The University of Reading Bulletin replaced the Vice-Chancellor’s Newsletter in March 1969 and continued to be published until June 2009. It is a valuable repository of monthly (later fortnightly) details of the University’s history over a period of nearly thirty years. The complete collection is held in the University’s Special Collections and can be accessed in the Reading Room at the MERL.
The Bulletin contains news from the University Court and Council, information about staff retirements and appointments, graduations, visits abroad and foreign visitors, course changes, finances, research grants and contracts, publications, student issues, sport, accommodation and obituaries as well as readers’ letters and a regular true-or-false quiz about the University.
Early issues were thin and unsophisticated, crudely stapled in one corner. Gradually, however, the quality of reproduction improved, photographs (eventually in colour) were included and the presentation became glossier. In May 1974 double columns and a smaller type (Baskerville 9pt) were used for the first time. The final, 500th, issue shown below traces the evolution of the front cover.
Occasionally copies contain an insert, and when I opened the issue from June 1973 a sheet of paper fell out with an unattributed account of the harassment of Harry Pitt, the then Vice-Chancellor. The following is a condensed version:
The student Rally ended at about 3.40 p.m.. Shortly afterwards a group of students was seen approaching Whiteknights House. The Vice-Chancellor had decided that he would not receive a deputation and left Whiteknights House to go to the Blandford Lodge car park. As he neared the car park he was seen by some students and they began to run towards the car park. The Vice-Chancellor had started to drive off but had missed the exit from the car park. He began to reverse and the students were slow in giving him passage. A group of students then pushed the back of the Vice-Chancellor’s car so that he could not continue to reverse. He got out of his car and walked towards Park House under the colonnade of the FURS Building.
The students followed shouting slogans such as “Pitt Judge! Pitt Jury!” On reaching the end of the colonnade the Vice-Chancellor turned back to return to his car, still surrounded by the students shouting slogans. He got into his car to drive away and a group of students sat down in front of it. He left the car and began to retrace his steps.
Still followed by the shouting group, the Vice-Chancellor turned towards the Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences building and then along the Queen’s Drive. On reaching Shinfield Road the student leaders were reminded that they were now on the public highway and if they caused an obstruction could be dealt with by Police. The students then dispersed.
There was no actual violence or jostling of the Vice-Chancellor but the students kept up a continuous shouting and jeering and surrounded him at all times. There were 30 to 40 at the beginning, but 75 or more at the end. Some were carrying furled banners and were probably not Reading students. But among the group there were certainly some students of the University.’
Background to the Protest
The events leading up to the demonsration are outlined in a ‘Note by the Vice-Chancellor’ in the copy of the Bulletin mentioned above. Here is an attempt at a chronological account:
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- The erosion of student grants by inflation had resulted in a national campaign by the NUS.
- At Reading this became acute in October 1972 when there was a substantial increase in hall fees. This led to a rent strike with threats of direct action unless the increase was removed or at least reduced.
- The University Council stuck by the original decision and, following a vote at a Students’ Union meeting, Whiteknights House was occupied for 3 weeks.
- Despite the disruption, the work of academic departments carried on as normal and, after the students had voted to end the occupation, no disciplinary action was taken.
- The rent strike ended and steps were taken to improve the accommodation system.
- In January 1973 students resumed their rent strike in support of the NUS campaign over grants. There was peaceful picketing and academic staff were sympathetic – after all, the target was the government and there was no intention to harm the University.
- An extended rent strike, however, was a threat to the institution and the Standing Committee of Council believed there was a duty to collect money owed.
- Students were told that if they did not settle their bills they would be denied payments from the Vacation Grant Fund, be refused hall places for the following summer term and the University would not process their Local Authority grant cheques.
- In protest, students disrupted a Senate meeting on 28 February 1973 and carried out a ‘token’ occupation of Whiteknights House on 21 March. No disciplinary action was taken.
- On 11 May about 30 students occupied the Registrar’s office until the V-C and Deputy V-C (Prof Cyril Tyler) agreed to talk to them in the Staff Common Room. Here the students intended to keep them locked in until they agreed to withdraw the letters to Local Authorities. Pitt, however, had a key to one of the doors and he and Tyler escaped.
- On 16 May students occupied Whiteknights House while Senate was meeting elsewhere. Some members of Senate forced an entry and identified 14 students on whom fines were later imposed.
- Staff who worked in the building expressed their gratitude to those who ended the occupation; it belonged to a sequence of events during which they had experienced ‘harassment, disruption of work, threats and physical intimidation’ (Bulletin, June, 1973, p. 30).
- The demonstration (see image below) and harassment of the V-C took place on 13 June.
- The University had prepared for solicitors to threaten writs in respect of fee defaulters and their guarantors (usually parents). In the event, fewer than 100 solicitors’ letters were sent and no writs were issued. The fact that students would not automatically receive their grants caused most of them to settle their accounts.
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Thus the affair died down with the beginning of the summer vacation, though there were still appeals against the fines to be dealt with. Six of the students who had been fined and wanted to appeal had reached the end their courses. They were nevertheless allowed to graduate.
Sir Harry Pitt (1914-2005)
Harry Pitt was Reading’s Vice-Chancellor from 1964 until 1978, He was a highly respected academic, a mathematician renowned for his work on probability theory and Tauberian theorems.
A mild-mannered, modest man, he found himself caught between understanding the legitimate grievances of students and what he regarded as the duty of a publicly financed institution to collect money that was owning. That the protests were directed against the government rather than universities or those who ran them was little consolation. Pitt sympathised with the cause but not the tactics; he wrote to Margaret Thatcher, then Secretary of State for Education, at least twice. The Bulletin of July 1973 reported that Pitt’s second letter to Mrs Thatcher expressed:
‘…the Council’s concern that the increases in students’ grants recently announced were still inadequate for their needs; that there should be an annual review of grant rates; and that married women students should receive grant [sic] on the same basis as single students.’ (Bulletin, July 1973, p. 6)
In his history of the first 50 years of the University, Professor Holt credits Pitt with introducing a new management style:
‘Pitt would encourage and restrain; he could lay down the constraints and limitations, whether moral, academic or financial, with great firmness; but he sought a consensus, a genuine communal decision, in the first instance from senior academic staff. Those who still wished to be led or directed found the new regime mild and apparently formless. In fact it re-fashioned the University as a self-governing community.’ (Holt, 1977, p. 289)
It is probably an understatement to say that Pitt’s tenure as Vice-Chancellor offered serious challenges. This was a period of rapid expansion and student unrest during which Reading’s student population rose from 2,000 to nearly 6,000. Nevertheless, Pitt successfully steered the University through these difficulties and received an honorary DSc from Reading University in 1978. He was knighted the same year for distinguished service to higher education.
sources
Holt, J. C. (1977). The University of Reading: the first fifty years. Reading: University of Reading Press.
University of Reading Bulletin, June 1973, No. 43.
University of Reading Bulletin, July 1973, No. 44.
University of Reading Bulletin, December 1978, No. 109.
University of Reading Bulletin, January 1979, No. 110.