Students of the revolution: The university in 1968 in France, Germany and Italy

In 1968 the universities became the center of protest in a large variety of societies across the world. Why was the university so vulnerable and how did it incubate a revolt which then expanded beyond its institutional boundaries to enter wider society? When did university protests become a social movement? What is the relationship between the late 1960s and the longer historical processes which have been summed up as the “Sixties”? This dissertation approaches the events of 1968 by a detailed comparative analysis of three student movements in the late 1960s at the Free University of Berlin, the University of Nanterre and the University of Trento. I argue that the three student movements, despite the different locations were fundamentally the same. Overcrowding of the university was not the reason for the outbreak of conflict, which emerged over a much broader issue of the nature of the university, whether democratic, technocratic or traditional. The student movements drew their strength from a historical process of the desacralization of authority which occurred throughout the 1960s in relation to culture, persons and institutions. The late 1960s are characterized by an attempt to mobilize the cultural freedoms and autonomy developing in the early part of the decade for political. The transformations of consumer society crystallized in political conflict leading also to a desacralization of the idea of revolution as previously imagined on the Left. The dissertation ends with a consideration of the “Critical Universities” of the late 1960s, experiments which attempted to create a radical democratic university but which also revealed the contradictions of the student movements themselves