Visions and Forms of Democratic Participation in Italian Universities after 1968

The essay focuses on the ideological aspects and organizational dynamics underlying the 1968 protests in Italian universities. It analyses the inter-generational confrontation within the parties and in the wider public sphere in order to explain the new assembly-based organization in the Italian university. Young people in many countries demanded new spaces for a more direct political action; in Italy this would foster a change in the university representatives and parliamentary bodies which had so far mediated student participation. The UNURI (Italian University’s National Representative Union), founded in 1948, would suffer a crisis in 1968 precisely on the thrust of requests from youth initiatives increasingly freed from party control. Countering the representative logic of UNURI, the student movement proclaimed a democracy based on direct assembly. The university thus became a place to think and implement new democratic practices, tested in the context of academic institutions unable to update their representative role and meet the strong demand for student participation