{"id":6547,"date":"2018-03-04T13:28:02","date_gmt":"2018-03-04T13:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=6547"},"modified":"2026-04-18T19:34:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T19:34:32","slug":"1968-rise-campus-radicalism-scotland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2018\/03\/1968-rise-campus-radicalism-scotland\/","title":{"rendered":"1968 and the rise of campus radicalism in Scotland"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

I for one am enough of a nationalist, and have enough faith in the students and young workers of Glasgow and Edinburgh, to believe that these forces are also present in them.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will not admit that the great dreams of May 1968 are foreign to us, that the great words on the Sorbonne walls would not be at home on the walls of Aberdeen or St Andrews, or that Linwood and Dundee could not be Flins and Nantes. Nor will I admit that, faced with a choice between the Mouvement du 22 mars and Mrs Ewing, we owe it to \u2018Scotland\u2019 to choose the latter. (Tom Nairn, 1970<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Last week, British universities entered a second week of strike action, as staff resist the further marketisation of their pension scheme<\/a>. One of the pleasant surprises of the strike so far has been the level of student support, with the \u201cimpacted customers\u201d themselves (as senior managers would see them) joining rallies, picket lines and even occupying the headquarters of Universities UK. Whatever the outcome, it is clear that many students are deeply concerned not only about their debts and teaching standards, but broader questions about the role and value of universities in wider society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is fitting that this wave of activism coincides with the half-centenary of 1968, a year with emblematic status in the history of student protest. It was in May 1968 that Parisian students, following minor upheavals on campuses across Europe and America, turned protests at the University of Nanterre into a nationwide revolt against the conformism, traditionalism and rising alienation that defined so much of post-WWII life. The iconography and mythology of les \u00e9v\u00e9nements <\/em>continues to shape the traditions of student resistance, forming a \u201cusable past\u201d through which students can align their own struggles with a storied episode of creative rebellion. But in this regard campus radicals in Scotland are stymied by our own distinctive myth of 1968: it didn\u2019t happen here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
France. Paris et Banlieue. Graffiti, bombages, inscription et affiche dans les fac et les rue autour de mai 1968<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This is part of a broader myth about radicalism in Scotland, prominent in the work of Gerry Hassan<\/a> and others, which tells us that genuine radicalism is largely absent from Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century. Only the \u201cbrief dawns\u201d of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders\u2019 work-in and the magazine Radical Scotland<\/em> threatened to make an impact, and Hassan suggests that even these became incorporated into Labour and nationalist narratives. Yet this insistence on identifying \u201cradical Scotland\u201d \u2013 rather than radicalism in<\/em> <\/em>Scotland, shaped by its Scottishness but not subordinate to it \u2013 only reinforces the predominance of a stodgy, defensive class politics and flavourless nationalism in the historiography of \u2018popular politics\u2019 after the Second World War. By subordinating radicalism to its influence on wider \u201cnational\u201d priorities, this approach not only forces radical history into precisely the sort of nationalist teleology from which it ought to be rescued, but also draws our attention away from key elements of the radical tradition whose enduring influence on Scottish political culture is less intentional and direct than the idea of \u201cradical Scotland\u201d implies. One of these elements was the culture and politics of student radicalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Student bohemia<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In his Modern Scotland<\/a><\/em>, Richard Finlay suggests that \u201cthe waves of student protest which marked campus life around the western world in the sixties and early seventies were largely absent from Scotland\u201d. While it\u2019s true that no paving-stone missiles disturbed the peace of George Square or University Gardens that summer, there is much more to say. Christopher Harvie describes<\/a> \u201ca student bohemia\u201d emerging from the early 1960s in Edinburgh, focused in particular on the \u201cPaperback Bookshop\u201d on Charles Street. The bookshop was owned by Jim Haynes, whose adventures in British counterculture saw him involved with the founding of the Traverse Theatre and the influential underground newspaper International Times<\/em>. The emergent culture of literary radicalism that Haynes and his bookshop represented has been well documented in Eleanor Bell\u2019s edited collection The Scottish Sixties<\/a>,<\/em> <\/em>and Ross Birrell and Alec Finlay\u2019s Justified Sinners<\/a><\/em>; but its role within a broader political scene remains strangely underexplored, and its legacy is often reduced to the status of mere curiosity. The stuffed Rhino head which surreally adorned Paperback Bookshop\u2019s frontage is now memorialised in a small bronze replica, mounted \u2013 to the endless bemusement of students \u2013 on the side of Edinburgh University\u2019s Informatics building, the old site of the bookshop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If this strange marker seems to embody one sad story of the contemporary university \u2013 the replacement of mind-expansion with information-processing \u2013 we should remind ourselves that sixties student culture was (of course) uneven and ambivalent. Tensions between a countercultural minority and a seemingly apathetic majority of students were particularly concerning for the more radically-inclined editors of Edinburgh\u2019s Student<\/em> <\/em>newspaper in the late 1960s. Responding to the wave of unrest which consumed the London School of Economics in 1967, one editorial identified \u201ca picture of a university and a student way of life which is about as far away from the life we lead here as the moon is.\u201d Frustrations like this were intermingled with provocative moonshots of their own, trying to jolt their peers out of conformism, if not into revolt: a meeting between the Duke of Edinburgh and the president of the male-dominated University Union was reported on the front page of the Student<\/em> <\/em>under the sub-heading \u2018ANACHRONISM MEETS ANACHRONISM\u2019. A fortnight later, a full-page spread on the merits of L.S.D. prompted the Student Representative Council to suspend the editor, Hugh Griffiths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sexual liberation was also a key concern, though often couched in carefully administrative terms. When the Student Representative Council began facilitating access to contraceptive pills for students, the university rector \u2013 right-wing celebrity Malcolm Muggeridge \u2013 condemned the decision, and after a campaign against him led by the new Student<\/em> editor Anna Coote, he resigned in the middle of a speech at St. Giles\u2019 Cathedral. That week\u2019s Student<\/em> <\/em>featured an enormous cartoon by a maths student called Phil Bevis, depicting Muggeridge\u2019s face as a skull (later described as the \u2018Muggerskull\u2019). The SRC, uncomfortable with The Student<\/em>\u2019s provocative approach, demanded closer scrutiny of the newspaper\u2019s output, prompting further outrage from the small group of radicals running the paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An end-of-decade reflection on the Student<\/em>\u2019s \u201csixties\u201d described this group as a radical \u201cdynasty\u201d, the \u201capotheosis\u201d of \u201cthe increasing tension and sorts of disagreements that began to appear openly in universities on the question of what university was about anyway\u201d. Their names, some of which are now more familiar, pop up time and again in controversies of the period: alongside Hugh Griffiths and Anna Coote were Steven Morrison, one of the leaders of radical demands for student democracy, and the first, unsuccessful, student candidate for rector; and Yvonne Baginsky, who was fired as editor after refusing to print a letter by rectorial candidate Kenneth Allsop which criticised Morrison, and who established the radical Student Independent<\/em> <\/em>newspaper in response. There was also Bob Cuddihy, chair of the university\u2019s Labour Club. While they may not have been representative of the student body, their antics created ripples that can be felt to this day. In the aftermath of the \u201cMuggeridge Affair\u201d, for instance, the Edinburgh University Student Publications Board was set up to oversee the Student<\/em> <\/em>in place of the SRC. EUSPB rapidly developed into a crucial part of the Scottish publishing scene, producing the influential New Edinburgh Review<\/em> <\/em>from 1969 and the Red Paper on Scotland<\/em> <\/em>\u2013 edited by Gordon Brown, at that point Edinburgh\u2019s second student rector \u2013 in 1975. At the end of the decade, EUSPB evolved into Polygon, publishers of some of the most important texts in Scottish literature and history since the 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critical enquiries<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This was part of a broader \u201capparatus of criticism\u201d through which, Harvie suggests, \u201cthe treatment of Scotland moved away from myth, recollected grievance and the romanticism which had penetrated earlier accounts,\u201d and towards efforts \u201cto understand why Scotland was different, and what long-term factors, if any, underlay the current political upheavals\u201d. In 1968, an Edinburgh PhD student called Bob Tait, then an editor of the student-run Feedback<\/em> <\/em>magazine alongside future Radio Scotland<\/em> <\/em>chief Jack Regan, established Scottish International Review<\/em> <\/em>(SI<\/em>) with support from the Scottish Arts Council in premises provided by the university chaplain, Father Anthony Ross. Tait and Ross exemplified the liberal, inquisitive and modernist Catholicism that has become closely associated with the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65. Their culturally rooted, yet intellectually cosmopolitan ideology helped to shape SI<\/em>, which sought to place Scotland\u2019s new culture and politics in an international context while simultaneously providing critical (though often somewhat distant and experimental) ballast to an emerging left-wing nationality politics in the aftermath of the SNP\u2019s by-election win in Hamilton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA colourless or promiscuous internationalism is to nobody\u2019s advantage,\u201d proclaimed the first editorial, \u201cbut a self-conscious cultural nationalism can lead to bad habits of stereotyped thinking and unwillingness to look at the situation as it really is\u201d. In pursuit of Scotland \u201cas it really is,\u201d SI<\/em> published a regular summary written by Christopher Smout of developments in the study of Scottish social history, an attempt to address the glaring lack of attention given to the distinctive trajectory which E.P. Thompson had identified, but never explored, in the development of working-class identity in Scotland. The muted reaction of much of the Scottish left to Bob Tait\u2019s<\/a> death in December 2017 suggests that a similar process of historical recovery is now essential for the 1960s and \u201870s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such developments were by no means exclusive to Edinburgh. Ray Burnett has described<\/a> his experiences in Aberdeen, where left-wing students took control of the well-funded \u201cDebater\u201d society to support a series of \u201cteach-ins\u201d on campus. In 1970, one such event titled \u201cThe Culture of Scotland, past, present, future\u201d, saw Hamish Henderson, Christopher Smout and others engaging in wide-ranging critical discussions of Scotland\u2019s cultural and political heritage. The structure of the event was heavily influenced by the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, drawing on the Sardinian Marxist\u2019s historicist approach to the role of intellectuals and \u201csubaltern\u201d struggle in the making of national cultures. Gramsci\u2019s work would later get one of its first major UK outings in the New Edinburgh Review<\/em>, which \u2013 during the rather turbulent editorial tenure of Maoist student Chic Maisels in 1973-74 \u2013 published Henderson\u2019s translations of Gramsci\u2019s \u2018Prison Letters\u2019, and papers from a conference on Gramscian thought. Gramsci\u2019s importance to our ideas about modern Scottish history, culture and politics is substantial (if occasionally overstated), and the student radicalism of the \u201868 era \u2013 along with the lifelong efforts of Henderson \u2013 can be given a lot of the credit for this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tom Nairn, credited in a recent essay<\/a> by Neal Ascherson with introducing \u201cthe notion of cultural hegemony\u201d to Scottish nationalism, was in fact rather isolated from such developments in 1968. He was busy with the occupation of Hornsey School of Art<\/a> in London, where he was sacked from his lecturing job for supporting the students. Burnett suggests that despite the considerable impact on Scottish intellectuals of Nairn\u2019s essay \u201cThe Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism\u201d in that year\u2019s New Left Review<\/em>, its author was \u201ca strange, distant figure on the metropolitan and chic European left \u2026 at the time it never occurred to anyone that he actually might be Scottish.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Identity politics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The politics of identity, so ubiquitous in the memorialisation of that era\u2019s radicalism, were threaded through everything. Students were beginning to see themselves as not only a distinct community but a political movement: Sarah Browne has argued <\/a>that \u201cstudent representation\u201d, at that time largely absent from university governance, was an omnipresent demand. It took various forms, but was often focused on the distinctly Scottish position of the elected rector, which was used for both symbolic and practical purposes. At Glasgow, left-wingers persuaded Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the Parisian revolt, to run (though he came fourth). In Aberdeen, the left organised behind the New Left intellectual Robin Blackburn, whose 1967 essay<\/a> on inequality publicised the Economist<\/em> <\/em>article that is supposed to have inspired the name of McGrath\u2019s 7:84<\/em> <\/em>theatre company. In Edinburgh, students furious at their \u201cabsentee landlord\u201d Rectors, Muggeridge and Allsop, pushed hard for a \u201cworking\u201d student rector and eventually managed to elect Jonathon Wills (whose \u201cGaston Le Jobbe\u201d cartoons in the Student<\/em> <\/em>nevertheless satirised his peers as \u201cfung studn\u2019ts\u201d) in 1971, followed by Gordon Brown a year later. The legacy of these efforts to politicise the Rectorship is felt today: Aamer Anwar at Glasgow and Maggie Chapman at Aberdeen have taken firm lines in support of striking academics, while Ann Henderson was recently elected as Edinburgh University Rector on a proudly trade unionist ticket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other identities were finally coming to the surface too, and these were also closely linked to campus culture. Under Father Anthony Ross, Edinburgh University\u2019s chaplaincy became a home for the Scottish Minorities Group<\/a>, founded in 1969 to campaign for gay rights. At St. Andrews, as elsewhere, the university became a crucial hub for the emergent Women\u2019s Liberation Movement, as Sarah Browne writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

it was being part of a small and remote community with a focus on student life and the university that really gave the women\u2019s liberation group in St Andrews a particular character. It also provided them with more opportunities to publicize their events and campaigns. They were able to promote their full message through the pages of AIEN [the student newspaper] where members Zoe Fairbairns, Stevie Norris, Susie Innes, and Anne Jackson all became editors. They used this influence to pack the pages of AIEN with articles on abortion, pornography, and book reviews of women\u2019s liberation texts, quite clearly giving the impression that St Andrews University was \u2018a veritable hotbed of feminism\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, Scotland was no hotbed of radicalism in 1968. The second issue of Scottish International<\/em>, published in August that year, featured a new poem by Iain Crichton Smith \u2013 titled simply \u201cScotland\u201d, which ended grimly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your artists cower in their walls of stone.
\nEurope has forgotten you. What are you?
\nYou are a silence, you\u2019re a mineral,
\nsleep of the dead strata, step on step,
\na house of echoes on a posthumous green.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such a silence was hard to break. Yet those underground \u201cdead strata\u201d would soon burst back into life: oil and Scottish nationalism erupted into British politics during the following decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The attention lavished upon those developments by scholars has tended to obscure another underground influence on Scotland\u2019s recent history, one over which we had \u2013 and have \u2013 far more control: the sedimentary power of collective, utopian intransigence, however small those collectives might be. Though few heard them at the time, the cries \u2013 both of frustration and hope \u2013 of Scotland\u2019s soixante-huitards<\/em> have echoed through five decades of history. If we remember \u201868 as yet another \u201cmissed event\u201d in Scottish history, we risk letting that echo die out. Tales of Scottish somnolence all too often fall into what Kristin Ross calls<\/a> \u201cthe police conception of history\u201d: just as the police tell us what is and isn\u2019t allowed, so too do historians often try to tell us what was and what wasn\u2019t possible, pointing to the past and saying: \u201cnothing to see here, move along\u201d. As Raymond Williams tells us, it is the duty of radical historians to \u201cmake hope possible, rather than despair convincing\u201d; to show people what might be concealed behind that bland surface, holding fast to the old \u201868 slogan: beneath these streets, the beach<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Main image by walknboston<\/a> CC BY NA 2.0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rhino head image by Cory Doctorow<\/a> CC BY NA 2.0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

First published by Scottish Critical Heritage<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rory Scothorne explores the emergence of student radicalism in Scotland, arguing that the politicisation of Scottish students during the \u201c1968 era\u201d has left a lasting impression on Scottish politics and culture rather than the prevailing myth about 1968: it didn\u2019t happen here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":6553,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[37,51],"class_list":["post-6547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-scottish-education","tag-young-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6547"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18858,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6547\/revisions\/18858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}