ABSTRACT
Many American students, and a few British also, took part in Civil Rights activities, and some of them subsequently applied the techniques within the universities, notably during the course of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 and 1965. The struggles of the Civil Rights Movement need no elaboration here: their significance in the present context lies in the techniques of protest and the spirit of militancy they engendered. C.N.D. was itself the slightly younger offspring of the same political conditions, but its initial impetus came from a rather different set of people. In wider frame of reference the problems of British society have a curiously insignificant place: the student left of today shows none of that lively interest in redefining the issues of British political life betrayed by the New Left of ten years ago. The militant students have slogans – 'student power', 'changing the structure' and so on – and a philosophy of protest.
