The Sixties´s Student Activism as Heritage

In the 20th century, student consciousness was profoundly transformed. The "academic crisis of 1962", with its hotspot in Lisbon, marked the beginning of the process in which the students became a collective with an agenda of concerns that went beyond academic aspects. They gained political awareness, to which several factors contributed: the colonial war had begun in 1961 and alternatives to the regime that rivalled the Portuguese Communist Party emerged or were strengthened.

In Coimbra, the 1960s were marked by an intellectual and cultural renewal. The echoes of May 1968 in France were also being felt. In the Academic Association, an anti-regime and supra-party list wins the elections for the Board in 1969. In that year, during the opening of the Mathematics Department, the newly elected president of the Students' Association was prevented from speaking. A strong public protest ensued. The regime responded with the arrest of that student and the suspension of some leaders of the Association. The reaction did not take long, the students declared "academic mourning" and the Government temporarily closed the University. Several teachers showed solidarity with the students. In a climate of growing repression, some students were expelled or forcibly incorporated into the army. The "crisis of 1969", as it became known, was the most emblematic moment of Coimbra student opposition to the Estado Novo, gaining national projection with the solidarity of the Universities of Lisbon and Porto. This crisis remains alive in Coimbra’s collective memory and has become a heritage claimed by generations of student activists to this day.