Altbach’s Theory of Student Activism in the Twentieth Century: Ten Propositions that Matter

Abstract

Student activism is ‘a highly complex, many-faceted phenomenon’ for which serious systematic efforts at understanding it only emerged as a scholarly response to the student revolts of the twentieth century. Until the mid-1960s, student activism was thought of as more characteristic of developing countries than the industrialised countries of Western Europe and North America, even though students had historically been part of the political equation there, for example during the Bourgeois revolutions of the 1840s. The student activism of the late 1960s stands out, however, as perhaps the most significant student political period of the twentieth century in Europe and North America. Philip Altbach was there. As a student at the University of Chicago, he was part of the anti-war Student Peace Union (SPU) from its establishment in 1959 and served as national chairman of the SPU from 1959 to 1963. In the early 1960s he turned his attention to studying student politics rather than actively participating in it. During this period he produced his PhD thesis, Students, Politics and Higher Education in a Developing Society: The Case of Bombay, India, and began to make a name as an emerging scholar on student politics in America, India and the developing world (working on related topics with Seymore Martin Lipset), and he tried himself as scholarly commentator on matters such as the civil rights movement in the US. This chapter sets out to order Altbach’s theoretical contribution systematically, by formulating ten propositions for understanding student activism in the twentieth century based on his work.