Student policies and protests: the student movements of the 1960s and the 2012 Canadian "Maple Spring"

Student unrest and protests are as old as universities and were mostly in reaction to unsatisfactory conditions or policies affecting students. The student movements of the 1960s in the Americas and Western Europe were different as they were in support of, or in opposition to larger social and political issues most of which had little to do with actual student issues or policies. Examples were the opposition to the Vietnam war and the support of social and civic causes such as Women’s Liberation and Antiracism. Because of the broad and general nature of these causes students had no immediate or direct impact in spite of the wide publicity of their protests, yet they were quite influential in the longer run. In contrast, the 2012 “Maple Spring” in Quebec and the less widely reported protests in Germany against university tuition concerned a typical student issue and were successful in the short run. This chapter recalls briefly the causes and events and analyzes the differences between the broad movements of the 1960s and the more focused protests some 50 years later