Intersecting Power Fields Steeped in Tradition: The Radical Left and Administrating Higher Education in Finland during the 1970s

Abstract

The student activism of the 1970s was strongly linked to the university administrative reforms in Finland. Especially after the radical faction of Finnish leftist students turned to pro-Soviet orthodox communism, the debunking of the professoriate’s “bourgeoise power” became one of the main goals of the vocal student movement. In this article, I analyse how the old professoriate was challenged and how they responded to this challenge. The conclusion drawn by this article is that Finnish university professors managed to resist the radical reforms and the pressure from the radical student movement in 1970s because their elite positions were not derived exclusively from one field, academia; rather, they also participated in other sets of elite practices, namely politics. Moreover, the close relationship between the state and academia was also manifested in the activities of students, who were historically also part of the Finnish elite. The starting point of this article is a case study of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki.