Anyone who was at the University of New Brunswick in 1968–1969 will remember the tumultuous events that are known in the shorthand of history as “the Strax Affair.”

And anyone who wants to revisit the story, or read it for the first time, has the benefit of a short book by Peter C. Kent, published last year under the title Inventing Academic Freedom: The 1968 Strax Affair at the University of New Brunswick.

At the time of the Strax affair, the author was a young history professor, as well as don of MacKenzie House and an assistant to the university president. Since retirement, he has taken the time to look back at those events and explain their place in the history of the university.

Big historical changes are often embodied in individuals, and in this story two of them stand out as archetypal figures of the times.

President Colin B. Mackay was the great builder of the modern university. During his presidency UNB expanded from 70 faculty and 700-plus students in 1953 to more than 300 faculty and almost 5,000 students by 1968. The number of buildings on campus more than tripled. But old ideas about how the university should be run turned out to be a lot slower to change.

For his part, Norman Strax was a Harvard graduate with a PhD in nuclear physics who arrived as an assistant professor in 1966. Although a shy man, Strax came to prominence as an organizer of buses to an anti-war pro­test at the Pentagon in 1967. A year later he emerged as, in Kent’s terms, the “catalyst for the radical potential that already existed” among students and faculty. Both were flawed heroes, but the “troubles” cannot be attributed to Mackay or Strax alone.

What mattered most was that this was a time of change in the life of the university. Greater access to higher education was a major development for the people of the province. The university community was more diverse than ever before, and the traditional “presidential autocracy” was being challenged by new ideas about faculty and student participation.

UNB was ready to go on to its future as a force in provincial development and as one of the ranking research and teaching universities in Canada. But history is often driven by the flashpoints that occur when the old order is fading and the new one has not yet arrived.

In this case a small protest against iden­tity cards at the library deepened into an overlapping set of crises: the suspension and later dismissal of the young professor; a student occupation of his office; a judicial injunction against Strax; and charges against the student newspaper that resulted in a jail term for one of the writers.

When the university finally accepted arbitration of the dispute, this was one of the early successes for the Canadian Association of University Teachers in setting standards of due process for academic employment in Canada.

Meanwhile, the president had already submitted his resignation, recognizing that he was not the right person to lead the university in changing times. He went on to play a national and international role in promoting higher education.

Strax himself lost his job and became a martyr to the cause who, as Kent puts it, “sacrificed his academic career to opposing the injustice of institutional oppression.” He later taught at a small college in Indiana. This is a memorable story in the history of UNB. It will also be read as a chapter in the history of student unrest in the 1960s and as a case study in the evolution of academic freedom in Canada.

For his part, Kent has served UNB for many years as a teacher, scholar and administrator. With this book, written with compassionate objectivity about the institution and its people, he has rendered another service to the university.

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David Frank teaches Canadian history at the University of New Brunswick.

This article first appeared in the November 27, 2013 edition of The Brunswickan.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily CAUT.

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