Beyond the war
Vietnam dominates the memory of 1960s student protest, but a large share of campus conflict was about the university itself. Students in the United States, West Germany, France and elsewhere complained that the institutions they attended were too large, too authoritarian and too disconnected from the problems of their time. These complaints came in four main groups.
Rules and in loco parentis
For most of the twentieth century, American colleges had acted in loco parentis, “in the place of a parent”. They set curfews, restricted visits between men and women in residence halls, supervised student organisations and could discipline conduct away from campus. By the early 1960s many students, who were often adults by law in other respects, found this paternalism intolerable.
At Berkeley the 1964 dispute began over limits on political advocacy on a strip of university land, but behind it was a wider claim that students held the rights of citizens on campus. The mass arrests that December are a well-known story, but the point here is the demand: that a university should not use its authority to restrict speech and politics. Over the next few years many American colleges relaxed residence-hall and conduct rules, often after pressure from students and a changing legal understanding of student rights.
In France, the Nanterre campus, opened in 1964 on the western edge of Paris, became known for its rules on residence halls, where men were not allowed in women’s rooms. Disputes over these rules were part of the discontent there in the years before 1968, along with poor facilities and crowded classes.
A curriculum that “matters”
Relevance was the watchword. Students argued that courses ignored contemporary issues: race, poverty, the war, the nature of corporate and military power. Some wanted whole fields added, including African American history and later ethnic and women’s studies, and others wanted more say in how existing subjects were taught.
Students also criticised large lecture classes, exams that rewarded memorisation and what they saw as research valued over teaching. The widely quoted image of the “multiversity”, associated with Berkeley president Clark Kerr’s description of the large research university, stood for this critique: a place where a student could feel like a number on a punched card.
In 1968-69 the demand for relevance produced some of the best-known campus conflicts, such as the strike at San Francisco State University, which was followed by the creation of a Black studies department there. In 1967 the debate was still mostly about courses, reading lists and the role of the university in military research.
Governance and power
A third demand was for a voice in decisions. West German students, organised in the Socialist German Student League (SDS, no relation to the American group), argued for co-determination, in which students would sit with professors and administrators on governing bodies. The Federal Republic’s universities were run by powerful professors, and students saw little change from the Nazi era in some faculties.
This feeling surfaced in a well-known banner at Hamburg University in November 1967, when students unfurled a sign at a ceremony saying “Under the gowns, the musty smell of a thousand years”, a jab at both academic tradition and the Nazi “Thousand-Year Reich”.
West Berlin’s Free University had been founded in 1948 with students taking part in its creation, which made the demand for participation feel especially pointed there. Berlin students were by 1967 also deeply involved in broader politics. The West Berlin protests over the Vietnam War and the Shah of Iran’s visit in 1967 grew out of the same suspicion of authority. Within the university, an alternative “Critical University”, in which students and sympathetic teachers ran their own seminars, was launched around the turn of 1967-68.
In France, the government’s 1966-67 reforms under Education Minister Christian Fouchet changed degree structures and increased selection, and student unions criticised them. Many in Nanterre and Paris read these changes as an attempt to fit universities to the needs of the economy rather than to students.
Italy had a similar story: the Italian student occupations of 1967 combined complaints about overcrowded lecture halls and rigid examinations with calls for student assemblies.
Free universities and alternatives
The fourth response was to build alternatives. American students from about 1965 on set up “free universities”, informal institutions offering courses that regular universities did not, taught by volunteers, graduate students and sympathetic faculty. One well-known example was the Experimental College at San Francisco State. Many were short-lived, but they showed that students wanted not just changes to the curriculum but different forms of teaching: discussion rather than lecture, shared decision-making and subjects chosen by learners.
What was achieved
Results were uneven. Over the following decade, many universities reduced in loco parentis restrictions, added student representatives to committees, and established new departments and programmes. Most did not give students real control, and many experiments faded. Critics at the time and since have argued that the demands for relevance sometimes lowered standards, while supporters say the reforms opened universities to subjects and people they had excluded. Historians still weigh both views.