A FEW years ago I received an invitation to meet the then principal of a Scottish university. As the university was my alma mater, the principal enquired whether I had previously been in his office.

To his obvious surprise I confirmed I had, although more than 40 years had elapsed between the two occasions.

The circumstances were also markedly different. In the late 1960s I had been part of a group that occupied that very office in protest against the university’s investments in apartheid South Africa.

Around the same time some of my more daring classmates were arrested and charged for seriously disrupting a Springbok rugby match at Aberdeen’s Linksfield Stadium.

An Edinburgh University firebrand named Gordon Brown led the opposition to the Springbok tour and, memorably, John Lennon paid my mates’ fines.

I often wonder what became of him; Brown that is, not Lennon. I suppose many would deem our behaviour in those far-off times to be immature and naive.

Perhaps, but the university disposed of its South African investments and sporting isolation contributed in no small way to the crumbling of the apartheid regime.

The anti-apartheid movement was only one of the protests in which students played major parts.

Opposition to the Vietnam War was another. Immature and naive or not, the voice of youth was certainly heard in the 1960’s.

In contrast, the last 20 or 30 years have witnessed the not-so-strange death of student protest. Modern student life is unrecognisable from what it was back in the day.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to have been undergraduates in the 1960s were actually paid to be there. We had no worries about fees, loans and debt stretching before us into middle age. True, most of us had jobs at some point during the year but these were usually restricted to the vacations: playing at being posties at Christmas or pulling pints in a bar during the long summer break.

Few of us required term-time jobs just to make ends meet.

We were virtually guaranteed employment, possibly for life, irrespective of degree or classification. To paraphrase Harold Macmillan in 1957 when he was the Conservative prime minister: “We never had had it so good.”

It was also a time when a distinctive youth culture emerged, reflected in music, fashion, changing social mores and, above all, confidence in our opinions and in the future. Consequently, we had the time, the space and the resources to make nuisances of ourselves.

There was a virtual obligation to challenge authority wherever and whenever it was encountered. A goodly percentage of our teachers felt similarly obliged.

How times have changed. Present-day students must look with envy at our gilded youth. Most today students have term-time jobs through necessity, not choice.

A significant number have debts, numbered in thousands of pounds. There is no certainty of well-paid employment and the class of degree matters as it never did before.

Their lecturers too are on a treadmill. Fixed-term contracts and the pressure to be part of a research-led institution mean that they are also obliged to keep their heads down.

There is no mystery, then, why student protest has all but disappeared. Today’s students are preoccupied with making ends meet and working towards a qualification that at least offers the prospect of a secure future.

They have little time or inclination to fight the battles of others. Through no fault of their own, students have turned in on themselves and we are all a little poorer for that.

Our students should be our conscience. Youth is the time of idealism, the time to challenge both real and perceived injustices and unfairness.

Ironically, it is the young who are disproportionately affected and threatened by an increasingly unfair and unequal society.

It should be our students who stand up for themselves and their contemporaries by contesting zero-hour contracts, minimum wages and housing shortages.

The absence of student protest is indicative of a society dominated by insecurity and concern about the future.

There’s nothing like a bit of insecurity to create a compliant, non-complaining population that accepts low wages, child poverty, homelessness, a harsh benefits regime and food banks, the 21st century’s answer to soup kitchens.

Student protest is needed even more than was the case in the 1960s.

Its re-emergence would be a straw in the wind that we are on the road to a fairer and questioning society that refuses to accept that there is no alternative to the present establishment agenda.