- we demand complete and democratic re-election of the entire teaching staff
— we demand free registration of students.
From the proclamations, it can be deduced that the main aim of the student criticism was the direction of State management, that is the administrative strata. The only basis for criticism here is that such a power wasnt able to accept the working class as head arbiter in the dispute. Conseąuently they were pressed into a counter attact on their own position which, for the broad masses and especially the poor levels of society, wasnt particularly convincing or successful. The student rebellion was attacked as a »so-called new left« with »the same hollow words without any meaning«. This »student new left« is not able to instruct society in self-management when actually their fa-culties don’t have self management while the rest of society already has. Neither could they speak of distribution of pay in accordance to work performed when it is known that the faculties live on a budget.1 This linę of thought continued after Tito’s television address on the 9th of June in which he openly declared that the student rebellion was spontaneous and justified, that 90% of the students were honest youth, and that he largely accepted their demands as his own with the promise that measures were already being undertaken and would be carried out. Further, this linę was brought to light in the lead article of Borba of June 10, 1968 under the title »Young Wheat and Weeds« which in its assessment and morę so in its intonation was the exact opposite of what Tito had declared. It was reiterated that it wasn’t necessary to be taken in by the student slogans and pressures when one knew that the bureaucratic deformation existed in the university and not in society where self management ruled. Deviation of the syndicate journal Rad,2 which in several articles came out with argu-mentive incentive for the close examination of the »four student de-mands« was ąuickly done awav with, first by the Central Committee of the Syndicate Alliance, and then by the press which called it foul dealings which »twisted the knife in the back of the worker« and which treated them as »a passive mass which is not in the position to have the independent power of decision«.
After Tito’s June speech at the Sixth Congress of Syndicates of Yu-goslavia in which, besides attacking that part of the administration which is enriching itself at the expense of the working class, he vigor-ously criticized certain groups of professors who infiltrated the uni-versities and negatively affected those around them. Following Tito’s remarks Milentije Popović, president of the Federal Assumbly, spoke to the political functionaries from Kossovo3 and told them that the demonstrations were a »real political plot« in which all enemies of °ur system found common cause; the groups who were mentioned as plotters included university professors, Informbureau agents, follow-
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Borba, June 9, 1968.
• See the issues of June 13 and 23, 1968.
Borba, July 1, 1968.