Session Information
17 SES 13, Student Revolt, City and Society - From the Middle Ages until Today
Symposium
Discussant: Laura Kolbe
Contribution
A certain universalism is an inherent prerequisite for the identity of a university. Most early universities were founded in the centre of medium size and often wealthy towns. The university created, as a self-sufficient community, a corporate identity, with academic ceremonies and symbols, an academic self-awareness and intellectual self-esteem compared to other townspeople, in particular the middle classes, and the peasantry.
Within university towns, general or liberal education, vocational training and scientific schooling can be considered the classical tasks of a university education, although the balance between these three aspects greatly differed in time and place. Sometimes explicitly, mostly implicitly, general education also included the creation of a critical mind. The training of the students into critically thinking individuals only seldom was an explicit aim of the university, yet it certainly was a regularly noticed side effect of a university education.
Notwithstanding its supranational dimension the university has always been connected with its locality. In this way three central, historical elements of European history meet: the town, society and the university. The university can shape its own town, as the British-American college and campus tradition shows, or the university communicates with the existing city, as the case was and is in continental Europe. Anyhow, universities as intellectual corporations have had a perceptible influence on the town and society.
Add to that the strong sense among the student community of belonging to a specific social group and it is not surprising that student revolts have been an integral part of the university throughout its history. The emergence of the mass university of the 1960s obviously had great impact on the university/society relationship. The universities became centres of revolt and unrest, and the relations between students and citizens became strained. Ironically, their advantageous position in society as part of the social elite made them realise that they had the capacity to change society too, something which undoubtedly enforced their critical approach.
The aim of this project is to study the role of the students as a critical mass within the urban context and society through examples of student revolts. Central topics and questions will be:
- In what kind of revolts students were involved?
- How were the revolts realised in the urban context?
- To what extent were the revolts successful in changing the societies around the universities?
- Has it been a continuous aim and/or effect of university education to train the students' critical minds?
- Who and what were the students fighting for? Was it for their own interests or were they indeed as idealistic as is sometimes suggested (especially when complaining about the current apathetic student generation)?
- To what extent does the current university still fulfil this task of intellectual emancipation or is there indeed less room to be critical?
- Are students absorbed in the neo-liberal commodification of university education in which everything needs to be functional, at the cost of their social commitment?
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