Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation, and Governance in South Africa, Susan Booysen (ed.) (2016)

Review of: Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation, and Governance in South Africa, Susan Booysen (ed.) (2016) Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 350 pp., ISBN 978-1-86814-985-8, p/bk, USD35

Introduction: Cohn-Bendit on the Roof in Gan Shmuel

The book opens with an Introduction that gives a tight description of the historical place Matzpen occupied in the Israel of the 1960s and 70s. Looking at Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s famous visit to Israel in the spring of 1970, the chapter offers an extensive interpretation of the Israeli debate that was triggered by the arrival of the leader of the European student revolt, but much more by his advocacy of the Israeli leftists of Matzpen. Taking this event as my departure point, an overview of Israeli society in the years following the Six-Day War is given, with an emphasis on three aspects that become relevant for the entire book: first, the return of the Palestine question with the beginning of the occupation, second, the place of Matzpen as a dissenting voice within Israeli society, and third, the continuing impact of Holocaust memory on political debates about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Only within this broader historical context is it possible to evaluate not only the significance of Matzpen in Israeli history but also the rejection the group encountered.

Between Lévinas and Arendt – Philosophical Origins of Alain Finkielkraut’s Reflection on the Other and the Education

A member of the generation of student revolt ’68, Alain Finkielkraut is thought to be one of the most prominent intellectuals in France, taking part in public debates on several issues essential for Europe and the world. His assays, articles and books may be read as a complex commentary with a sound humanistic background to the condition of western culture as well as to current socio-political events. Our article focuses on revealing theoretical grounding of Finkielkraut’s reflection in the philosophies of Emmanuel Lévinas and Hannah Arendt. We attempt to reconstruct the way Finkielkraut employs his critical apparatus built on their thought to the field of educational practices in order to present the specific perspective of educational research and to contribute to the knowledge produced by widely understood critical pedagogic.

Dissidents and Police: The Polish March 1968 and a Tale of Two Generations

This article is part of the special cluster titled Generation ’68 in Poland (with a Czechoslovak Comparative Perspective). March 1968 in Poland witnessed two different revolutions. The first one occurred at the universities. The students—the generation of twenty-year-olds—revolted against an oppressive, authoritarian state and demanded freedom of speech. But there was also a second, parallel revolution. It exploded with the anti-Jewish purge carried out by low- and mid-level party officials in their forties. These apparatchiks, born around 1930, denounced the student revolt as a “Zionist plot” and pushed for a nationalist version of the communist system. This article explores why those two generations clashed in 1968 and what was the outcome of that struggle, both in political and social terms.

The Student Question

This chapter provides a discussion of student movements in Paris, China, Afghanistan and India. There is a treatment of the estrangement between the gurukul and the college, between Aligarh and Deoband, the problem of colonized self-estrangement of the mind which results in a deprivation of vitality and authenticity in intellectual labour. Some of the topics discussed here are the student revolt and the student rush, the colonial legacy in the erstwhile colonized world, students participation in university processes, the need for a participatory system in both academics and organization, student leadership, the constitution and functioning of students’ unions, the university as a corporate academic community and teachers’ organizations.