1979 King’s at 150

King’s 150th anniversary came at the end of a tumultuous decade. Over the previous fifteen years, the educational landscape in Britain had been transformed by the Robbins Report, growth of comprehensive schools, and growing student radicalism in the wake of 1968. While King’s experienced some flux as a result, it never witnessed the dramatic changes or unrest seen at some other universities. Even so, student and college life did change in important ways, setting the groundwork for a more radical transformation at the start of the new millennium. A new charter adopted for the 150th anniversary reappraised King’s institutional priorities. The student body started to undergo important shifts, becoming more diverse and engaged in social justice issues. This strand of research catalogues the evolving life of the college to consider how new governance structures affected everyday life in King’s. Secondly, it investigates how student society responded to the wider challenges and issues of the 1970s in ways that framed new ways of ‘being a student’ in late-twentieth century Britain.