Event Details

David Fowler, ‘The Radical Sixties at Lancaster: Student Activism, “1968” and the Craig Affair(s)’

David Fowler is an historian of Modern British History, Politics and Sociology and has taught and researched at the University of Cambridge since 2003.

The paper will explore how the radical ferment of the late 1960s - the May '68 student revolt in Paris, the antiwar movement in the US, and the student occupations at the LSE, Essex, Warwick, Oxford and Hornsey - impacted on one of the flagship new "campus" universities of the 1960s. It examines the dynamics of student and don radicalism at Lancaster. How far was Lancaster an integral part of the 'transnational' student movements of the 1960s; or a distinctive locus of radical activity? The Craig Affair(s) of 1968 and 1972, involving a charismatic and iconoclastic English Lecturer at Lancaster, who generated a mass student movement in support of his plans to radically reconfigure the teaching at the University and its relationship with the wider community, will form a lens through which to capture the radical currents of the era.