Session Information
17 SES 13, Student Revolt, City and Society - From the Middle Ages until Today
Symposium
Discussant: Laura Kolbe
Contribution
Up until the 1960s the Dutch provincial town of Nijmegen was sometimes called ‘Rome of the North’, mainly due to the presence of the influential Catholic University. Around 1970 Nijmegen quickly acquired the reputation of being a hotbed of political activism. This too, so goes the master narrative, was largely the result of the presence of the university. With good reason it is often said that students at the rapidly secularizing Catholic University of Nijmegen were at the forefront of the rebellion against the establishment which was seen at universities throughout the western world. In the early seventies, when the ‘revolution’ at the university had largely died out, students set their sights on social wrongs in local neighborhoods. As the city of counterculture and leftist agitation par excellence, Nijmegen became known as ‘Havana on the Waal’. In this paper I would like to raise the following questions. Who were these activist students? How can their noticeable activism be explained? What was the role of the Catholic University, which had been founded with the assignment to educate and ‘emancipate’ the underdeveloped Catholic population? What were the aims of the students and how where they influenced by what was taught at university?
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