Rebellion in Europe

At France's 23 universities last week, 250.000 students abandoned their lectures in a carefully planned three-day boycott of classes. At the same time, class attendance at the University of Madrid dropped sharply during a ten-day strike, and 1,000 students conducted a protest march. In Italy, although the Catholic University of Milan was reopened after student protests had closed it for a week, absenteeism persisted; meanwhile, riotous students at the University of Naples barricaded Rector Giuseppe Tesauro in his own office until club-swinging police broke through the blockade.

Although the incitements vary, student protest is sweeping Europe this fall. As in the U.S., the students are demanding power in setting educational policy and rebelling against paternalistic rules of conduct; they are also freely voicing disagreement with the policies of their national government. The mood of militancy has even afflicted Britain's Cambridge University, where King's College undergraduates--calling Prime Minister Harold Wilson a "fascist bastard" for supporting U.S. policy in Viet Nam--have asked for Marxist-oriented "alternative lectures" and called the in loco parentis role of their tutors "ridiculous." Asks one King's man: "How can a middle-aged man know about young people--and why shouldn't one be allowed to sleep with whom one wants?"

Undertones of Irony. While student agitation is an accepted fact of academic life in much of Asia and Latin

America, it is far less frequent in Europe. Most of the current rebelliousness is definitely Berkeley-styled and is blamed by some educators as being U.S.-inspired. The Free University of Berlin has even developed its own version of Mario Savio in Rudi Dutschke. a fiery radical who has been arrested for leading student demonstrations against police barricades.

The student unrest has undertones of irony. In 1943 the Franco government created an official union of Spanish students aimed at indoctrinating them in the country's political ideology. Students are now creating their own autonomous unions to express what they consider to be their true political beliefs. Since these are often considerably to the left of Franco's, the government is now insisting that politics has no place in a university. But politics was not the only issue responsible for a series of pitched battles between police and University of Madrid students; on a recent weekend some 80 protesters were arrested. Even some pro-Franco professors sympathize with student complaints that the university is chronically overcrowded, poorly equipped and sorely underfinanced.

Aroused to Challenge. If U.S. police officials sometimes suspect Communist influence behind student protests, it comes as no surprise that Communist leaders in Czechoslovakia saw "capitalist agitators" behind a protest march by students of the Technical University of Prague. Actually, they were merely fed up with continual breakdowns in heating and lighting on their campus, caused mainly by rats chewing through electrical insulation.

When police chased the protesters back into their dormitories, the rebellion spread to nearby Charles University. Students there held candlelight rallies, boldly protested police brutality.

Dutch students, who have a long tradition of political placidity, have been aroused enough this year to challenge police and send up smoke bombs in their demands for "political emancipation" and a bigger voice in running their universities. More than a third of the students in Dutch universities have joined a militant Students' Trade Union, which is planning a "counter-university" similar to student-run "free universities" in the U.S.

Protests at the University of Paris have been sparked mainly by valid complaints that the university is not equipped to handle its 150,000 students, and that the government is doing little to provide additional space for qualified entrants. Last week's class boycott, which students from other French universities joined in sympathy, was designed to press demands for "a complete reform of the university, its structures, methods and pedagogy."

Dead Universities. Academic inadequacies are also responsible in part for a series of student upheavals at German universities that are perhaps the most serious of all. There is widespread agreement that the country's once proud centers of learning are, for the most part, hopelessly moribund. Autocratic professors are still kings in their own classrooms, and students complain bitterly about the irrelevance of many lectures. A history student, for example, can study for five years without hearing a single lecture on the Third Reich. Undergraduates receive little or no personal guidance from undermanned faculties: the University of Hamburg has fewer than 200 teachers to handle 20,000 students; "seminars" are sometimes jammed by 400 students, lectures by 1,000.

Politics has complicated the festering complaints of students against their schools. The fatal shooting of a student from the Free University of Berlin during a demonstration against the Shah of Iran (TIME, June 30) ignited a series of uprisings at universities across West Germany. An emotional struggle has also developed between leftist and conservative students, both demanding different kinds of reforms but neither willing to compromise or join forces. In Berlin, demonstrating Free University students have clashed violently with police five times. At rallies, "Red Rudi" Dutschke reads telegrams of support from the Viet Cong. Rectors at Hamburg and Munich have been shouted down by students. "Our universities are dead," concedes one government education official. "We must start from zero."

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