ABSTRACT
While the international dimension of the student protest movement in the 1960s has already been thoroughly examined in historical research, the same has yet to be done for the counterprotest that emerged against the student movement in various Western countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This chapter intends to examine particularly the activities of the student movements’ opponents from within the academic field. Therefore, the chapter analyses in comparative perspective the efforts of professors and other academics, especially in the United States and West Germany, to organise political resistance against left student politics and against reform measures within higher education that threatened to diminish the professorate’s position of power within the universities under the label of “democratisation.” However, the fear of losing power was just one of several reasons for professors to oppose the student movement. Taking a closer look at the transnational academic network International Committee on the University Emergency (ICUE), this chapter points out how strongly the key figures of the professors’ counterprotest had been intellectually shaped by biographical experiences with totalitarian movements and by the Cold War. As the chapter argues, these “Cold War liberals” considered their efforts to stop the spread of neo-Marxism within the academic field a genuine contribution to protect the Western model of liberal democracy.
