Conclusion: The Legacy of Resistance

Summary

“The students are right!” Ada claimed in her penultimate article for Il Giornale dei Genitori. On November 27, 1967, 487 students had occupied the Faculty of Letters of the University of Turin in Palazzo Campana. These students, from the Faculties of Letters, Philosophy, Education, Law, and Political Science, opposed their traditional subjugation to the authority of the professors. They advocated a “new kind of university for a new kind of society.” The occupation lasted for exactly one month. The rector of the University of Turin brought in the police, and twelve of the 487 students were imprisoned for several weeks under very harsh conditions. By January 1968, almost all Italian universities had experienced strikes or occupations. Ada supported the students and their cry for reform, a task she believed her generation had left undone.

In the article, Ada recalled a time toward the end of the war when she and her friends had been discussing plans for the future of Italy and, in particular, the reform of the schools. Somewhat jokingly, she had said that the university should be closed for twenty years, and a new one reconstructed, “born of the real needs of students who have grown up in a new world.” Now the students of the University of Turin were taking up this task. Ada was struck by the “abundant mimeographed material” the students had produced during the occupation, which showed their absolute rejection of existing structures. The present structure, claimed the students, was a “baronial organization, in which each teacher [was] lord and master of his own course.” Instead, the university should offer a plan that transformed not only the structure of the courses of study but also “the choice of specific subjects” and the “very methods of study.” The students also wanted a university “based on equality and discussion.”

Ada sided with the students: “In reality, the young people do not want to do without the teachers; they want them to be truly such, with an authority deriving from their intrinsic qualities and not from a formal bureaucracy.” The students wanted their school to teach them to “talk, discuss, make politics, act, and organize themselves in order to transform thinking.”