Ylioppilaslehti and the University’s Language Struggle in the 1920s and 1930s

Authors

• Jukka Kortti Helsingin yliopisto

Abstract

his article covers how, before the Second World War, the student's  magazine Ylioppilaslehti wrote about the university’s so-called  finnicizing issue. Especially the 1920s and 1930s have been labelled  as the period of the hegemony of the Academic Karelia Society in the  academic world, and Ylioppilaslehti was the first area to be taken  over. This atmosphere of "fighting nationalism", created as such, and  the rise of university students' politics in general, are strongly  intertwined with the attitude of Ylioppilaslehti towards the language issue. The particular research question is how Ylioppilaslehti operated in  the students’ own public sphere, being the academic and more  especially, the university students’ world. However, even though  Ylioppilaslehti functioned within its own bourgeois and normative  arena of public sphere, from the 1920s, it orientated itself  increasingly towards the national public sphere. The research material consists mostly of issues of Ylioppilaslehti and some supplementary literature – the history books of the Student Union of Helsinki University in particular.