Parents around the world must have thought their university-aged children had lost their senses in 1968. Spurning the benefits that two decades of post-war prosperity had brought, students went on strike, organized sit-ins and seemed bent on tearing down the old, conformist order and modelling a radical new world.

That was the summer when the idealistic Kenneth Everett Stone, a student activist, strode to the podium at Convocation Hall, accepted his honours Bachelor of Arts degree and, in a stunning act of protest, ripped his diploma in two. He had a moment at the microphone.

"Fellow niggers" the 21-year-old shouted in front of other University of Toronto graduates, professors and his uncomprehending parents. "Look what Mr. Charlie's done to your minds." (Mr. Charlie was a disparaging reference to white people.)

His education emphasized "marks, plagiarism and obedience," he said. He had hoped for collegiality and bracing debates with professors, but what he got instead was rote learning.

"This piece of paper is meaningless," he declared.

Some stood and applauded in agreement. Others shouted him down.

Emoke Szathmary, who also graduated that day, remembers how she felt as a 22-year-old who had worked hard to put herself through university. "I was amazed that he did it and further amazed that he didn't seem to think there was any quality in his education, that it was something shoddy," she says from Winnipeg, where she is the president of the University of Manitoba. "In those years you had to scramble for every nickel – if it was not worthwhile, I wondered, why did he stick around for four years?"

Bob Bossin, another graduate and co-founder of the folk group Stringband, recalls worrying about Stone while admiring his "great little piece of political theatre.

"It was a way of saying the emperor has no clothes and that the system is vulnerable, don't fall for it."

Bossin deliberated but ultimately chose not to join Stone and tear up his degree that day. "The ceremony was not so much for me, but for my mom – my dad was already dead – and my aunt. I didn't feel like flipping them the bird."

With convocation ceremonies beginning this week at U of T, it seemed appropriate to check in on Stone 40 years later.

He sits beside his wife, Kay, in their Hamilton kitchen while two of his four adult children listen to this story, which was front-page news in some Toronto newspapers. The close-knit family lives in a small house built in 1914 on what was a gladiola farm and is now engulfed by the city.

"I was an angry young person," says the 61-year-old, his hair thin and his beard grey. "The administration refused to acknowledge that students had a role to play in the planning of the university.

"But my thinking wasn't fully developed," continues Stone, who majored in political science and economics at Innis College."I'd worked every summer, I'd paid for it, and university was not what I'd expected – a dream world, talking to the professors. It was unrealistic."

After all these years, Stone is still glad he did what he did. Though for stronger impact, he says, he should have organized a band of students to tear up their diplomas with him or some other group action. "I guess it was a sign I'd be an iconoclast. I already knew I'd be opposition to the status quo."

And he's still angry.

His life has been a continuum – of carrying placards at protests, agitating for change and writing letters to the editor. His boots have pounded the sidewalk in campaigns against racism and apartheid. He was a leader in a local California-grape boycott and has housed Central American refugees. Stone was a founding member of the Hamilton Association of Concerned Jewish Canadians to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

He also launched a suit against Chris Stockwell for a $3,000 bar tab the former Ontario energy minister and his staffers billed to taxpayers.

"He has never sold out," says his friend Jim Zimmerman, now a book editor, who applauded him that day in Convocation Hall and later went to console Stone's mother at home. "He's still working for social change."

Although Stone's first wife was also an activist, he says his political activity put a strain on the marriage. "She got tired and resentful and we went our separate ways," he recalls. During the seven-year partnership they had Danny, now 32, and Jessica, 30.

Stone met Kay, with whom he has two children, through union work. "He just stood out," says the 54-year-old nurse. "It was more than just the issues of the local; he had a bigger picture. An injustice to one was an injustice to all."

After getting his B.A., Stone went to work for the Ontario Union of Students and, later, a fertilizer factory. Then he drove a truck for Canada Post in Hamilton for 22 years, before moving on to a temporary position as grievance officer for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.

Stone made an unsuccessful bid to be a Hamilton alderman in 1988. Two years later he returned to the University of Toronto for teacher training and made the dean's list upon graduation. He went on to earn a master's degree in political science from McMaster.

There were lean years when he was a supply teacher with a hefty student loan and supporting Kay and his children on $18,000 a year.

He's a full-time teacher now, outside of Hamilton. "Because of my outspoken views," he says, "I've had to work in places where my activism isn't known."

Stone does make time for the arts. He's currently reading The Hanging of Angélique, an exposé of slavery in Canada by Afua Cooper. "I was astonished by the revelation that Jewish merchants were responsible for about 200 years of developing and expanding the slave trade in black Africans," he says.

He and Kay have season tickets to Opera Hamilton. And Stone is a folksinger. "He doesn't just go to the picket line – he writes the songs for it, too," says Peter Shebib, a retired steelworker. "He should have gotten a lot further in the union and politics – he's too honest and outspoken about the real issues ... They like get-along folks."

Stone and his family live modestly. Their house needs painting. There's a 1965 Buick Skylark convertible in the garage, and Stone drives a '93 Saturn.

But he doesn't regret a life that's been marked by financial insecurity. "I don't really care about the money," he says. "My only regret is that I didn't make it into politics. I think I could have contributed quite a bit."

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What makes him mad now? "George Bush's war of terror against Arabs and Muslims, into which our own prime minister bought lock, stock and barrel. We're paying for a losing counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, where our troops control the ground they are standing on for a moment." He berates Bush, (Defence Minister) Peter MacKay and (Liberal Leader) Stéphane Dion, saying they clamour for humanitarian interventions in Sudan's Darfur region while creating humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

After an interview, he sends an email saying: "I didn't get an opportunity to say anything about a spinoff effect of Bush's war of terror" – the racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims in Canada, and the RCMP and CSIS "hatching of phony plots."

"I think he's angry at people who don't think for themselves and are led like sheep," says son Danny, an environmental technologist.

Stone grew up on Old Park Rd. in Forest Hill, one of four children of a building contractor. He helped out his dad in the summer. He was valedictorian at his Hebrew school at Beth Shalom Synagogue and dreamed of a career in politics.

He went on to Innis College at the University of Toronto. The college was founded in 1964 to accommodate the baby boomers swelling university enrolment. Unlike the traditional colleges at U of T, which were based on religious affiliation, Innis shaped its own personality. "It evolved into a left-wing, socially conscious college embracing the spirit of change and dissent that was emerging in the late Sixties," says Roger Riendeau, currently vice-principal of Innis. "It seemed to attract those kinds of students." Someone at the time called Innis the "critical edge of the university."

For students like Stone, the civil rights activists who came to Canada from sit-ins in Mississippi and hung around the common room, were galvanizing. "It was a time of intellectual ferment," he says. "We were not accepting what we were being told ... You could put out a leaflet at 9 a.m. and have an anti-war rally of 600 people at noon."

He pauses. "Now it takes a month. In Hamilton you'll get 125 people out."

Stone, who became president of the Innis College Student Society, pushed hard to win the first student representation on the college council, which at that time was made up entirely of faculty and staff. By 1969, Innis was offering courses on cinema, urban studies, the environment and Canadian culture and society, all of which evolved into U of T's first interdisciplinary programs.

"I learned more about politics from the fight for student power than I ever could learn from books and in the classroom," he says.

He admits to having made a mistake at convocation, but not the one you'd think. "I didn't tell my parents to stay away," he says, holding his head in his hands. "What a faux pas. They were so proud. And they were inconsolable."

"Bubbe still holds it against you," says Danny, referring to his paternal grandmother, Janet. His brother, Brendan, 24, who sat on their dad's shoulders through anti-free trade demonstrations, will start a PhD in social and political thought at York University. (Stone's daughter Jessica works in health care in Australia, while Siobhan, 19, attends the University of Guelph.)

Stone's 93-year-old widowed mother now lives in Baycrest Hospital. "My son has a very brilliant mind, he's very clever," she says. "But when he tore up his diploma I felt very badly. I was very embarrassed. I thought everyone was looking at me."

To this day, she doesn't understand why. "He was always very loving and considerate of others and wanted to help everybody. If he had not torn up his diploma, he may have been prime minister ... "

And she still can't accept that he believed in and initiated his act of protest. "He did it because his friends dared him to."

So Stone was more than happy to learn four years ago that Innis College was going to honour him as one of 40 outstanding "Innisians" being singled out for its its 40th anniversary.

Some alumni objected to his inclusion and urged vice-principal Riendeau to reconsider.

"I insisted he be recognized," he says. "I thought Ken reflected the spirit of Innis College ... His defiant act was a principled statement."



