The Mustard Project: a new open access resource/digital archive of the May 1968 campus events at the University of Essex, UK

John Haynes Announcement
Location
United Kingdom
Subject Fields
British History / Studies, Digital Humanities, Modern European History / Studies, Public History, Social History / Studies

An alert to researchers and teachers of student protest of the 1960s. The Mustard Project has just launched an open access archive of digitised documents from the May 1968 protests at the University of Essex.

Although widely omitted from histories of the global and national upheavals rippling across universities at the time, Essex was one of the first British campuses to go into revolt in May 1968. The Free University established there hit the national newspaper headlines repeatedly over the following weeks, and students from Essex also made the trip across the English Channel to support their counterparts and the striking workers in Paris.

Like every 1968 story, Essex had its local flashpoint: the founding Vice Chancellor's summary suspension of three students for their role as alleged 'ringleaders' in a protest against a visiting government research scientist from Porton Down. Deeply engaged with the international situation, the students believed that Porton was implicated in the use of Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) agents in Vietnam, and read out a 'war crimes indictment' at the guest's lecture to the student Chemical Society; one even tipped a tin of mustard powder over the lecturer, and some days later the Vice Chancellor 'rusticated' the three for their alleged infringement against the visitor's freedom of speech.

For the first time the stories of the events, and what came after, can be accessed through over 270 (and counting) digitised documents from the University's archive, including:

  • the complete set of written and oral testimonies from the University's own enquiry into the events;
  • a further set of repsonses to the question of free speech on campus specifically;
  • documents of the Free University's teach-ins and the resolutions passed at its general meetings;
  • press releases, leaflets, letters and memos from staff and students;
  • transcripts of local and national media coverage.

The Mustard Project will appeal to those with an interest in the histories of education and science, germ warfare and the Vietnam war, freedom of speech, the right and/or obligation to protest, the institutional growing pains of a new university, and the struggles to define the structure and role of the academy, and the knowledge it produces, within the wider contexts of national and global student activism of 1968.

Contact Information

Dr John Haynes, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex: jhaynes@esssex.ac.uk

Contact Email
drjohnhaynes@gmail.com