Higher educational industrial waste

A friend has forwarded Michael M'Gonigle's review of Hugh Johnston's book Radical Campus, from your Spring 2006 issue. She thought I'd be interested in the photo of me holding a megaphone speaking to a SFU student rally. I'd be more satisfied to have been interviewed for Johnston's book.
M'Gonigle comments that Radical Campus is more a biography of SFU than an analysis of the larger context. Without the context the institutional record will inevitably remain superficial. Johnston arguing that support for the pursuit of everyday democracy in the university was undermined by our bottom-up militancy, as M'Goningle reports, simply doesn't adequately grapple with the roots of the unfolding crisis and conflict.
Those interested in some unedited words from the evolution of SFU's activism and the larger context might be interested in my Student Radicalism and National Liberation: Essays on the "New Left"; Revolt in Canada - 1964-74 (2006). These essays show the role of the anti-war and community organizing movements as precursors to the student movement, and how our activism opposing the continentalist "higher education industry"; (M'Gonigle's good phrase) helped spawn the Canadian nationalist consciousness.
It is long overdue for the student radicalism of the '60s to be seen as a moment in the evolution of a new politics, based on an extra-parliamentary civil society search for alternatives to corporate capitalism, which is only beginning to gain historical momentum. I believe that M'Gonigle may be right that the war on Iraq is setting the stage for a renewed student movement which again makes the "radical connections.";

Jim Harding now lives in Saskatchewan. His other books are After Iraq: War, Imperialism and Democracy (Fernwood, 2004) and Social Justice and Social Policy (Wilfrid Laurier, 1995).