By Alex Usher. It’s May First, the day when new student union executives typically take office in Canada.  But it’s also now exactly fifty years since the events of Mai ’68 in France, which was maybe the totemic moment for those who believe in a “student movement”.  In the United States, it was the year the anti-war movement really hit its stride (following the January Tet offensive), and where the image of student power hit its peak at the August 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  In France, the government very nearly collapsed in the face of four weeks of student and worker protest (the magic Trotskyist formula), only for president De Gaulle to come storming back to power in a decisive snap election the following month.  In Mexico, student protests were put down in bloody fashion on October 2 when over 300 students were killed in what became known as the “Tlatelolco Massacre” in the run-up to that year’s OIympic Games in Mexico City. More...

By Alex Usher. Following on the theme of yesterday’s blog on May ’68, I recently read a volume of papers edited by University of Surrey Professor Rachel Brooks called Student Politics and Protest: International perspectives (Research into Higher Education).  As with any volume of essays, the quality of the articles is uneven and it while doesn’t have quite the global reach of the late 60s works of Seymor Martin Lipset and Phillip Altbach (here and here), it still has a reasonably impressive scope and I think there are some good takeaways to be had from it, albeit not necessarily the ones the authors intend. More...