Student protests from 1938 to 2025

Описание: Do students at elite universities ever make meaningful contributions to struggles for justice? University of Oxford professor Danny Dorling considers the question.

Audio recording of Professor Dorling's speech at Counterfire's Revolution! War, Capitalism and Resistance event in Bristol on 1 March 2025.

"In the University of Oxford, in 1938, in my grandfather's time there, students campaigned against fascism and genocide. A student bought a copy of a recently painted picture called Guernica and hung it up in the senior common room at the college that Boris Johnson went to. That revolutionary student, I think he was a communist at the time, was Dennis Healy. He later became Chancellor of the Exchequer.

"Another group of students created a play in which a concentration camp was built on Christchurch meadow in Oxford in 1938 to warn of what would come, particularly if the British allied with the Germans, because that was certainly an option. The student who wrote the play was called Iris Murdoch. Those are the only names that were remembered from 1938 – nobody remembers the university officials who tried to stop them.

“The biggest protests that I attended in the 1980s were the anti-apartheid protests, and still those protests occur in elite universities like the one here, and my own. At the end of every evening when they have music in Wadham College in Oxford, by tradition, 'Free Nelson Mandela' is played to remember what happened then.

“Then go on to my children's political awakening, last year, when, in my city, roughly a dozen students were arrested and taken to police stations far outside the city and charged because they had protested about Gaza. All the charges have since been dropped. So who's going to be remembered in future? Will it be our registrar or our vice-chancellor or the other 11 people who signed a letter condemning the students? Or will it be those students and the continued protests? You can guess where the hearts and minds of the student body moved to the minute they were arrested: it was a moment when the large majority of students at the University of Oxford knew which side they stood on. Only a tiny minority do not see what is going on in Palestine as absolutely terrible.”

Visit Danny Dorling's website:
https://www.dannydorling.org/