The Decolonising University: Oral Histories and Student-Authored Sources on the Ends of Empire in 1960s Britain

This article explores how student-authored sources can help situate Britain’s new universities of the 1960s within the broader history of empire and its afterlives. Using the University of Warwick as the primary case study, it examines student responses to the employment of former colonial civil servants by these new universities and connects these to wider conversations about decolonisation in the 1960s taking place on these campuses. Drawing on student newspapers, oral history interviews and ephemera from student societies, the article shows how the end of empire was woven into the conversations – and silences – of everyday campus life. In doing so, it challenges presentations of new campus universities as wholly forward-looking and detached from the moment of formal decolonisation in which they were founded.