In fact even during the worst disruption, most students came to the polytechnic to work, and despite a brief drop in admissions for some courses, the institution (now London Metropolitan University), not only survived but prospered. Admitting he was “not temperamentally a politician”, he once confessed that he itched “for the ability to say ‘Hang the ringleaders,’ ” adding: “One can’t unfortunately do it.” One of his key allies, Caroline Cox, the head of the sociology department, felt obliged to protest when Miller declared that “sociology is in about the condition chemistry was in when they called it alchemy.”ĭespite the enormous stress on him and his family, Miller soldiered on as director until 1980, when he took early retirement, by which time the main troublemakers had left. In a spirited defence of Miller in 1975, Lord Annan, provost of University College London, attacked the “brutal and brazen” treatment to which he had been subjected and declared the goings-on at the polytechnic to be a “public scandal”, but Miller did not always make things easy for his supporters. Miller’s somewhat autocratic, outspoken management style and his insistence on academic excellence (“elitism”, said his enemies) did not help, and some staff and governors joined students in campaigning for his dismissal. Miller himself once received a black eye during a scuffle with protesters. Governors’ and academic board meetings were invaded. Students who did try to work during occupations were bullied, while non-Marxist university speakers found their lectures picketed or broken up. He made his first appearance as director designate through a window as students had barricaded the door. Before Miller arrived, militant students staged an occupation of the polytechnic demanding that his appointment be rescinded (the fact that he had worked in Rhodesia was held against him and he was accused of “racism”, even “fascism”). Even before Miller took up his appointment, the group had issued a statement promising “the most serious disturbances this country has yet seen in a polytechnic”. At the time the polytechnic’s branch of the National Union of Students was in the grip of the International Socialists, a Trotskyist group for whom militancy for its own sake was a guiding principle.

The new institution had been formed from a shotgun marriage between two unwilling partners (the Northern and Northwestern Polytechnics), with an academic structure involving an unusually high level of student representation. Two years later he was appointed director of the newly formed Polytechnic of North London and found that he had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.

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