The prehistory of 1968: the birth of an Australian radical intelligentsia

...In the postwar years in Australia, education expenditure as a proportion of GDP nearly trebled, from 1.6 per cent in 1950-51 to 4.3 per cent in 1970-71; and primary, secondary and tertiary enrolments grew by 11 per cent, 45 per cent and 89 per cent respectively, in a single decade after 1964-65. Consequently, the number of Australian universities grew from nine in 1958 to sixteen in 1971, with four new universities established in 1964-66 alone. This increased the proportion of people aged seventeen to twenty-two attending university by 48 per cent between 1960 and 1972, with many coming from families and social classes that had had little or no previous association with universities, often relying on teaching studentships, which gave impecunious students an opportunity to attend university but required them to study in specific fields, and then work in often isolated or undesirable government schools. Overall, between 1955 and 1970 university student numbers increased 300 per cent, from 30,000 to 120,000, while full-time academic staff increased 250 per cent, from 2000 to 7000.

Such rapid periods of expansion have occurred before and the results have been the same--the politicisation of students, teachers and academics, and the emergence of a radical cadre that impacted on their societies for decades to come. As James Billington remarks in Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (1999): there is a "recurring problem of satisfying a rapidly increasing educated population with expectations that run far ahead of vocational opportunities", and this first became manifest on a mass scale around the 1840s, when "the rise of revolutionary movements ... was directly related to the development of a new class of intellectuals in continental Europe [which] created original ... ideologies, and eventually developed a new sense of identity" as an intelligentsia committed to radical social and political change. During the European revolutions of 1848, it was the intelligentsia that "bore the contagion from their studies into the streets, from banquets to barricades, and across national borders. They popularized, legitimized, and internationalized the revolutionary impulse."

The situation intensified through the nineteenth century, as education became compulsory and public expenditure multiplied dramatically across Europe, with Germany alone increasing primary school funding 3000 per cent over the three decades up to 1901. Students of various ages and teachers at various levels became ubiquitous, with the latter forming "a kind of officer's corps [with] a strong corporate esprit", and commitment to pursuing their own interests (Carlton Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, 1963).

Developments were particularly dramatic in Russia, where the composition of the student population in secondary schools changed radically as vast numbers of commoners entered the system, quickly transforming the educated class from "a small band of rich youths with troubled consciences and patriotic aspirations, [into] a large pool of people of all estates" antagonistic to the Tsarist regime. Consequently, throughout "the last half century of its existence, the old regime was in a state of permanent war with the student population" (Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 1977). In the period from 1905 to 1914 alone, the number of higher institutions and their students doubled, to reach 100 and 150,000 respectively, making Russian higher education "a battleground for a reactionary government and a revolutionary movement bent upon the government's destruction" (Oron Hale, The Great Illusion, 1971).

In such periods (then and now), the dominant political ideologies and commitments of academics, teacher educators, tertiary students, teachers and school students became vital political factors. The key ideologies throughout Europe and Russia were various forms of nationalism, liberalism and socialism, and increasingly radical versions of the sociology of Henri de Saint-Simon, and the Idealist philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, especially in the radical versions devised by Mikhail Bakunin or Karl Marx, which retained their influence into the period under consideration here. While all of these differed on the question of whether it should be the nation, the people, an ethnic group, a social class, or a conspiratorial vanguard that led the revolution, all envisaged an elite position for the intelligentsia, while the latter also had the added advantage that this was done as part of a universal--indeed, "scientific"--scheme of history, providing, as Billington puts it, "intellectual security and strategic guidance for revolutionaries", and becoming "the principal sources of modern revolutionary ideology, [spreading] across national and cultural boundaries to attain nearly universal appeal". ...

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