If you’re a devotee of campus histories (and yes, I realize that’s a big “if”) you’ll know that they tend not to deal with many events in great detail.   Sadly, monograph-length treatments of specific events, or turning points, that define an institution are few and far between. This is why a recent book by Peter C. Kent called Inventing Academic Freedom: The 1968 Strax Affair at the University of New Brunswick is such a refreshing read.  Sure, it’s a parochial story that won’t interest many outside of Fredericton, but it’s actually a very evocative piece of writing, a window into academe in the 1960s which shows how utterly universities have changed in the last fifty years.

The story itself is a little on the bizarre side.  Norman Strax, a newly-minted PhD from Harvard, was hired by the UNB physics department in 1967.  Over the next 12 months, he proceeded to try to radicalize what he saw as a hopelessly conservative campus – with, it should be said, some success.  Weirdly, when school reconvened in the fall of 1968, he decided to pick a fight with the administration over the topic of the new system of issuing ID cards.  (Yes, really – ID cards were thought to be a tool of The Man).   For a variety of not-very-good reasons, Strax’s antics got him suspended from his job, which led over the course of a year to student occupations, a censure from the nascent CAUT, and the resignation of UNC’s President, Colin MacKay.

In one sense, the book does not actually make the case purported by its title – Strax’s case might have set some precedents around university disciplinary procedures, but it had little to do with the development of academic freedom, writ large.   But that’s OK; the magic in this book is about being transported to what seems like a different universe.  Some of it is good old fashioned anachronistic humour: the President seeing the demonstrations as being “a bit like Munich”, students carrying banners accusing the Board of being “finks”, and use of the phrase “up against the wall Mother****ers” as being the height of revolutionary chic.

But what’s most interesting about this book is the glimpse it offers into what a campus felt like without a union or – in any real sense – an administration, either.   A campus where men (there were precious few women) like Kent could be a professor, an executive assistant to the President, and a residence don so trusted by students that even the most radical would confide in him, all at the same time.  It’s an ideal Kent still pines for, despite it having been utterly crushed by the process of massification; and reading this book, one can sympathize with him.