Penguin Education Special
The Hornsey Affair
Students and Staff of Hornsey College of Art
British Library r eference X.529/10167

Preface:
None of the staff taking an active part in the sit-in were actually artists or designers but mainly General Studies staff.

Made and printed in Britain by Hazel Watson & Viney Ltd. Aylebury, Bucks, 1969.

* Linocut print design and book cover of "The Hornsey Affair" published 1969, Copyright © Martin J Walker, London 1968

Preface: p11
Most of the contributions come from a zone in the available spectrum of opinions about what happened which one could call 'left of centre'.
p15 Notes Towards the Definition of Anti-Culture (Tom Nairn, a member of General Studies staff.)
"I was supposed to be a social-science expert."
p17 we lived mainly for mentions in newspapers, television appearances, and other forms of display.
The celebrated Hornsey Light-Sound projection system . . .
p18 We bourgeois had been elevated as a result of DipAD reforms.
p18 As I soon learned, the peasants were of small account.
p19 We are blamed for the whole upheaval, now, at both Guildford and Hornsey.
p19 Tottenham: primary school, Fashion & Textile Department.
p20 Alexandra Palace: Fine Art Department.
p20 Janitor's House: Stroud Green ­ carpentry.
Page Green: Teacher Training.
Crouch End Hill: Three-Dimensional Design.
p21 mention of Moulton bicycle.
p22 As in the wider world, 'under-privileged' was really a synonym for 'exploited', 'starved', 'cheated', and so on.
p24 In the Soviet art schools after the Revolution, the students constituted themselves into groups or 'currents' of at least twenty people with common aims and interests. These groups elected teachers, who had security of tenure for two years unless attendance at their classes ceased altogether (in which case they could stay to the end of the year in course.) Stalin put a stop to all that after a few years, naturally. (For Stalin!)

What Happened: The First Four Days
p31 (sans serif)
The Student Action Committee. The S.A.C. first met on a Tuesday evening in a third-floor flat close to the college. The sudden eruption during a second-year Student Union meeting over the freezing of the Union funds by the Bursar had developed into a group committed to direct action. The first meeting consisted of thirty to forty determined students.
Determined in what way? Determined Bolsheviks?
Which second-year?
p31 PR & Communications
Defeat apathy (films!)
Absolute secrecy
JB
p31 (serifed)
Rooms A&B, 4 pm start
A student from Regent Street Polytechnic made a rousing speech. (She? name)
Vice-Principal invited to answer questions
17:30 Switch-board kept open.

Non-Stop Communication
p30 BC
p33 'The Bursar's standing outside there, laughing at you. Why don't you invite him in to explain why he's laughing?' He declined.
Re-iteration of the plan: films!
p34 Visual Research Department had planned a staff meeting for that day, and one lecturer had written ­ sometime before the action ­ a long critical analysis of the crisis in the college and in education generally.

References to document 3, p35

Open Democracy
S.A.C. Room F
p36 - nonsense ­
p36 Gradually, as the debate continued with the whole student body, and with organization by general agreement, S.A.C. entered its second stage of planned obsolescence. Group decision making had become a principle of the takeover and S.A.C. was only recalled to make tactical decisions whose strategy required no outside publicity.
P.B-D and GB
p38 Andrew Macintosh argued that a detailed examination of what was wrong with the system and of what might best replace it could only be done in seminars. [Divide, dilute and conquer?] He had only been a Governor for four months.
p38 'Participation'
FH
p39 Pete Brown's Poetry Band
p40 Heart of the Revolution
BC
Everyone stayed in the hall the whole night and the proposed film shows, debates and pop sessions we had lined up were largely postponed as no-one had time. What about the upstairs studio! This is inconsistent with other records.
p42 Films (shown from 11pm to 3am)
p45 we propose an elected Senate, to replace the Board of Governors.
p46 Time is Necessary
JB
p47 All facilities will be available 168 hours a week throughout the year.
.>>> This is completely unrealistic in terms of staffing, budgets and maintenance of equipment. Few industries work on this basis; glass, steel, electricity generation, and even these are not requiring student access. The nature of studying still requires Health & Safety considerations besides the obvious risk of misuse of resources, such as for commercial profit.
p48 Document 3
p48 'Normal Work'
p49 Press Relations
The Press Office was established in the warren of offices formerly known as General Studies . . .
Notice Board of Press Cuttings
AB
p51 The meeting recommends that a commission be set up with the authority to: etc. 1, 2,
Six members of staff
Six elected students
The Principal

A General College Meeting of Staff and Students will be called for Friday 14th June 1968.
p52 The most interesting view of what happened which no-one knew, was the Principal's. So there were at least three interpretations.
p53 Once that is down the whole education system in this country with its immoral barriers and its distorting early specialization, will be shaken.

p54 Foreign Affairs
External Liaison Office
PC
p55 London College of Printing, 10:30
Central School, 13:00
Goldsmith's College, 16:00
p55 A Student Union Bulletin published on Thursday 23 May 1968, five days before the Sit-In read:
Tuesday, 28 May 1968
A CRITICAL UNIVERSITY OF DESIGN
A critical analysis of the structure of HCA
An investigation into the selection and examination of students
The development of a programme of student demands for the reform of art education.
Student proposals for the restructuring of HCA

p56 Open letter
Friday 31 May 1968
DP (David Warren Piper)
Association of Members of HCA
p61 Roots of the Revolution
Why the Art Students?
p62 "It's fantastic what you've done, but really you are underpoliticized and confused!"
p63 Regis Debray, "Revolution in the Revolution."
p64 Our boldness was founded on our lack of knowledge. We had not learned to live the present through books.
p64 Nanterre.
p65 Richard Wollheim has said of art students that they "are distinguished among students by their passionate belief in the importance of what they are doing. In consequence it does not seem ­ as indeed it did not seem to the greatest of British Socialists William Morris ­ an illicit or narrow objective that art should be diffused through society. Add to this the inherent subversiveness of art, inherent in the total demands is makes to think, to feel, to act in an utterly un-selfsparing way and we have an explanation of how the art school movement can be totally radical and yet totally sectarian."
p65 To the Stupid Students.
Why do not you two-a-penny, feather-bedded students get back to your hovels from whence you were pupped. We workers do not pay out huge sums of money from our pay to school useless spivs and drones. Clear out! And make way for decent citizens. (Postcard, June 1968)
p68/69 The straightforward careerists, for whom Trevor Fisk, President of the N.U.S. is a spokeman, unperturbed by the pervasive alienation of society, complain that art school education does not fit them for a job.
p73 We have tried to take the 'r' out of revolution and talk about evolution. We have reiterated that our revolt is on purely educational grounds.
p73 (Tom Nairn, 'On the Subversiveness of Art Students', Listener, 17 October 1968)
p75 Once you have destroyed the stumbling block of accepted aesthetic judgment criteria, all the posters were 'good'; they showed a spontaneity and sincerity that acceptable graphics has never known . . .
One thing really came home; the message is so much more important than the quality of the technique. MW Martin Walker
>>> With respect, I disagree on both counts. They were not good in ideas, techniques or effect. They were inferior to the Parisian posters. There was too much Gestetnering and not enough poster designing. We'll do it better next time :-)
p78 (Wollheim)
NACAE National Advisory Council on Art Education
Equipment
Work space
Calibre of staff
General amenities
Curricula
p79 The Establishment Speaks Seminar held with Sir John Summerson, Chairman of the NCDAD, National Diplomas in Art & Design.
6 June 1968.
GCE barrier ­ respectability ­ letters ­ snobbery
p79 Mr David Warren-Piper (a Hornsey lecturer) said: 'Respectibility inhibits innovation. We aren't justified in equating school attainment with creative ability.'
p80 'network' structure
p88 Summerson at the Round House conference in July 1968, said: "And now you are asking me my opinion on something on which my opinion is quite worthless. I am not an artist, I don't teach in an art school ­ I teach, but not art. I must repeat, my personal opinion here is worthless."
p82/83 (The quotes are from Richard Wollheim.)
p85 Sir Hugh Casson has also expressed approval for the Coldstream loophole! He does not question that O-levels may be totally irrelevant to art studies, and thus of little value even to the successful. The loophole is for the illiterate genius ­ whoever he may be. (He writes elsewhere of the risk of fewer places for artists!)
p86 From where does freedom of thought come?
p86 'Liberal Studies'
Art History
Complementary Studies
Professor Nikolaus Pevsner has said in defence of complimentary studies: "I think it is good for anyone if during his education he is forced to use his brain."
p87 The general studies tutors themselves continually complained; art students were hopeless, they never read, they should be made to do more written exams.
p87 The Coldstream Council assumed that art students were innately verbally deficient and paradoxically, for that very reason, thought that intellectual qualifications were called for. Whereas if we did not assume such a dichotomy in the first place, we would not have to continually prove it as its opposite. Again there would be no problem where there were no preconceptions.
p89 Network: or How We Beat the Gallery System
(JW) Dave, Colin and JW repaint the men's toilets. Technique, colour scheme . . . idea/concept
>>> Not much to do with network
p93 Vocational
In 1962, the NACAE issued the second report on vocational courses.
p94 dichotomy
p95 . . . the DipAD Courses which is fundamentally an academic teaching diploma!
p95 Teaching had been traditionally the chief occupation of those who did not make it in the narrow elite of professional artists in a culture largely unconscious of art and design.
p96 John Rushkin wrote 'I would no more involve the art schools in the history of surgery.'
p97 on Art History with slides: How one's knees would tremble, when a mittel-European voice would cry 'Negst schlide pleasse!'
p99 We lived our dream for seven weeks, and we did not like it.
DK and VH
p105 The Education Debate
Starts with a quote from Marshall McLuhan.

The Revolution Begins at Home
p106 College closed on 12 July 1968
p107 Perhaps we were too narrow, in a very British way, too little concerned with the philosophy and meaning of our action.
p108 It should be remembered that the question of selection was a leading one in the educational debates of the French student movement in 1968, and that the emphasis was broadly the same here: towards openness and against an academic structure which is in effect a class structure in disguise.
>>> I disagree
p110 quote from Document 46
p110 We demand the elimination of GCE examination entrance qualifications for all art colleges Document 3
p111 selection procedures Document 61
p115 linear system
network or flexible system
p116 In art and design, the choice between good workmen and geniuses is spurious. Any system worthy of being called 'education', any system worthy of the emerging new world, must be both at once. It must produce people whose work or 'vocation' is the creative, general transformation of the environment.
p117 The linear structure of the present courses militates against versatility and particularly against emergence of the bridge personality who can make vital connexions between apparently disparate disciplines . . .
Document 11, paragraphs 10, 11, 14
p119 document 46
p120 Network system
Document 70
Document 46
p120 creative groups
>>> This failed in HK when students were punished for individuality, or projects group marked. Resulting in expulsion!
>>> In Bowes Road, Graphics, when there were groups it was essential to know whose inputs contributed to the whole and how these could be individually marked. I saw no evidence of a systematic approach.
p121 academic status of DipAD for teaching versus 2 class system, grants and yet different graduates applying for the same jobs
>>> What gets a person employment; portfolio, face, price?
p122 working-class students apply to easier vocational courses
Document 46
p125 It must work through the factors common to different fields of art and design, rather than lines or furrows ploughed out by each form of art and design in the past.
P125 For us, the point of acquiring skills is that this is the best way of seeing how to transcend them.
Document 46
p126 document 16?
p127 The administrative body should be purely a servicing and co-ordinating department with no executive powers.
Document 40
p127 initiative
p128 Student power
Staff and students in a common task
Document 46
p129 'Research' ­ an indispensable element in education.
PB-D
p129 Document 11 3 June 1968
Nine paragraphs
>>> I mostly disagree.
p130 typesetting, paragraph 12
Paragraph 17 art history
Paragraph 19 relevance to teaching
p131 paragraph 21 assessment
p132 Appendix 1
This is an analysis of figures appearing in the Royal College of Art Annual Report 1959, covering students over the years 1950-59. Compares with 5 GCEs or more against less than 5 GCEs.
>>> It doesn't indicate the department or the relevance of the GCE subjects to the departments or courses.
>>> Nonsense data. In Hong Kong we saw certain subjects commonly held by students who studied in different design courses and entered relevant careers.
p141 If the French student revolt brought France's economic 'miracle' and highly developed technocracy to stalemate in six months, what effect would a similar upheaval have here?
p144 . . . we fought the cultural revolution on the ground, against the wrong enemy, in the wrong way, and of course with the wrong result.
p147 Tuesday 4 June 1968, College administration didn't invite staff to meeting on Wednesday 5 June.
p148 National funding of college in hands of Haringey!
p149 'Suggest That the Revolution Disarm Itself'
p150 The promised staff meeting eventually took place at the Parkwood School on 11 June in an uncomfortable, ugly hall packed with more Hornsey staff than had ever before met together in one place. Some members of staff had gathered the evening before to discuss tactics for the meeting; news of this had reached the administration and Governors who prepared their counter measures. It was an uneasy and awkward meeting.
The Parkwood School meeting was a remarkable, and pivotal, event in the history of the Hornsey affair.
p151 One motion was prepared, to set up a 'Staff Association'. Then an amendment was put forward (by David Warren-Piper) that the Association should be a joint one, embracing staff, students, and the college administration. This amendment was passed by 161 votes, as against 119 for the original motion.
This was the rather Byzantine form the simple problem assumed (arriving at this one decision took over two hours). Though no-one dreamt of putting it in these terms, in the official atmosphere prevailing, the original motion was one of dissociation of the staff from the revolt ­ it amounted to saying that the staff would have their own separate body, and that amounted (in the circumstances) to disavowing the student action. The amendment of course was the opposite . . .
Hence the students had won a considerable victory. They now had a sizeable majority of the whole staff on their side, in a way nobody could dispute.
p152 And of Course There was Television
p153 Two smiles died on 24-Hours like wilting dandelions shouted down by the wind of change MW Martin Walker

The Day of the Dogs . . .
The student elections for the sixteen took place almost at once (the staff elections had to wait on the postal ballot) and by one of those curious transmutations which occur in human affairs without anyone quite observing how it happens, the sixteen became in effect, if not in theory, the executive of the student body, just as the old S.A.C. had been.
p154 The Governors' document (8 June) had concluded: In the interests of art education, of the students about to undergo assessments . . .
p155 Projects
Card index
'bureaucracy rides again'
Projects included: clothes for spastic children; the double-page spread we had in International Times; utilization of waste products; fabric packaging; children's multiple-component play kits; etc.
P B-D
p156 The health inspector got to hear about the canteen being repainted . . .
p158 The results of the staff postal ballot were announced on 25 June and the full Steering Committee of staff and students finally met on 28 June.
p158 Hornsey College of Art Steering Committee
p160 The college was officially closed on 4 July, at 7.30 in the morning. When the first students arrived in the morning, they found a notice posted on the door to that effect. They also found the building surrounded by security guards accompanied by dogs. The students inside the building had barricaded themselves in effectively, and rigged up a loudspeaker system at an open window to broadcast their opinion to the citizens of Crouch End.
Soon a large crowd had gathered. A small number of policemen turned up as well, and occupied stances around the happening to prevent breaching of the peace. Later, the gas and electricity were cut off. Nobody could understand what the point was. Nobody really understands to this day.
p163 At 11 am that day a general meeting of the staff and students did take place in the College building. At that meeting a motion was passed accepting the proposed basis of settlement for discussion.
p164 (a) . . . dogs withdraw
(b) restore (gas and electric) service ­ Friday
p170 On the morning of Monday, 8 July, Alderman Cathles, accompanied by Council officers and the Principal, came to the College and took part in an open meeting of Steering Committee members and others who cared to be present.
So, as part of the step by step programme, before 11 pm on Monday night everyone left the Main College. The sit-in was over.
p171 Meanwhile, at the Round House and the I.C.A. . . .
p171 paragraph 2
The Day of the Dogs happened the day before the I.C.A. Exhibition opened. It was only the second exhibition to be put on by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in its new premises in The Mall, and was in effect an extension of the events which had taken place at Hornsey since 28 May.
p171 Sixty-two colleges were represented at the first conference of the newly constituted Movement for Rethinking Art and Design Education (MORADE), which met at the Round House in Camden Town, on 8-10 July.
p172 The conference's final proposals:
7. The conference demands that the G.C.E. entrance requirements and the present system of assessment be dropped. (FR)
>>> I disagree.
p175 . . . the Paris students thought that 'La negociation, c'est la ruse!', 'Negotiation is a trap!'.
>>> It seems that the butchers, bakers and candle-stick makers of Haringey Council knew this better than the General Studies intellectuals and academics.
p177 Alderman Baines was asked to give a categorical undertaking that the Autumn Term would commence on 23 September. He said he could not do this.
p178 As from 6 pm on Friday 12 July 1968, the Hornsey College of Art and all its buildings and premises are closed until further notice.
On Monday, 15 July, technicians and clerical staff, who would normally have been working in the College, were sent on leave or redeployed. The normal vacation functioning of the College, the rounding off of one academic year's business and the preparation for the next were rendered impossible. The agreement had been completely broken, both in spirit and letter, and the whole future of Hornsey College of Art was once more being decided; without staff or student consultation or participation ­ the very situation which had caused the outbreak of 28 May. Only the Commission was left.
p182 Meanwhile Alderman Baines writes a letter . . .
paragraph 2. The Governors, newly appointed after the local government elections last May, agreed at their first meeting on 7 June to all of the students' domestic demands, including a presidential sabbatical year and complete control of student funds.
p185 Danger: Red Guards at Work
The inevitable attack launched against our action was, that it was both politically motivated and politically disruptive. Nothing could be further from the truth, because generally speaking art students are uniquely separatist and politically naïve. The irony of the political motivation accusations was that they came from both friends and foes. Just as the Council saw the occupation as a left-wing international plot, so did socialist, anarchist and revolutionary organizations who would have quickly escalated the situation into a Sorbonne-type revolution if we had let them. The authorities similarly realized this, which could explain the tapping of college phones, opening of mail and numerous inquiring characters snooping about. At times the temptation to escalate the political situation was very great and a small group within the College tried to push an offer by a union to strike in sympathy and so broaden the activities. This and similar offers were defeated on the grounds that these were strictly non-educational. Some members maintained that since a central Socialist government was feuding with Tory councils up and down the country, and the local council seemed to see education as a clearly defined political issue, by implication we were involved in a political dispute. Furthermore other reformers would say that educational change would not come about until there was a significantly different political climate.
The exclusion of politics from the movement almost reached purge-like proportions and many students feel we should disaffiliate from the National Union of Students; this is despite the fact that many N.U.S. members in other colleges see Hornsey as one of the few lights in a politically bleak scene. The reason for this hatred of politics is surely part of the national suspicion of politicians; there are many at Hornsey who will testify to where political corruption begins and ends; with the butchers, bakers and candle-stick makers of local government. The most enlightening political feeling from the Hornsey affair is the realization that every tax-payer in the land is experiencing the same kinds of political frustrations as Hornsey staff and students, whether it be over the emptying of one's dustbin or disgust at the nation's Homes for the Aged. The most pleasing messages of support came from the man in the street who was as bewildered by mindless bureaucracy as Hornsey students. (JB)
Alderman Bains gave an interview to the Hornsey Journal on Friday, 2 August in which the following points were made:
Dealing with the assertion that the College Governors do not understand what the Association meant Alderman Bains replied, "We do, and we are not having it. They want to set up an arrangement whereby Mr Shelton (the Principal of the College) and staff report to the students. This is a pure Chinese Red Guard effort and we are not having it.
'The College was set-up by the council, who have delegated its administration to the governors, and the students can't do what they like.'
p187 Bains' response to David Warren-Piper's letter to the Guardian reveals that Piper first obtained another post at Bradford University and has now left Hornsey College of Art . . .
If progress ­ change ­ in our society is so vital to Mr. Piper, it should not be achieved at the expense of others, or by wrecking a progressive college.
(Shortly afterwards the much-maligned Warren-Piper was co-opted onto the Summerson Council, the highest authority in art education.)
>>> Remember Summerson said he wasn't an artist or a teacher of art, and nor was Warren-Piper!
p196 The Commission
paragraph 3
The Chairman of the Hornsey Commission for the latter part of its life was Frances Aungler Pakenham, Lord Longford.
p197 'Heads of Department Plan'
This plan echoed the Commission's one, in having an apparently democratic, elective structure extending from the grass roots inside the various Departments up to an all-College 'Academic Panel'. But it made the elective structure into an advisory one, and kept the power of decisions firmly in the hands of a parallel system of 'Executives' culminating in the 'College Executive' (i.e. the Principal, Vice-Principal, and Heads of Departments).
p198 Thus, a movement that had started by proposing a total revolution in education and the demolition of the old authority ended up begging for more representatives on the spurious parliament which that authority erected to disguise its educational bankruptcy.
p199 A Summer Commune
p200 The 'Hanley Road Commune' was inevitable, I suppose. (Islington) David Page.
p202 Meal times, especially in the evenings, invariably turned to political discussions. We had amongst us a Communist, an Anarchist, a Maoist (as Charles described himself) 'a sort of unsectarian Trot.' Most of these labels used were rather arbitrary. JD
p205 examinations . . .
The main expression of the competitive bourgeois ethos in education.
p206 Geoffrey Martin, NUS Pesident.
p206 Such was the atmosphere when the date of the normal College re-opening came up. On 23 September a large procession of students met in front of the building in protest, and then went to the Haringey Civic Centre at Wood Green to sit down on the steps, and run banners and cardboard Alsatians up the municipal flag-poles in front.
p209 Quietly, every day, power did things which were never even envisaged by 'direct action' and if they had been would have aroused bottomless floods of indignation.
p211 The Attack on General Studies.
Nothing makes the overall character of the restoration clearer than the systematic, relentless persecution of the Department of General Studies.
Many members of the department at Hornsey also made no secret of the fact that they saw the student upheaval as a possible way of bringing about changes in education for which they had fought in vain in the past against indifference and inertia of the system.
>>> So the academic credibility of the DipAD could no longer rest on this Department's contribution, in fact they had shot us in the foot and themselves in the head as an act of their delusionary importance!
p212 Head of General Studies Department was D J Joseph.
Only the Art Historians ­ being relatively 'safe' ­ were allowed to go on working in the main building.
p213 'the relation of art history and complementary studies to the departments is now under consideration and from information so far available it would seem that a different staffing basis is now required.'
p217 . . . the measures taken against the Department of General Studies at Hornsey ­ a major change affecting the whole orientation of studies, and affecting the College's right to even award a degree ­ were not even mentioned at a meeting of its new Advisory Panel.

The book ends on pages 219-220 with some words written by Martin J Walker.
p218 Elected Vice-President of the Students' Union. Resigned after three months.
Was graded 'one of the top four students' in his year after the first year. (Graphics)
p220 I am untutorable.
The student has learnt to educate himself.