Chapter 9 describes the revolt at the University Institute of Social Sciences at Trento. It demonstrates the importance of protest about Vietnam in the first closure of the Institute. I argue that in the course of the revolt, the students discovered themselves as passive subjects of the university system and sought to reinvent themselves as active subjects via protest. In the third occupation at the Faculty of Sociology at Trento, they developed a charter of demands that sought to create structural spaces within the university and perpetuate the student movement without integrating it within the university. The protest movement successfully paralysed the Institute of Sociology without managing to impose itself, until the contestation spread to the Catholic Church in the Anti-Lent of 1968 which, although it culminated in the successful transformation of the institute, nonetheless left the protest movement with a question of what direction it should take.

Chapter 11 traces the history of the 'critical universities' created in the wake of the peak of student mobilisation around 1968 – in particular, the Kritische Universität of West Berlin and the Università Critica of Trento. Plans for a université critique at Nanterre failed as conflict escalated rapidly and the French government moved most quickly to enact reform within higher education. These experiments attempted to draw on the mobilisation created by confrontations with police and society to transform the university. However, they were beset by problems of poor attendance, inequalities and divergences within the protest movements over the purpose and value of university reform. I argue that the internal contradictions of the movement and the politicising drive of events ultimately led to the collapse of these experiments.

Chapter 2 analyses the meaning of sociology in the 1960s. It traces the creation of the sociology degree in France, West Germany and Italy, and describes in detail the origins of the University Institute of Social Sciences in Trento. The chapter describes the first occupations in Trento over the discipline of sociology. The chapter shows how technocrats and modernisers envisaged in sociology a discipline that would provide managerial staff to administer and control social change. Students, however, most frequently chose sociology as a discipline that embodied a critical vision of contemporary society, personal emancipation and political change. I argue that this conflict explains the centrality of sociology to the revolts of 1968.