It’s May First, the day when new student union executives typically take office in Canada.  But it’s also now exactly fifty years since the events of Mai ’68 in France, which was maybe the totemic moment for those who believe in a “student movement”.  In the United States, it was the year the anti-war movement really hit its stride (following the January Tet offensive), and where the image of student power hit its peak at the August 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  In France, the government very nearly collapsed in the face of four weeks of student and worker protest (the magic Trotskyist formula), only for president De Gaulle to come storming back to power in a decisive snap election the following month.  In Mexico, student protests were put down in bloody fashion on October 2 when over 300 students were killed in what became known as the “Tlatelolco Massacre” in the run-up to that year’s OIympic Games in Mexico City.  (For an excellent overview of all this, do read Richard Vinen’s new book The Long ’68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies, which is very good).

In Canada, 1968 was a more sedate affair.  Quebec saw a series of student strikes around – what else? – free tuition and McGill had its own set of protests around the status of French at the University.  Students at the brand-new Simon Fraser University spent much of the summer and fall of that year occupying their administration building for reasons that really strike one as trivial now but were clearly a big deal back then (another long read on this, if you want it, is Hugh Johnston’s Radical Campus: Making Simon Fraser University, which is one of the more intriguing Canadian campus histories out there).  And if we’re really pushing the notion of campus unrest, the University of New Brunswick had the Strax Affair.

What’s notable about all of this in retrospect are two related points.  The first is that – with Canada a notable exception – most of the big student protests (or “uprisings”, if we’re being grand) is that they weren’t really about “student issues”, except perhaps in the limited sense that at some campuses – notably the Sorbonne – the issue of men being able to bring women into their dorms (but never the reverse, as far as I can tell) was among the irritants which preceded the unrest.  They were about Indochina and the Cold War, they were about capitalism (the word “neo-liberal” not yet having been invented), they were to some extent about sexuality and some of the higher reaches of Maslow’s hierarchy.

It’s not that these kinds of protest movements don’t exist today; rather, it’s that no one thinks of them as student protests specifically.  Anti-war protests in 2003 may have skewed young, but “students” were never seen as the main protagonists.  Same with Occupy, or Black Lives Matter.  During the 2011-2 wave of worldwide protest, only Tahrir Square and the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan come close to resembling 1968 on the role played by students.

And this brings us to that second big difference: students played the role they did in 1968 mainly because they could still credibly be seen as a “vanguard” element.  These were the future leaders of society in revolt, looking for fundamental change for that same society. That radical students were never in the majority did not matter – the sheer energy of those radicals made them seem more numerous than they were.  Since then, increased access to higher education has diminished the view of students as “vanguards” and paradoxically lowered the value of what they have to say about broader social and political issues even as they have become more numerous and broadly representative of youth as a whole.

It is a little bit odd to see how these distinctions appear to have been lost in recent years.  For instance, in the recent wave of university protests in Paris, protesting changes in the university admissions system, students have been self-consciously evoking 1968 in their words (the attempts at Debordian surrealism, the attempt to portray their protests as a fightback against “capitalism” rather than simply education policy) and methods (occupations of university buildings).  It’s not that students themselves are nostalgic for ’68– some of them weren’t born until ’98.  But there remains a sense that 1968 was the “right” kind of student protest, not just in terms of the results (big crowds, general strikes) but in terms of the “correct” way of dealing with politics (i.e. “Sticking it to the Man”).  And yet, precisely because today’s students are fundamentally protesting an issue of educational policy rather than broader social issues, it seems very difficult for these protests to strike much of a chord in the broader population, which is what made 1968 so special.