'To form citizens': Scottish students, governance and politics, 1884-1948

Citizenship was not a straightforward concern for Scottish university students between 1884 and 1948 and tended to express itself in multiple and often competing allegiances. Despite students being empowered to elect a Rector, and their role in university governance being accorded statutory recognition through the Students' Representative Councils, students still struggled to identify a role for politics in university life. Local, national and international contexts also encouraged apparently contradictory responses from the student body. In addition, university enfranchisement perpetuated many of these dilemmas into the later lives of former students. The abolition of plural voting in 1948, while signalling the triumph of a more egalitarian vision of citizenship, for the most part left unresolved the status of the student in the civil life of Scotland.