Chapter 9 - ‘Student Power’

Summary

Chapter 9 describes the revolt at the University Institute of Social Sciences at Trento. It demonstrates the importance of protest about Vietnam in the first closure of the Institute. I argue that in the course of the revolt, the students discovered themselves as passive subjects of the university system and sought to reinvent themselves as active subjects via protest. In the third occupation at the Faculty of Sociology at Trento, they developed a charter of demands that sought to create structural spaces within the university and perpetuate the student movement without integrating it within the university. The protest movement successfully paralysed the Institute of Sociology without managing to impose itself, until the contestation spread to the Catholic Church in the Anti-Lent of 1968 which, although it culminated in the successful transformation of the institute, nonetheless left the protest movement with a question of what direction it should take.