Ylioppilaslehti and the University’s Language Struggle in the 1920’s and the 1930’s

his article covers how, before the Second World War, the student's magazine Ylioppilaslehti wrote about the university’s so-called finnicizing issue. Especially the 1920s and 1930s have been labelled as the period of the hegemony of the Academic Karelia Society in the academic world, and Ylioppilaslehti was the first area to be taken over. This atmosphere of "fighting nationalism", created as such, and the rise of university students' politics in general, are strongly intertwined with the attitude of Ylioppilaslehti towards the language issue. The particular research question is how Ylioppilaslehti operated in the students’ own public sphere, being the academic and more especially, the university students’ world. However, even though Ylioppilaslehti functioned within its own bourgeois and normative arena of public sphere, from the 1920s, it orientated itself increasingly towards the national public sphere. The research material consists mostly of issues of Ylioppilaslehti and some supplementary literature – the history books of the Student Union of Helsinki University in particular.A new Universities Act was a current topic in 1922, just as it is today. The most essential part in the reform concerned the language of education, Swedish and/or Finnish. It was the starting point for the language struggle which lasted until the Second World War. Nationalistic university students played an important role in this ethnolinguistic conflict. This article covers the issue through the students magazine Ylioppilaslehti, which has not only been an important forum for university students, but occasionally also significant for the wider Finnish public sphere