1968

Amidst the 1960s’ student movements, the University was not understood in terms of a core idea (or ideal), neither in the way in which Immanuel Kant conceptualized the University in 1798 or John Henry Newman in 1852 (Kant Reference Kant and Gregor1979; Newman Reference Newman1873), nor to the extent that Jacques Derrida was to recall Kant in 1980 or Stefan Collini to recall Newman in 2012 (Derrida Reference Derrida, Rand, Rand and Wygant1992; Collini Reference Collini2012) – each writing, in their times and from different positions, responses to the demands of power on the beleaguered University. Ideals (and idealism) might have driven student movements, but the University was not regarded as embodying those ideals. Throughout, the University was understood as already existing according to a given ruling system and understandable only as such: as a political site. The University could be acted upon or from in terms of what it already is: as a political site. None of the things that the University putatively already stood for needed to be defended, conserved or recovered. My use of the word site here is meant to underline this unidealistic attitude to the University.

The intellectuals of the movements – meant here in the broadest sense as including students, professors, party or union workers, ideologues, activists and reporters – joined several ways of acting upon and from the University. They examined and presented (or represented) the site as mirroring the social contradictions that it generates. They considered changing it from within or reforming it. They occupied it to that end. They then also took the University off-site or re-sited, enlarged or extended it (for example, by bringing those outside within, proposing alternative universities). They joined the University with other sites (such as factories) and the commons (city streets or squares). They considered abandoning or even destroying it.

From the state’s top-down perspective, the site of the University delineates an organization in Max Weber’s sense: ‘A social relationship which is either closed or limits the admission of outsiders will be called an organization (Verband) when its regulations are enforced by specific individuals: a chief and, possibly, an administrative staff, which normally also has representative powers’ (Weber Reference Weber, Fischoff, Roth and Wittich1978, 48). Thus, from this governmental perspective, the University consists of students and professors undertaking their functions under regulation by a bureaucracy to fulfil the state’s purposes: that is, providing higher education and research according to the state’s requirements. That, at any rate, was the understanding on which Christian Fouchet, French Education Minister between 1962 and 1967, proposed reforms in higher education which started being implemented in 1966–1967. These were bitterly opposed by students and professors and are often considered one of the spurs to the May 1968 movement (Seidman Reference Seidman2004, 53–57). The reforms, in brief, sought to introduce more professional content in curricula, design programmes to reduce failure and dropout of students, and allow selective entry procedures for students. The 1968 movement, from this perspective, led to those reforms being replaced by those of Edgar Faure, Education Minister in 1968–1969 (Patterson Reference Patterson1972). However, singling out the Fouchet reforms in this manner diminishes the part played by ministerial-bureaucratic governance in catalysing alienation in the University. On the one hand, that alienation had a considerably larger import outside the confines of the University; on the other hand, such reforms had a longer provenance in France, and a much wider remit than France – the thrust of such top-down reforms was similar on the eve and after 1968 in numerous other countries (for a sense of policy before and after 1968 in European countries and the USA, see Daalder and Shils Reference Daalder and Shils1982).

To some degree, the on-site intellectuals of the May 1968 movement responded to ministerial-bureaucratic reforms with proposals of counter-reforms within the University. Both the National Union of Students of France (UNEF), led by Jacques Sauvageot, and the professors’ National Union of Higher Education (SNESup), led by Alain Geismar, issued policy statements bearing upon governance of the University (Bourges Reference Bourges1968, 109–114, 115–127). In form, these addressed top-down bureaucratic declarations; in substance, they countered the authority and narrowness of such declarations. They advocated student power in the University, autonomy of faculties (teaching and research) wrested from bureaucratic control, and coordination with industrial workers in a wider anti-capitalist movement. The short-lived success of the latter objective – finding common ground with workers – in the May 1968 strikes naturally gave the French student movement a distinctive and centralized legacy. That ground was found at the interstices of students’, professors’ and workers’ unions, and was eventually diffused by the bureaucratic manoeuvrings that unions as organizations couldn’t dispel – manoeuvrings in which the Communist Party of France played its part alongside the Gaullist government. The very appearance of a University reform agenda, despite the ideological thrust, in such UNEF and SNESup policy statements marked a gap from the March 22 Movement. The latter, arising from the recently established Nanterre University, represented by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Jean-Pierre Duteuil and others, moved more determinedly outwards from the University but nevertheless joined the May 1968 movement. Cohn-Bendit and Duteuil note that, after taking an initial interest in the movement, the Maoist Union of Young Communists (Marxist-Leninist) distanced itself because of the reformist edge of May 1968 (Bourges Reference Bourges1968, 77).

The argument that effectively opposed that narrow ministerial-bureaucratic view pegged the University as a key node of the capitalist system itself. That is, the University was recognized as one amidst the network of seemingly discrete organizations which, together, constitute the productive apparatus of the capitalist socio-political order. So, the University could be regarded as the site for producing specialist or technical knowledge in the same way a Factory is the site for material commodity production. Hence, Jacques Sauvageot’s observation that the University

Similarly, Alain Geismar argued that ‘scientific research, one of the university’s essential functions, has become a productive force, capable of altering the production apparatus itself, and, in consequence, the very situation of producers within the economic and social system’ (Bourges Reference Bourges1968, 46). This argument in fact echoed the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964–1965, seeking to foreground the University as a necessary site for political activism of general social import – engaging with civil liberties and against racial segregation, joining anti-Vietnam War protests and workers’ movements, opposing neo-imperialist regimes which, ultimately, symptomatize a domestic and global capitalist order. The site of the University seemed apt for political action because, as Richard Abrams put it in 1965, ‘the University of California in recent years, perhaps especially the Berkeley campus, has seemed like a microcosm of the general social scene’ (Abrams Reference Abrams1965, 356).

The political site of the University was also bubbling with similar concerns in Berlin in summer 1967, in the student movement fronted by the Socialist German Student Union and confronted with the vitriolic news coverage of Axel Springer’s publishing company. Against this background, Herbert Marcuse – then employed at the University of California, San Diego – delivered a lecture at the Free University of Berlin in July 1967. Reflecting on the protests in American universities, and drawing upon his analysis of advanced capitalism from a few years earlier (Marcuse Reference Marcuse1964), he observed:

From there it was a short step to Geismar’s or Sauvageot’s observations quoted above. The University had thus been (re)presented as a site that both reflects and generates the social contradictions of advanced capitalism and neo-imperialism. The University therefore was also seen as the site from which those contradictions could be exposed and opposed. As Rudi Dutschke, the most popular spokesperson of the Socialist German Student Union, said in an interview a couple of months before he was shot by a Neo-Nazi in April 1968 (and barely survived):

In its outwards-from-the-University push, this statement was more in the spirit of the March 22 Movement than of UNEF or SNESup; understandably, Cohn-Bendit had followed and admired Dutschke.

The differences within these student movements were bridged by one active principle: occupation of the site of the University before moving outwards. In Paris, SNESup, UNEF and the March 22 Movement agreed on this. The physical occupation of the University meant removing it immediately from bureaucratic control, opening its doors and making it the headquarters for mass mobilization. For Nanterre, the occupation was described by François Crouzet as a room-by-room and wall-by-wall transformation (Crouzet Reference Crouzet1969). This account expressed a sort of bourgeois despair; a different sort of despair coloured Jean-François Lyotard’s account of the state’s reoccupation of Nanterre in 1969–1970 (Lyotard Reference Lyotard, Lyotard, Readings and Geiman1993, 46–59). After the occupation of the site of the University, its spatial reach was extended by moving into the commons: student rallies emerged from the occupied universities into the streets of various cities, demonstrations took place in squares and before government buildings. So, barricades were erected around the Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter in Paris, the Springer buildings were besieged in Berlin, and so on. Meanwhile, as Marcuse observed with the demonstrations at the University of California and elsewhere in mind, the occupied University also became the site for recharacterizing what the University could or should be. In that 1967 Berlin lecture, Marcuse mentioned the ‘teach-ins, sit-ins, be-ins, and love-ins’ and ‘the range of and tensions within the opposition: critical learning and teaching, concern with theory on the one hand, and, on the other, what can be referred to only as “existential community,” or “doing one’s own thing”’ (Marcuse Reference Marcuse, Marcuse, Shapiro and Weber1970, 88). The students’ protesting presence, so to speak, enacted a reimagining of the University. In an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre in May 1968, Cohn-Bendit spoke of opening the subsidized university restaurants to the public and, at some length, of setting up a ‘parallel education’: ‘We must launch a university ourselves, on a completely new basis, even if it only lasts a few weeks. … In all faculties we shall open new seminars – not lecture courses, obviously – on the problems of the workers’ movement, on the use of technology in the interests of man, on the possibilities opened up by automation’ (Bourges Reference Bourges1968, 106). The Free University of New York and the Antiuniversity of London, set up in 1965 and 1967 respectively, and both short-lived, had already anticipated Cohn-Bendit’s idea (for both institutions, see Jakobsen Reference Jakobsen2012).

Before and during May 1968, some French intellectuals travelled and encountered other effervescent sites of the University which have been muted in the mainstream Paris-focused – Europe-centred or North-America-centred – narratives of the student movements. Michel Foucault was on a three-year secondment since 1966 at the University of Tunis. Student demonstrations there, called by the left-wing group Perspectives, concentrated in March 1968 on the complicity of Habib Bourguiba’s regime with neo-imperialist capitalism – its hold on postcolonial countries – and the regime’s penchant for suppressing dissent (Hendrickson Reference Hendrickson2012). Bourguiba did suppress this phase of dissent forcefully, and Foucault played a supporting role for the beleaguered protestors: giving refuge to wanted student activist Ahmed Othmani and advocating for his release after his arrest; offering his apartment as an organizing centre and for producing printed material and posters (Medien Reference Medien2019). The political turn Foucault’s work took after 1968 is oft noted. As he observed in an interview:

Foucault, then, was off-site as far as May 1968 in Paris went, but that doesn’t really mean that he was on-site in Tunis – he was, as he saw it, in an off-site country, a so-called third-world country. In a way, for Foucault the site of the University in Tunis was submerged within the off-sitedness of Tunisia itself. That’s also the view that mainstream accounts of 1968 have taken since. Though earlier, March 1968 in Tunis is generally recalled only because Foucault was not here, in Paris, in May 1968, but there.

Other French intellectuals were also variously off-site around 1968. Not only were they, like Foucault, often in off-site countries, some encountered student movements which refused the site of the University itself, choosing to leave it behind. Louis Althusser was not at the barricades of May 1968 either; he was unwell and in an asylum. His theoretical writings influenced the movement, but his reflections on it were to appear later (Legrand Reference Legrand2009). Interestingly, he had introduced some elements of Mao Zedong’s writings, particularly the essay ‘On Contradiction’ (usually dated to 1937), to European intellectuals over the preceding decade (Bourg Reference Bourg and Cook2014). In China, the Cultural Revolution was entering its later phase in 1968, with the conflicts between various factions in high schools and universities being managed by the movement of students to the countryside. A few French intellectuals – reporters – were in Beijing through the Cultural Revolution from 1966, notably Jean Esmein and Jean Daubier. They wrote reports for Le Monde and other papers, and later book-length accounts which were sympathetic to the aspirations of the Cultural Revolution (Esmein Reference Esmein and Jenner1973, 93–134; Daubier Reference Daubier and Seaver1974) – denunciatory studies appeared thereafter (beginning with Leys Reference Leys, Appleyard and Goode1978). Both Esmein and Daubier emphasized the part ascribed to the University in those aspirations. The University emerged as the ambiguously poised site where ideological battles within the Chinese Communist Party and the state’s executive bureaucracy were transplanted. Insofar as education went, the 16-point Cultural Revolution programme issued by the Party’s Central Committee in August 1966 focused on mass self-education and school reform. However, the following observation had an obvious bearing on the University as a bourgeois stronghold:

Mao Zedong had, by this time, variously spoken about eradicating the persistence of bourgeois values from the University. Notably, in a speech of December 1965 at Hangzhou (see Zedong Reference Zedong and Schram1974), he elaborated on the need to reform the Arts and Humanities (more or less out of existence) while developing Science and Engineering to practical ends at the University. The thrust of his vision – and of the Cultural Revolution in general – was that the appropriate education would be best obtained by reducing formal schooling, focusing advanced technical education on needs, and otherwise leaving behind or eradicating the site of the University.

In Cultural Revolution China then, the Maoist student movement was a peculiarly top-down affair, albeit a divided top, which gathered a life of its own at the bottom. Elsewhere, too, Maoist student movements, also calling for departure from the University and similar education reforms, arose from ideological divisions within the party structure – but leading towards armed confrontation with government agencies. In early 1968, film director Louis Malle was in India, where he filmed the documentary Calcutta (1969) and the TV series L’Inde fantôme (Phantom India, 1969). Alongside the May 1968 movement, his visit to India was to have a marked influence on Malle’s political views (Frey Reference Frey2004, 11–14). In Calcutta, which focused on the urban downtrodden, Malle filmed a segment on a street demonstration against the United Front government in West Bengal of the time and skirmishes with the police. Maoist Naxalite students shouting slogans featured prominently in those scenes. In 1967, Maoists had participated in the armed peasant uprising in Naxalbari village (from which the term Naxalite derived); through 1968, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which was part of the United Front, was in the process of splitting up. In 1969, a Maoist breakaway party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), was formed. Its membership included a significant number of university students from Kolkata and elsewhere. Its key ideologue, Charu Mazumdar, thereafter issued several calls to students to leave their schools and colleges and join the revolutionary struggle, to follow Mao Zedong thought in armed uprising against the capitalist state (Mazumdar Reference Mazumdar1970). The notion of revolutionary students who would abandon the University and sacrifice themselves for the people as revolutionaries who at the same time are also students has had a powerful appeal for Indian Maoists (Dasgupta Reference Dasgupta2006).

Back on-site in first-world France (to echo Foucault’s tone), those who participated in the May 1968 demonstrations soon found their hopes disappointed, especially with the role the Communist Party of France played, leading them off-site from the University. Not many emulated André Gorz in calling for the University to be destroyed in 1970: ‘The university cannot function, and we must thus prevent it from functioning so that this impossibility is made manifest. No reform of any kind can render this institution viable’ (Gorz Reference Gorz1970, 1553). Gorz was no Maoist; others turned away from the site of the University by turning to Maoism. As historian Julian Bourg put it:

To differing degrees that also occurred in communist circles in Italy, Germany, the USA and elsewhere.

Returning to where this essay started: in Belgrade, things worked the other way – Maoism, which was never influential, seemed to disappear as a point of reference. Tito’s 9 June speech, which closed off the June 1968 student demonstrations, denounced ‘a certain infiltration’ that ‘gradually took place on the part of foreign elements who wanted to use this situation for their own purposes’, including ‘various tendencies and elements, from the most reactionary to the most extreme, seemingly radical elements who hold parts of Mao Tse-Tung’s theories’ (quoted in Perlman Reference Perlman1969, 15). And he observed suavely: ‘The newest developments at the universities have shown that 90% of the students are our socialist youth, who do not let themselves be poisoned … Our youth are good, but we have to devote more attention to them’ (Quoted in Perlman Reference Perlman1969, 15). In Belgrade, the site of the University was thus restored to ruling institutional order sooner than in Paris.

Now

To summarize: the student movements of 1968 – through the 1960s – were variously anchored to the political site of the University, understood as an institution structured by a ruling order. This meant that opposing the ruling order and seeking social transformation involved reconceiving that site, reforming it, occupying it, extending it, opening it up and even leaving it or rejecting it altogether.

Looking back to 1968 from the current juncture, roughly 50 years later, it seems evident that the University is not quite the same sort of political site any longer. In the interim, University bureaucracies have gradually consolidated their position so that even the 1980s’ bureaucracy, not to speak of that of the 1960s, seems remarkably slack. The growing hold of managerialism (or New Managerialism) on higher education institutions has been much researched (see Amaral et al. Reference Amaral, Meek and Larsen2003). The consensus is that the University is more comprehensively aligned with joined-up commercial and ministerial interests than ever. That is not consequent to the traditional paths of exercising brute force upon the University or making the University the reserve of elites. Rather, the sway of managerialism has capitalized on incrementally changing the character of the site: fracturing, atomizing and depoliticizing it.

Some of those moves were vaguely anticipated amidst the 1960s’ student demonstrations. In 1967, as quoted above, Marcuse had noted the extent to which University research depended upon funding from government and foundations. By 1980, Derrida was less concerned about funding and more with the removal of research from the University to ‘non-university centres of knowledge’:

By the 2000s, research informing corporate and governmental policy, and indeed the functioning of the University itself, came largely from outside the University: from corporate research providers and purpose-built policy research centres (Search et al. Reference Search, Gupta, Durão and McDonough2017, 74–88). The cutting out of such research from the University – indeed rendering the University itself subject to such research from outside – alters the political salience of the site such that the 1968 conception of it seems redundant.

A hint of another direction in reconfiguring the University was presciently noted in an influential 1966 pamphlet from Situationist students at the University of Strasbourg, On The Poverty of Student Life (De la misère en milieu étudiant). It observed that some market-friendly ‘progressives’ were actually ‘the partisans of the future cybernetized university which, here and there, is already showing its ugly head’ (Members of the Situationist International and Students of the University of Strassbourg 2000, 7). The cybernetized university had in fact not really raised its head particularly then; the reference was to an exchange between an enthusiastic cybernetician, Abraham Moles, and a sarcastically dismissive Guy Debord in Reference Debord1964 (Debord Reference Debord1964). By the late 1990s, however, with the development of online teaching, the cybernetized university was well on its way. Writing about this development in 1998, David F. Noble felt that it was essentially commercially led from outside the University: ‘During the last two decades campus commercialization centred upon the research function of the universities, but it has now shifted to the core instructional function, the heart and soul of academia.’ He pointed in particular to ‘private vendors of instructional hardware, software, and content looking for subsidized product development and a potentially lucrative market for their wares’ (Noble Reference Noble1998, 118). Academic work, both teaching and research, is now so integrated with online digital systems that the site of the University is really largely virtual. Even where a specific institution may be identified with a physical campus, it is deconcretized into a vast and dispersed digital site, owned and operated by agencies that are often distant from the campus. Moreover, this digital site allows for a deep penetration and monitoring of the individual lives of students and teachers. The seemingly collective existence of communities of learning in the University is continuously atomized and belied.

Under these circumstances, it is difficult to envisage future student movements in the mould of those in the 1960s. They would now have to be anchored to other kinds of sites than the University – which would beg the question of whether they could be considered student movements at all – or they would have to reconstitute the site of the University off-site in some way (perhaps as alternative, unofficial, unsanctioned), away from what we are now accustomed to calling the University.