One label, many movements
“The student movement” of the 1960s was never a single organisation. It was a set of linked movements in different countries, each with its own grievances. In the United States it grew out of the civil rights sit-ins of 1960, took a campus-focused form with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the autumn of 1964, and was then carried by opposition to the Vietnam War. In Western Europe and Japan, protest centred on crowded, rigid universities and on distrust of political establishments. In Eastern Europe and Mexico, students pressed for basic political freedoms.
1967 sits in the middle of this story rather than at its peak. It was a year of growing confrontation, but the most famous upheavals, such as the occupation of Columbia University and the French events of May 1968, came in 1968 and 1969. The deadliest American episode, the shootings at Kent State, happened in May 1970.
What lay behind it
Several long-term changes came together in the early and mid-1960s.
Demographics and mass higher education. The postwar baby boom reached college age just as universities expanded. In the United States enrolment roughly doubled between 1960 and 1970. France, West Germany, Italy and Japan also saw rapid growth, often without matching increases in teaching staff, housing or reform of old rules. Berkeley’s president Clark Kerr described the modern campus as a “multiversity”, and students often experienced it as large, impersonal and bureaucratic.
Civil rights as a model. The sit-ins, Freedom Rides and Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964 showed that young people could change events through direct action. Many white students who went south came back to their campuses with new skills and new impatience.
Disillusion with the Cold War order. A generation raised in postwar prosperity began to question both superpowers. Its thinking drew on writers who attacked conformity and concentrated power, and the story of New Left origins in the late 1950s and early 1960s explains much of its vocabulary.
Vietnam. From 1965, Vietnam War escalation gave American protest a focus. In the United States the Selective Service draft, with its student deferments, made the war a personal matter for young men. Elsewhere the war was less a draft issue than a symbol of American power, which is why Berlin, Tokyo, Sydney and Stockholm all saw antiwar marches.
A timeline, 1960 to 1970
- 1960: Sit-ins begin in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is founded in April. In Japan, students take part in large protests against the revised US-Japan security treaty.
- 1962: Students for a Democratic Society issues the Port Huron Statement in June.
- 1964: The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, September to December. A mass sit-in at Sproul Hall ends in several hundred arrests.
- 1965: Teach-ins on Vietnam begin, starting at the University of Michigan in March. SDS organises a Washington march in April that drew tens of thousands.
- 1966: Students at the University of Chicago occupy an administration building over the release of class rankings to draft boards. In China, university and school students become the first Red Guards, though under the direction of the Cultural Revolution leadership rather than as an independent movement.
- 1967: The shooting of a student in West Berlin in June, the Haneda clash in Tokyo in October, the March on the Pentagon later that month, and university occupations in Italy in the autumn.
- 1968: The Tet Offensive in January, the Columbia occupation in April and May, French student unrest and general strikes (the May 1968 strikes), student protests in Poland in March, and Mexico City’s Tlatelolco massacre in October. Japan’s Nihon and Tokyo universities are occupied.
- 1969: Harvard’s University Hall is occupied in April, and SDS splits at its June convention. The Tokyo University occupation is cleared in January.
- 1970: After the US incursion into Cambodia, protests spread; four students are killed at Kent State on 4 May and two people at Jackson State later that month.
How the regions differed
In the United States the movement moved from civil rights and campus rights toward antiwar resistance and, for some, revolutionary politics. In West Germany, Italy and France, university structure and political authority were the main targets, and the European New Left gave these protests their theory. In Japan, rival factions of the national student federation Zengakuren fought both the government and each other. Chinese students were mobilised by the state. In Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1968 students demanded intellectual freedom. In Mexico the 1968 movement ended with a massacre ten days before the Olympic Games opened; the number of dead is still disputed.
Where 1967 fits
Seen against this timeline, 1967 was the year in which student protest became international and more confrontational. Berlin, Tokyo, Rome and Washington all saw major clashes within a few months of one another, often with no direct organisational link, which suggests shared causes rather than a single plan. It was also the year in which many activists began to speak of “resistance” rather than “protest”, which meant refusing cooperation with the draft, the military and university authorities instead of only voicing disagreement.
Methods
Common tactics included sit-ins, occupations of buildings, teach-ins, marches and strikes. The language of each country’s movement differed, but the idea of “participatory democracy”, in which people affected by decisions should help make them, appeared in many forms. Over time, a split developed between those who wanted to reform institutions and those who wanted to confront them, and violence became more common in some places by 1968 and after.
Endings and legacy
The movements faded for different reasons: internal splits, state repression, the winding down of the Vietnam War, and fatigue. In the United States, the voting age was lowered to 18 by the 26th Amendment in 1971, and the draft ended in the early 1970s. Many participants went on into the women’s movement, environmentalism and local politics, and universities in many countries did loosen their rules and give students more of a voice. Historians still disagree about how much the protests changed institutions as opposed to attitudes.