few other council members, clearly in the minority, were attempting to make distinctions between the AIA kind of politics and a broader, more multi-dimensional (not liberal) left critique. While Mike Ura’s efforts in this regard are the most notable (because his politics did not result in a dogmatic writing style; see his articles), the political situation of Shane Roberts is more significant to the events that followed. Roberts had direct contact with the Chevron during the summer by attending staff meetings, by contributing articles to the paper, and through personal friends of his who worked more frequently on the Chevron.

The AIA has accused Roberts and others of trying to suppress their voice on the Chevron. On the contrary, it was the intent of not only Roberts, but of the majority of Chevron staff during the summer of 1976 to prevent the AIA from gaining control of the editorial policy of the Chevron, a move seen as endangering open and varied political and non-political content in the paper.

However, even if Shane Roberts and others on Students’ Council had as their intention the prevention of a one-sided, constricted student newspaper, their actions in closing down the Chevron are, in my mind, completely inexcusable. Acting as they did, completely externally to the Chevron staff, they repressed any possible healthy collective developments within the Chevron even more effectively than a “takeover” by the AIA might have done. The representatives of the students refused to recognize that the AIA was definitely in the minority on staff at the time, and, although the AIA’s influence was extremely strong, one has to have a very dim appreciation of students’ intelligence to think that new staffers would be dazzled by them for very long.

Yet the closing of the Chevron gave the AIA more fuel for their dazzling fires: they were handed an issue out of which they could build a political bandwagon. The lack of any other conflict on campus that students showed an interest in made the Chevron closing very appealing to those yearning for political activity. Unfortunately, the AIA, having built the bandwagon, was the first to jump on it and supply it with slogans. The only aspect of the whole problem that they were willing to talk about was the fact the Chevron was closed down; all other details of the circumstances were irrelevant. So energetic was their espousal of this line that problems of staff dynamics and collective relations were quickly obscured.

For these reasons what needs to be investigated is not just the methods used by Students’ Council for dealing with an alleged “takeover” of a newspaper by a political group, but how certain working dynamics among the staff of a supposedly co-operative newspaper became so antagonistic as to cause a serious breakdown of participation.

Two models of collectivity

To begin an elaboration of these points, it is necessary to attempt a more detailed description of collectivity on the Chevron and why it is of central importance to the operation of the paper.

From about 1970 onwards, editors and paid positions on the Chevron have been mostly de-emphasized. After a collective had taken over the Chevron in January and February of 1970 an editor was casually acclaimed as a signing officer only. There was an enthusiasm in avoiding key authority figures that propelled a large number of volunteers into experimenting with the paper, resulting in a wide variety of topics, graphic effects and styles. One of the more noticeable characteristics of the Chevron during this era was its sense of humour. Also, at this time the salaries budgeted for certain positions were split up among a large number of people or put to other uses.

However, in times when the staff dwindled, as in the summer, or when serious disagreements broke out, this collective inertia slowed down. A more rigid division of labour was re-instituted and more responsibility was assigned to those in paid positions. Often these developments took place at the expense of variety and innovation in the paper.

Collectivity, then, is not merely common agreement on ideas or practice. If it is to be healthy at all it must primarily be a process of change and development. One could describe it as an activity of debate and experiment. Inexperienced people, possessing only an enthusiasm, should be able to join a collective newspaper staff, express their naïve opinions without shame or harassment, and learn the process of journalism and newspaper production through their own experiments and mistakes.

They would not have the more experienced people telling them outright what is correct and incorrect, nor would they have to work in isolation. The more smoothly a collective operates, the more everyone is willing to give and take advice, join with each other in shared projects, and re-evaluate everything they do in order to do a better job next time. The results would be, not necessarily an efficiently run newspaper with perfect grammar and consistent professional style, but rather a situation in which people are coming to grips with the complexities of print-media communication, in other words, a learning process. And because such a process will bring a large variety of opinions and perspectives into contact with each other, the content of such a newspaper is more likely to build a description of events that is relevant to a larger number of readers.

There is, however, another notion of collectivity that brings the opposite results. It is the notion that a collective must be completely unified, that nothing can be accomplished unless there is total agreement on issues. In this context the collective process must be a hammering out of various perspectives until they conform to one purpose. It is not the achievement of a synthesis whereby individual wills reach a common understanding of a variety of real experiences, but rather the reduction of reality to one “correct” experience. In this process the inexperienced do not proceed through mistakes and success on their own initiative, learning with help from others, but instead are initiated by the “wisdom” or “correctness” of others bypassing any real learning process.

This concept of collectivity is rooted in the assumption that there is one pure human nature and that deviations are perversions of one scale or another. Instead of the differences among individuals being on the order of variety or freshness, they are seen as part of a hierarchical order of more correct or less correct. No notion of equality can exist in this form of collective. Those in authority are those who are most convincing in asserting their own correctness, and they do this by whatever means necessary: eloquence, asserting seniority in practical experience, quoting from the texts of the “experts”, and temporary friendliness. What results from this is often a very efficient organization where everyone knows their place, but it does not engender the kind of knowledge that allows one to go out to a new experience and be capable of understanding the new variety of problems one will find there. It is a learning by rote and all that one takes elsewhere is a catechism from which to quote.

The latter notion of collectivity is more often than not characterized by its lack of humour (or lack of nondestructive humour) and its inharmonious relations as the people within it struggle to delineate their hierarchy. It is apparent to me, having been a volunteer member of the Chevron staff during the spring and summer of 1976 and as a close observer and occasional participant for five years prior to 1976, and as a staff member for two years prior to that, that the direction in which the Chevron staff was heading by the end of the summer of 1976 was toward this latter notion of collectivity. As people felt themselves losing control of this process they tended to leave the paper rather than be involved in the arguments and fights that were increasing.

The Anti-Imperialist Alliance

It’s questionable as to whether or not it’s fair to refer impersonally to the AIA. No organization ever consists of people so homogeneous that they think alike, act alike, and, in complete agreement, make all the same mistakes. However, the AIA has consistently put on this mask of unity to the public especially on important issues, for example, by signing its statements “Anti-Imperialist Alliance”’ instead of by the individual or individuals who actually wrote the statement. In this sense the AIA becomes almost an entity in itself, something much larger than the sum of its individual members. And because the actual membership of the AIA is kept a secret it becomes a somewhat ominous creature. Indeed to talk about a “member” of the AIA is misleading; there are, apparently, no membership cards to prove membership; a member can only be identified if he or she expresses affiliation.

Yet this mystification of the AIA is not the work of its critics but rather of its partisans.

Since it appears that the AIA wants to be seen as such a unified body, I feel justified in referring to the various statements, actions, and attitudes made by individual AIA members in connecton with their political position as AIA statements, actions, attitudes, etc.

While I worked on the Chevron during 1976, AIA positions were put forward most often by Neil Docherty, Larry Hannant, and Doug Wahlsten and to a lesser extent by Salah Bachir. Other staff members who were affiliated to or supported the AIA almost always agreed with the positions of these staffers. In the conflicts that developed over the summer of 1976 the three main AIA members taking part in the Chevron continually polarized arguments between themselves and the most experienced people on staff. The arguments that ensued were the most verbally abusive clashes that I had ever encountered on the Chevron since my first affiliation with it in 1969.

Conflicts within the Chevron staff

For reasons that are not very clear to me these conflicts were a somewhat abrupt departure from the way in which staff meetings and Chevron content discussions had occurred prior to the winter-spring of 1976. Perhaps the AIA had too little strength prior to that time to actually push the arguments very far. Non-AIA staffers had the tendency to ignore or just walk out of discussion that rose to such a level of antagonisms as the AIA preferred in their “vigorous debates.” Many people just did not take them seriously and laughed either openly or aside at the AIA’s rhetoric.

It may have been the seriousness of the AIA’s attack on Shane Roberts (see appendix 3), which was seen even by those staffers critical of Roberts to be overblown, or the increasing occurrence of AIA material both as articles (see Appendix 1) and especially in “Feedback” during the winter and spring of 1976 that led a smaller group of non-AIA staff members and Chevron supporters to confront the AIA during the summer. Or it may have been a conscious decision the part of the AIA to push as far as possible their lines on particular issues presented in the Chevron.

In any case, it was as if a gauntlet had been thrown. Each side seemed to be presenting articles to irritate the other. The AIA usually used “Feedback” to make a statement critical of an article written by political opponents. (see Appendix 2). But the non-AIA staff members preferred to have articles critical of AIA positions printed as features in the Chevron. This was done largely so that the paper could be seen as taking a stand either clearly critical of the AIA or having a much more sophisticated analysis (we felt) than what the AIA was presenting. Feedback submissions went into the Chevron uncontested (at least in respect to content; unsigned letters and those of dubious origins were usually questioned); however, feature articles—which traditionally were generated by a few people and accepted by the rest of staff as a contribution to the variety of content in the Chevron—became the main topic of discussion and voting at staff meetings.

Some examples of conflicts in staff meetings

There were three particular staff meetings where this conflict escalated nearly to the point of absurdity, and yet, even a year later, it is still not funny.

At one point in the summer some staff members came across an article from an American Marxist journal that attempted io prove that, despite the political relationship between Mao Tse-Tung and Joseph Stalin, Mao did not follow Stalin’s directives and could not be considered a Stalinist. Many of us were, at the time, sympathetic to most of what had occurred in China since the 1949 revolution and saw this article as a way of encouraging people to look at China without being confused by the AIA’s rhetoric about it. At the same time we thought that it would force the AIA to state their reverence for Stalin, a situation that we thought would make clear to other staff members and Chevron readers the repressive nature of the AIA’s ideology.

My present feelings about the article have changed significantly. There are more and more indications that Mao was the same kind of ruthless tactician that Stalin was, except perhaps in terms of overall bloodshed. (see various works by Charles Reeve, Simon Leys, “Charlatan Stew,” and the Hong Kong 70’s Front for left-wing critiques of Maoist China). It now seems that the article we presented, while pointing out valuable aspects of how Mao learned from Stalin’s mistakes and “indiscretions,” was still irrelevant to the kinds of articles students are generally interested in. The article covered the same territory as most of the AIA’s political submissions and although it was an attempt to demystify some aspects of this political ground, it did not go far enough in that respect. Yet the AIA never raised the point of its relevancy to students; they were only concerned with it as a political attack which must be suppressed.

The AIA came prepared to the meeting at which the article was to be discussed. They were armed with a multitude of quotes from Mao praising Stalin, but the kind of formal praises that one would expect to read on a Christmas card. The quotes were empty of any kind of indication as to how the practice of Mao and Stalin was related. Even though such a relationship can be established, the AIA made no attempt to do so except through “guilt by association.” In the same way Pierre Trudeau’s many statements complimentary of Mao could be used as proof that Trudeau is a Maoist.

On the other hand, they refuted any statements made that were critical of Stalin: “This writer is an enemy of Stalin and therefore a Trotskyist, and therefore cannot be believed, especially when talking about Stalin.” Our own ranks were not very well organized. Some people remained silent or asked a few leading questions hoping that the AIA would hang itself in the loopholes of its own logic. Others among us, especially myself, could not sit still during what I experienced as a medicine-show con game. Our arguments became so heated and loud with neither side willing or capable of making sense of the other that everyone in the room was made extremely uncomfortable.

The same sort of non-discussion took place around an article concerning Angola and the various “liberation” organizations that were struggling for hegemony in that country. The AIA line favoured one group over the group supported by the article we presented. Like the previously mentioned meeting the main characteristic of this one was the shouting and impossibility of agreement. My feeling is that at both meetings the AIA members present employed the same methods of argumentation and harassment as is typical in their Feedback submissions (see Appendix 2).

During the Mao-Stalin debate the AIA stated that they considered the article an insult not only to Mao and Stalin but to themselves as well. They insisted that the article be not printed at all, but on voting, the staff decided that it was acceptable with a few modifications (it was never printed because it could not be shortened to a suitable length). The result of the Angola debate, apart from the hard feelings, was that the submitted articles would be printed along with a response from the AIA in a special Chevron supplement (this did occur on 23 July 1976).

Harassment of Adrian Rodway and other staff members

An even more serious matter broke out in August 1976 during a meeting to elect a news editor for the next eight months. However the AIA had something else in store for us, much to our surprise: Docherty presented a case against Adrian Rodway, at that time the editor of the Chevron, calling him incompetent, demanding that he be fired, and nominating Larry Hannant for the position of editor. Though it was clear that the AIA and Rodway were not the best of friends this move was quite a shock. Rodway had been working under difficult conditions in completing his schoolwork and supporting his family, yet his articles in the Chevron had been consistently among the most well-written ones in the paper. The AIA complained not only about his articles but that Rodway did not spend as much time at the Chevron offices as an editor should. Only one or two of the non-AIA members agreed with this criticism and the majority of staff voted confidence in Rodway. In fact all the more experienced non-AlA staffers got along well with Rodway and were quite willing to give consideration for his time needs, especially since no one in memory had had to support such a large family while working on the Chevron. This confidence was a good example of how a group working collectively can modify its relationships in order to meet changing needs and conditions.

However, the AIA seemed intent on damaging these relationships. By the end of the summer AIA harassment was an open topic among members of the staff. Two regular news writers, John Morris, a former editor, and Dionyx McMichael, both left by September because of the hostility they felt around the Chevron office. One quickly feels that there is no hope for collective change when one gets arguments more and more frequently in exchange for suggestions and ideas.

In the areas of the paper where the AIA seemed to focus its concern (news, features, “Feedback” especially, but not entertainment or sports) every idea raised became a political idea. This in itself can lead to exciting discussion and development of multi-dimensional perspectives on issues, but in the environment of the Chevron, a political issue became a means for the AIA to polarize people. They took their position, based clearly on a political line, and stuck to it. The argument would go on until one side or the other had to leave for more important things. If they didn’t convince people at one sitting they would try again later on. This practice has led many people to compare the AIA to Jehovah’s Witnesses and other evangelists, a comparison that misses out only on the degree of verbal aggression used by the AIA in their proselytizing.

This was the experience of those members of the Chevron staff who had something besides the AIA view to offer. In this context when Dionyx McMichael heard Neil Docherty say something to the effect of “Why don’t you get up and do some newswriting for a change,” it is not surprising that she failed to see it as a joke (as Docherty later claimed). She knew she could no longer tolerate that kind of work environment.

The same sort of harassment existed for Rodway especially during September, when he was frequently the only non-AIA person in the office on deadline nights, having to withstand single-handedly all the arguments for or against this or that late article. Adrian also spent most Thursday nights at Dumont Press proofing the Chevron between typesetting stages and printing. This was not required of him as editor but was officially the responsibility of Docherty, the production manager. However, more often then not, Rodway stayed longer at Dumont than Docherty.

On these occasions at Dumont I had opportunities to talk to Adrian about events in the Chevron office. He frequently described how he felt “cornered” and “harassed” while alone with the AIA people in the Chevron, and how he did not know how much longer he could endure that experience. Even though it was very disappointing, it came as no surprise when he resigned on 24 September 1976.

Staff dissent after the closing

After Rodway’s resignation and the subsequent closing of the Chevron by the executive of the Federation of Students, it became much easier for the AIA to express its opinions on the Chevron without challenge. AIA members and AIA-influenced people were clearly in the majority among experienced staff members. The key exception was the advertising manager, Brenda Wilson, whose first activities on the Chevron had been in 1968.

Wilson was in a precarious position on the Chevron staff; she was the only paid staff member whose job was still in effect, according to the Federation of Students. She still maintained her office in the Chevron, leaving it open for other staff members to use and instructed them on the procedure of the ad department, but she refused to sell ads for the Free Chevron. She continued to participate in meetings and helped out with various other functions on the paper. Her activities were split largely because of the difficulties she had had throughout her term as ad manager with the AIA when it came to interactions around the office and on Chevron content. Since the closure she had frequently expressed these problems and also her dissatisfaction with the way the AIA was influencing the Free Chevron staff. She, myself, and Jacob Arsenault were by that time the only staff members who had worked on the Chevron previously to the closing and who were willing to raise criticisms of the AIA’s methods on the paper.

There are a few reasons why our criticisms were not being listened to. The majority of people working on the Free Chevron were those who first became acquainted with the paper in early September. At that time there was a burst of energy put into getting the paper out and little time for political arguments except late at night when only the older staffers were around. The new people had not had much of a chance to experience the kinds of problems we were describing.

The closing of the Chevron was clearly and rightfully seen as a repressive move on the part of the student council. It also engendered a great deal of enthusiasm for a fair and valuable cause: keeping the student press operating. Every reason that the Federation gave for closing down the Chevron did not make any sense to those who had just come to work on it.

Given this situation it was very easy for new staffers to accept the simplistic analysis put forward by Hannant and Docherty and other AIA’ers: the Federation was a bunch of corrupt hacks who cannot take criticism and therefore react by pulling the strings of power and ownership that give them authority. It was not only the content of this analysis that appealed to new people but the style with which it came across. Hannant and Docherty organized the occupation and sparked the discussions at meetings; they were the first to present an analysis and did it with the fervour usually found in their presentations.

However, for a few of us to say: “Wait a minute, the situation is much more complex than that; there are a lot of problems within the Chevron,” was like someone standing on the sidelines saying things that just didn’t fit into the excitement of the occasion. We were not on the bandwagon, and my need to work at a full-time job and the personal difficulties the three of us were having with the AIA members made it very difficult for us to ever get on it.

Also, whenever we mentioned that many staffers had left the Chevron because of problems in staff collectivity the AIA’s response was to consider those ex-staffers as people who couldn’t take the pace, or who had “personal” problems. Our raising of criticisms was seen to be something that threatened the kind of unity of attack that the AIA wanted to focus on the Federation.

As a result we were told that what we were saying was irrelevant.

In mid-October Wilson made a statement during a Students’ Council meeting to the effect of “I understand why the Federation acted as it did in closing down the Chevron, but I don’t agree with its tactics.” A few days later I was in the Chevron office when I heard Neil Docherty claim that Wilson had said she had supported the Federation’s move to close the Chevron. Henry Hess agreed that’s what he, too, thought he heard Wilson say. Asking Wilson about it and getting a different story, I urged that the four of us sit down to straighten this out. We talked for an hour in unusually amicable terms. During this discussion Docherty criticized Wilson for organizing a group of Chevron staffers to talk to the Federation after the Free Chevron staff had voted against such a move. She maintained that it was perfectly within their rights as individuals to keep lines of communication open between the Free Chevron and the Federation in the event of the possibility of negotiations. However, by the end of the discussion (people ended it only to get back to other tasks) it appeared to me that there was an agreement among the three people to continue to work together.

At the end of October a meeting was called of Ontario members of Canadian University Press. At the end of the afternoon there was to be a session restricted only to CUP members and the Free Chevron staff. The intent was to exclude representatives from the Federation of Students so that a strategy could be worked out for reinstating the Chevron. At this point the Free Chevron Staffers requested a quick meeting among themselves to decide whether or not all those who said they were Chevron staffers were really sympathetic to the Chevron’s cause. At this meeting it was Wilson, Arsenault, and myself whose sympathies were being challenged. In Wilson’s case her previously mentioned statement was dragged up, again interpreted as support for the Federation. This was coming close to the last straw for us. We argued that this was a misjudgement but before the discussion got very far someone, probably realizing that it might go on for a long time, suggested that we all go back into the CUP meeting.

Once inside I was still feeling somewhat irritated by the accumulation of events like this and asked to talk to the meeting about the problems of staff collectivity. My reasoning was that, given incidents of the sort that had just occurred, talk about united strategies was premature. A discussion about collectivity would also give us a better understanding of why the Chevron was closed down and thus how to build a strategy for opening it up again. The occasion of the CUP conference also seemed to me to be an ideal situation for a discussion of staff dynamics since there were representatives of a number of different newspapers present. The CUP executives and some reps from other papers expressed interest in such dialogue but all of the Free Chevron staff (apart from the three of us and one other) objected completely to this idea, saying that it was irrelevant and detracted from the matter at hand. The debate on whether or not to talk about staff dynamics lasted for nearly an hour.

This marked my last attempt to struggle with the Free Chevron staff.

Summary

In generalizing about the AIA’s activities on the Chevron it is tempting to use a word which they often hurl at their political enemies: opportunism. The word is inadequate in some respects, however, because it implies an organized conspiracy to take over the Chevron. This does not actually appear to be the case, and certainly cannot be proven. What is more likely and is just as much of a problem is that a small group of people with stalwart and stubborn political methods and no sympathy for people critical of their unquestionably correct position merely outlasted their opposition in conscious and concerted struggle. This was a struggle that had nothing to do with the attainment of real needs by one group of people exploited by another, nor of the regaining by a working class of wealth appropriated by an owning class, nor a struggle for human rights by one group oppressed by another. Instead, the AIA’s intent was to assert the hegemony of their world view over all others by various means including the suppression of other views.

The Chevron was useful to the AIA in that it allowed them, as supposedly “objective” reporters, the key voice on issues presented to the student body. The Chevron’s position as the only “unified” voice of students on campus has allowed them to infuse into their exclusive reporting a political line and be essentially unchallenged. No other voice on campus has its power, namely, a circulation of 10,000 copies including an off-campus mailing. (The Gazette has not had the same credibility on campus until recently, but its coverage of campus events is just not as extensive, nor has it been characterized by the kind of critical content that, over the years, the Chevron has come to be known for.)

The Chevron staff can have the last word on anything it wants, including “Feedback,” and thus a large amount of information concerning students’ lives and the decisions that students make concerning their lives is filtered through the Chevron staff’s analysis. For this reason it is essential to keep the Chevron as open a forum with as much debate as possible.

To attempt to exclude the AIA from the Chevron is to engage precisely in their kind of politics. Yet, given their consistent attitudes and methods over the last two years, their participation in almost any project on campus is very likely to cause hostilities and problems on that project. However, the problem is not merely with the AIA but with any group of people that persist in such doctrinaire crusades. People committed to causes in this way have tremendous amounts of energy, and work hard and with dedication for their ideals; yet it is nearly impossible to argue constructively with them. Any such group of people, if they take a liking to a particular project, can fairly easily outlast anyone else already engaged in the project. Since the number of people it takes to produce a student newspaper is small (some have been done single-handedly) any small group, with ideas that are completely irrelevant to what is happening on campus, could take over such a function.

There are two areas that need to be examined in order to get at the roots of this problem. The first is in respect to the funding of student media projects. The crucial part of the Chevron’s present funding is through student fees that are currently compulsory. Even if fees were voluntary, they would still probably be collected on registration and the initiative of the student would be needed in reclaiming his or her fee. In such a system there would still likely be a sizeable amount of money set aside for a student newspaper. The funding of such a newspaper would thus rest a great deal on either student apathy or real student interest in the activities that the fees pay for. But a way of ensuring to the maximum the relevancy of a student newspaper would mean making the staff members go out and get all their funding themselves.

However there are many dangers in this arrangement. There is the possibility that the newspaper content would become predominantly advertisements. Or sensationalism, violence, and pornography—very saleable commodities—might become the norm. Almost certainly, smaller newspapers would result. Just the same, one must consider that there are no restrictions on advertising, pornography, and violence presently imposed by the funding process (although these items are usually restricted by the staff itself), so it is only speculation to assume that this choice of content would change under other conditions. The main advantage of this self-funding system is that the staff would have to have a much more concerned relationship to the paper’s content.

The other area of concern, and one which I consider to be more important is the fact that the Chevron is effectively a monopoly on campus. If the amount of energy, time, resources and enthusiasm that normally goes into the Chevron were spread among a number of smaller papers on campus, the features of student print-media communication would be thoroughly transformed. Most certainly a larger number of topics would be raised and the discussion among the papers would be more comprehensive than ever before.

This would ensure that no single group could monopolize campus media. However, if a number of such small papers commented on particular issues in similar ways, it would be a far more accurate indication (than would, for example, a statement in the Chevron) that students in general were in agreement on that issue and that conditions were good for some sort of integrated action.

Funding might even be easier for such smaller papers in that they would probably be based within small common interest groups such as the student societies. In such a situation where people have a more direct relationship with and, thus, more control in a media project than they would in a centralized project, I think there would be more of a willingness to support it, either through participation or money.

Some objections to this scheme might be raised by citing the example of Enginews, a society paper not much respected for its approach to student life. My feeling is that there is a significant number of engineers (for example) who do not treat the Enginews at all seriously but instead look towards the Chevron to fulfill the functions they see as important for a student newspaper. If the Chevron were not to exist, then it is very likely that the interest shown by these students would be focused on the Enginews or another engineering students’ newspaper. Inevitably a more sophisticated paper would result.

The move to smaller, decentralized student newspapers would only be a healthy move if it was seen as relevant by the student organizations concerned and, especially, the present Chevron staff. The forceful imposition of such a policy would certainly have results as disastrous as the forceful closing of the Chevron last year. The best that can be done at present is to initiate a dialogue on these ideas.

I received these clippings of articles from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record from rych mills.

Since the text is a little difficult to read, I will gradually add transcriptions of the articles. Here is the introduction to part one of the two-day series.

New outlook, but still radicals

Jim Nagel, former editor of the University of Waterloo student paper and then a reporter for The Record, is now working in a religious communal farm he helped organize at Glastonbury, England. On a trip to K-W, he revisited radical students. In the first of a two-part series, he reports what they are doing today and what they thought about the student activist days.

By Jim Nagel

Special to The Record

Whatever happened to the student radical wave of the 1960s?

At the University of Waterloo for much of the period, editor of the student newspaper for two years, I knew all the activists and probably had an idea of what they were about—even if I was too much of a fence-sitter to play a passionate role,

A full decade—the 1970s—has passed since the crest of the radical wave. I have looked up my friends who were active in Waterloo student affairs then to see where life has led them.

Some went into law; others into government to save the environment. Some went into organized labour; others into their own small businesses.

Some went into (or stayed in) the news and publishing game. Some went back to the land. Some went into university faculties to analyze where the movement went.

Most of the radical wave of the 1960s is still rolling, although the ripples have changed. The individuals who made up the wave, for the most part, have not changed their radical personalities of the past. But they have spread thin. Students of the baby boom are no longer concentrated on a campus, reinforcing one another’s ideas, but are separated across the country.

It was Hush, the Toronto tabloid, I think, that headlined Waterloo as “the Red university.” The UW, along with Simon Fraser University in the West, had the reputation of being English Canada’s radical hotbed.

That reputation surprised me, because the most spectacular thing that ever happened at Waterloo was the bookstore sit-in of 1966. For example, in all of Canada, the only real violence of that era was the 1969 computer-burning at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. While students here held Protests, outside Canada it was different.

In Paris in May 1968, student revolutionaries were on the verge of overthrowing De Gaulle’s reactionary government. The Sorbonne was occupied, riot cops faced cobblestones in the streets, ten million French workers joined a nationwide strike led by the students.

At the same time in New York, police were dragging Columbia University students from buildings. In Washington, the widowed Mrs. Martin Luther King was opening the Poor People’s Campaign and its plywood city at the Lincoln Memorial.

In Bonn, the government was laying down the law on student demonstrators. Someone tried to assassinate the radical leader Red Rudi Dutschke. In Prague, Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face” was blooming. And the wind was blowing rumours of Soviet troops massing on the border.

Back in Canada it was the time of flower power. Pierre became prime minister in April and called a general election three days later; Trudeaumania was sweeping the country.

In Saigon, a secret U.S. army directive was calling for an all-out Vietnam offensive. President Johnson asked Congress for $3.9 billion more for the war. Paris peace talks stalled.

Today, a full decade separating us from these concurrent hurricanes, that world has calmed down. The Vietnam war has at long last been repudiated, blacks got civil rights, students got some say on university boards.

The campus is quiet. Students today are more concerned about jobs amid high unemployment than they are about causes.

Students of the ’60s are now in the wide-open world beyond university. Most of the students whose integrity I respected in 1968 have not lost it in 1990. And they’re still concerned about worldwide problems:

Unemployment, education cutbacks, power of huge corporations, half the world starving, the bomb still hanging over it all, authoritarian government lurking to “save” us.

4 leftists turn into lawyers

In 1969 and 1970 a half-dozen of the University of Waterloo student leaders intended to carry their ideals from university polities into law school.

Their intention: Gain understanding of the power structure. Learn to use the system to carry their ideals into the real world.

While at school they planned to live communally in a big house. During the next two years, the household &endash; and some of the marriages and friendships &endash; split up.

Now in 1980, they are practising law, each going their own way, with varying political positions.

Steve Ireland says of the law school commune it was “really bourgeois” to other radical students sharing housing. “That was the time when Stewart (Saxe) had the Mercedes,” he chuckles.

Success surprised us, ’60s “firebrand” recalls

“Firebrand Ireland” I used to call him for fun when he was student-radical president at the University of Waterloo 12 years ago.

Today Stephen W. Ireland, B.A., LL.B. ts a respectable Toronto lawyer wearing a [obscured; maybe “sports jacket”?] but at least it’s corduroy,” he is quick to point out.

Ireland never was one of those slogan-shouting types that, at least in media imaginations, characterized the 1960s. At Waterloo, the most outwardly spectacular event in that period was the bookstore strike of November 1966, when several hundred students sat in the campus shop with guitars, protesting; the university’s high-profit prices on textbooks.

Former university president Dr. J.G. Hagey refused to come to talk to the students, so 210 students trooped up to his office. It was all good-natured, and it worked. The university changed the pricing policy.

“Nobody thought that sort of thing could happen,” said Ireland, “Least of all those who organized it.”

The bookstore success bolstered the student leaders’ confidence. Issue followed issue. “There was a lot of controversy,” said Ireland, “And that was the point.”

Students “saw that if you made your concerns known and had a bit of force behind them — if you were organized and had numbers behind you — you could be heard.”

As a result of student pressure while the new athletics building was planned, for example, planning was done for the general student apart from league sports. Similarly, a sit-in persuaded the library to adopt more flexible hours.

Get the student federation incorporated: that was one of Ireland’s first priorities as president. That legal framework proved to be a structure that weathered the turbulent months following.

Ireland’s biggest contribution was in “getting the principle recognized about student participation in university government.”

He was one of the main authors of a 1967 report that opened a long debate. Some faculty were bitterly opposed but students were granted seats on most university governing bodies.

“How that’s being followed up today— whether, students are playing a meaningful part—I have no idea,” said Ireland.

(One seat on UW’s board of governors today, as it happens, is filled by John Bergsma. An engineering graduate, he is now president and general manager of Columbus McKinnon Industries in Burlington.)

Times have changed for students since the economic slump of the 1970s, Ireland says. In our era, “We had the world by the tail. We were able to flaunt the authorities, to say obnoxious and unpleasant things without worrying about the consequences,

“We all got degrees, got tickets into the Establishment, and we’re all doing good work.” Today students worry how to support themselves.

Ireland and a partner (and a secretary each) are now set up above a bank opposite the central Toronto law courts: “Not plush, but convenient.”

"Criminal cases, “which I’m not all that fond of,” used to make up half his clientele, He now devotes most of his work to family law — divorce, separation, custody of children and property. Working with real people he finds more satisfying: &endash; especially when out of the blue a year later comes a thank-you from a past client.

Steve and his wife Sally, themselves recently separated and reunited, own a [obscured] musical taste might be a barometer of his political views: some Beethoven and a “fair amount of not-too-hard rock.”

Activist student now activist lawyer

Brian Iler, barrister and solicitor dressed in cords and cardigan, drives a 1971 Datsun with 132,000 miles on it and prefers to do his legal work in Toronto with community groups “which tend to be substantially to the left of the NDP.”

It’s 12 years ago that Iler, from Guelph, was elected student president and helped form the Radical Student Movement. [obscured] Today he believes in getting housing, food and such co-ops legally established because “the process people go through in running their own lives is an important part of social change. It’s a matter of bringing institutions down to a size people can feel comfortable with.”

Toronto now has a federation of housing co-ops, each with 10 to 100 units. The federation’s staff of a dozen helps new groups set up, does management services, deals with the mortgage corporations, and so on.

Brian and his wife Arel Agnew — a fellow Waterloo student — and their two children share a house in central Toronto with another couple. They take turns at chores in a day-care centre and food co-op. Iler is involved in the Law Union of Ontario, a federation of 500 left-wing lawyers, law students, and legal workers. He is not in a political party.

Iler practises on his own, sharing space with two native-rights lawyers. He rides his bicycle four blocks to work — even in winter.

An engineering student in 1965, he became active through Circle K, a campus service club and went on to organize the university’s Tenth Anniversary Week in 1967 to mark UW’s first decade. He succeeded Ireland as student president in 1968, the year of the radical crest.

Behind the scenes, radical action was being orchestrated by a small cell including ILer, tongue-in-cheek calling themselves the Committee for Intellectual Mobility. They met Thursday midnights.

“We’d hatch issues to raise shit on.”

They organized an outdoor rally on the shortage of student housing and decided to set up a protest tent city. Iler laughs that the tent city was not very successful. “Gerry Hagey (then UW president) came round one Sunday morning to visit people in their tents, and there was hardly anyone there.”

A mass resignation of student council and Iler as its president was another Thursday-midnight idea aimed to stir up discussion by students.

That was how Iler’s presidency ended, in October 1968 in a “town-hall” impeachment referendum of over 2,000 students. In the ensuing election he was defeated by conservative John Bergsma.

A 1971 summer job in Morley Rosenberg’s law office in Kitchener brought Iler into the middle of the Market Square controversy. The city council and the K-W news media had kept quiet about a deal with Oxlea Investments Ltd. to rip down the old city hall and farmers market to make way for a new mall.

Someone leaked news of the deal to The Chevron, and the student paper hit the streets with a special city-wide extra.

“We fell down badly on organizing the opposition to that afterwards. No one had had any experience organizing that kind of campaign.”

In his Toronto office, one of Iler’s biggest cases was a successful suit in 1976 against a guard at Millhaven maximum-security prison &endash; apparently the first such action against a prison guard to come to court.

Is he still reading Marx?

“I’m not too familiar with his stuff any [obscured] have been. Tom Patterson and Cyril Levitt (in 1968) theorized; I worked.

“I practise law because I enjoy working with people and doing practical things.

“And not just that. It's working with people towards a saner society.”

Student organizing “taught us a lot”

Steve Flott, one of the chief theoreticians at UW in the heyday of campus radicalism, admits that life now is outwardly “upper-middle-class traditional.”

He specialized in transportation law and since 1978 has been executive vice-president and general manager of the Ontario Trucking Association, in Toronto. !Some of the basic (radical) “concepts are still there They take a [obscured].”

Finding his job challenging enough, Flott has decided to stay low-key regarding politics for the next five years. The job involves him with trucking companies of all sizes in their licence applications to the provincial transport board.

One of his ex-radical friends calls him a workaholic. He always was one. He polished off an MA degree in history in only eight months in 1968 at Waterloo. American by birth, he had come to UW from Catholic priesthood training.

He was in on the secret steering committee at Thursday midnight.

You learn as much from working on student council or the campus newspaper as you do on your degree courses. “Part of the success that a number of us have had since leaving school was due to our experience at organizing things and managing during our student-politics days. We gained a lot of political skills which weren’t only used in politics.”

He was wearing his Saturday cords, turtleneck, and 10-year-old sweater at the interview at the large house he and his wife own in Toronto’s suburbia.

“I’m not saying society works well, but it’s there. I can’t see why I shouldn’t take advantage of that situation.”

Ex-radical maps out battles with labour

Stewart Saxe in 1968-69 published 1,000 pages of radical manifestos as editor of the University of Waterloo’s student newspaper The Chevron.

Today he has become a member of the biggest law firm in the world, representing multinational corporations.

Besides becoming a lawyer, he is owner of a modest estate, a rather isolated country house overlooking the Credit River near Georgetown.

Moreover, he has become son-in-law to Morton Shulman, Ontario’s outspoken ex-coroner, ex-MPP and author of Anyone Can Make a Million. Dianne Shulman Saxe is also a lawyer.

He sports a pocket watch in the vest of his three-piece suit and in its inside pocket the inevitable Daytimer, the efficient appointment diary like the one radical student executives carried back at Waterloo in the late ’60s.

He practises labour law — on the management side, How does this fit with his left-wing ideals?

“Poorly!” said Saxe laughing. “But let’s say it’s no trouble in my case. There are some people who practise labour law in ways that I will not.”

His job is to make quick deals between management and union, avoiding public battles. “I don’t think there’s anything anti-employee in this.”

After four years of legal studies at Osgoode Hall plus articling, he started in 1975 as a senior solicitor at the Ontario Labour Relations Board in Toronto. A year later he was its director &endash; meaning in charge of the 100-person secretariat responsible for deploying a field staff of [obscured].