Introduction

At Protestant universities, students increasingly emphasised their separate identity and made use of secessions on their own as a vibrant symbolic expression of social protest against townspeople and the university—both being highly dependent on the students' economic power. Around 1800, students in the Europe got involved in all kinds of revolutionary actions as part of their common identity. In Oxford as well as elsewhere in Europe, students united themselves in all kinds of associations, societies, and corporations. The foundation of the Allgemeine Deutsche Burschenschaft in Jena in 1818, with an expressly political agenda, was probably one of the most obvious manifestations of the growing consciousness among students. After Second World War and particularly during 1960s, students presented themselves as sharing a separate identity, manifesting itself in so-called 'new student movement'. This new kind of student engagement differed from its classic predecessor by no longer wanting to be a vanguard of an existing broader institutionalised social or national movement.