Raising Cain: The University Student and the Politics of Protest

Introduction

Student protests and occupations are not new phenomena. On February 10, 1355, what came to be known as the St. Scholastica Day riot occurred. Oxford students and townspeople clashed after a dispute in a local tavern and almost one hundred people were killed. But while student protests have occurred throughout history, the 1960s introduced a new kind of student activism, and in that decade the nature of the relationship between student and university fundamentally changed. In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom recounts his experiences teaching at Cornell during the 1960s: “I know of nothing positive coming from that period; it was an unmitigated disaster for [the universities]…the sixties were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts.”1Bloom argues that while students in the sixties rediscovered an interest in morality, their new morality bore