From a medieval massacre sparked by a tavern brawl to the horrors of Tiananmen Square in June 1989, the history of student protesting is littered with instances of violent clashes. Matt Elton hears from historians Rana Mitter and Hannah Skoda about the lineage of protest through the centuries, considering the causes driving such groups to action and why they have sparked such ferocious responses…
Matt Elton: Without going into any of the present-day politics, which historical instances of student protest do you think are particularly revealing about its wider impact, and do you think such parallels are helpful?
Hannah Skoda: I’ve been thinking about just how active students have been over many, many centuries. I’m a medievalist in Oxford, and in 1355 the city was the location of one of the period’s most famous student protests. It’s known as the St Scholastica’s Day Massacre, because things did not end well for the students. It was a horrible episode in which some students claimed their drinks had been watered down by a tavern-keeper in an ale house on what’s now Cornmarket Street. These students were so angry that they whacked the tavern-keeper over the head with a beer mug. He punched them back, and then the whole thing escalated into a massive fight, with the townspeople bringing in extra people from the countryside to join in.
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The whole episode went on for several days, and the level of violence was horrific. According to some accounts, the townspeople scalped some of the students. It was really nasty. But what’s striking is that it started from a sense of self-interest from these students: they were concerned about protecting their privileges as students. Because when you unpack it a bit further, you find that it wasn’t just about the watered-down drink.
The students were concerned about two related issues: the assize, which was who had control over the economic weights and measures used for commercial transactions in the city, and their jurisdictional privileges, which exempted students from the usual kinds of jurisdiction [meaning they were supposedly only subject to ecclesiastical courts, and restricted the ways in which they could be punished].
So the riot started because the students were keen to defend their own interests, and the townspeople were trying to defend themselves against people they saw as encroaching on the autonomy and wellbeing of the town.
All of this strikes me as very different from the sense of social justice that has seemed to propel so much student protest in the 20th and 21st centuries. One point of comparison that plays slightly more in favour of these medieval students, who I’ve just painted as completely self-centred and brutal, was that they had a really strong sense of the place of the university in the kingdom as a whole. There was an awareness that what happened in Oxford (and, by the 13th century, Cambridge) was going to affect the rest of the kingdom. There were endless letters from the university to the king or his counsellors arguing that they needed to assure the wellbeing of the university because the wellbeing of the whole nation depended on it.
So this sense that students have a really powerful voice is there from an early stage – but I wonder how recent the social justice dimension is, and would be really interested to hear more from Rana about 20th-century student protest.
Rana Mitter: I’m going to talk about one particular date with relevance across multiple years, and that’s 4 May. If you’re Chinese, you don’t even need to say the year, because 4 May 1919 was the date of probably the most famous student demonstration in the nation’s history.
It was a relatively small student demonstration of about 3,000 people who had gathered outside the Forbidden City, the old Imperial Palace, which then as now is at the heart of Beijing, the Chinese capital. They were outraged by something happening thousands of miles away in Europe, because the spring of 1919 saw the culmination of talks that resulted in the signing of the Versailles peace treaty. Although we tend to think of the end of the First World War as a European issue, China was also involved because it had sent approximately 100,000 workers to dig trenches for the Allies on the western front. As a result, it expected that various former German colonies on Chinese soil would be handed back to China.
But because of various pieces of international skulduggery, that didn’t happen, and they were instead handed over to the Japanese. And these young Chinese students from some of the great universities of China were outraged by this, so they gathered in the centre of Beijing to demonstrate. This was a cause that was, in a sense, bigger than themselves: it was nothing to do particularly with their studies or their terms and conditions as students. They felt – and this in some ways is a very typical Chinese thing – that if they, as the very privileged, elite, educated youth of China, didn’t speak out against what they thought was a national disgrace, then they weren’t doing their job as students, as intellectuals, or as thinkers. And that demonstration was the beginning of a much wider range of demonstrations by students throughout the 20th century.
The most famous example of that happened exactly 70 years later, on 4 May 1989, in what was then Tiananmen Square – in that same location in front of the Forbidden City. At the height of the protest, more than a million students and workers gathered to demand reform and democracy from the Chinese Communist Party. The event is, of course, famous because of the tragedy of what happened a month later, on 4 June, when Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader, sent in troops to mow down and shoot hundreds, probably thousands, of demonstrators at the end of that Beijing spring.
RM: I want to talk more about 4 May as a date in a moment, but before that I want to ask a slightly simplistic question. The role of students has evolved rapidly even within the modern era – so if we head back as far as the medieval era, what was their role then? Who were they, and how did they fit into society?
HS: The big difference – in Europe at least – was between the northern universities, which on the whole trained people for the church, and the southern universities, which focused more on law and medicine. Students in northern universities also tended to be very young: they came to Oxford, Cambridge and Paris when they were only about 14, so they really were extremely immature. I think that probably gives us a bit of an insight into some of the stuff that went on!
It was a different situation in the southern universities, because the people training to become doctors or lawyers started university when they were considerably older.
There’s a powerful argument among several historians that student protests in southern European universities in the Middle Ages were much more explicitly political and tended to deal with wider causes than those in the northern universities because of this age difference.
RM: The issue of age also links to that date I mentioned, 4 May, in a different year: 1970. That was the date of one of the most horrific incidents involving students that the western world has ever seen: the shooting dead of four students at Kent State University in Ohio. Some people of a certain age like me might remember that there’s a very fine, very moving song by the singer Neil Young called Ohio.
Members of the National Guard – who, of course, were very young themselves – were told that student demonstrations were taking place on the university’s campus. They moved in to try and keep things quiet, but were panicked and made a horrific misjudgement and started firing thinking that they were being provoked. And four students were shot dead. There’s a famous, horrific photo of one young woman screaming in horror as she kneels by the body of one of those students. The incident was seared into the public memory in the United States for years, and is still well-remembered today.
That memory provides an interesting comparison with the Chinese case, too. Famously, you still can’t talk in China about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests even now. It’s an absolutely hidden, taboo subject – although, of course, plenty of Chinese students find out all about it when they leave China. The Kent State shooting, on the other hand, became a key moment in the US thinking about itself, and the way it treated its children.
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What made the deaths have so much impact was not just the horror of the killing themselves but also the fact that everyone involved was so young – not just the students themselves but also the National Guardsmen. This was set against the backdrop of the trauma of the wider Vietnam War, too, because men were still being drafted to fight. That lasted from the late 1940s until 1973, so one of the things most associated with youth, particularly for young men in their late teens and early 20s, was life and death.
That’s very different from the situation for so many college-age students now, when there’s a chance to have a good time, make your political voices known, and maybe even learn something along the way.
So the student demonstration in which these horrible events happened is linked to that wider social turmoil – and the fact it happened during the middle of the Vietnam War is something that really made people think about the position of young people in society.
HS: I’m also interested in the sense of solidarity and resonances between protests in different universities, and across time, because I think you quite often get a sense that students are following in a lineage of protest. Part of that must be to do with age – a sense of all being at a similar life-stage, and therefore having similar interests – but I also wonder whether some of it is to do with the ways in which ‘the authorities’ deal with student protest.
I’m thinking about the student protests in Prague 1989, which began as a commemoration of the breaking up of student protests by the Nazis in 1939 and then provoked a backlash of their own, for instance. There’s a really interesting sense of echoes, resonances and amplifications across time, as students engage with what other students have done in different times and places.
RM: I think that’s right. There’s also a strong memory among my colleagues here of 1968 being an iconic year in terms of student demonstrations. Some of that sense of solidarity is due to communications, and visual images: the fact that TV was around in the 1960s made a big difference, for instance. Students in Paris could see students in Berkeley [California]; students in Berkeley had an idea that people in Germany were putting their viewpoints forward. That all became part of a transnational network of student activism, demonstration, and so on. There’s some element of that today, but certainly you might say that the 1960s was the first period in which you had this networking across boundaries.
Hear more from this conversation in our History Behind the Headlines series, in which Rana Mitter and Hannah Skoda offer perspectives on the historical events and perspectives behind the news.