Amid IIT-B protests, a case of Denmark axing univ's sociology dept over Marxism

Amid calls to scrap humanities courses in the IITs, an episode from 1980s' Denmark offers a case to look at, when the University of Copenhagen shut down its two sociology departments. Then-education minister said Marxist politics had compromised the discipline, with political beliefs taking precedence over documented and verifiable research.

The nearly 600-year-old University of Copenhagen is one of Europe's premier research institutions. Yet, in the late 1980s', the university, along with Denmark's Ministry of Education, shut down the country's sociology departments. The reason was that they had, over the years, practically ceased to function in terms of producing quality research and graduates. A former education minister attributed this decline to what he called "Marxists", who had steadily taken over the departments.

The reason we are telling you this story is that calls to restructure, or even shutter, Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) courses at India's premier technical institutions have grown louder, particularly on social media. This comes amid protests at IIT Bombay following the death of 22-year-old student Sunil Wakode, who died by suicide after allegedly being caught using unfair means during an examination.

Many people, particularly on social media, have alleged that IIT Bombay's HSS department was behind the protests. The claims were fuelled in part after IIT Bombay's sociology professor Suryakant Waghmore alleged that the institution's faculty had displayed a "total lack of sympathy" for Wakode.

Others, meanwhile, have questioned the need for full-fledged humanities courses at India's IITs. That, however, is a debate for another day.

Back to Denmark. The country's authorities shut down its only two sociology departments for eight years after an international committee concluded that the quality and quantity of sociology research at the University of Copenhagen was "non-existent" and that its graduates were thoroughly unemployable.

The then-Education Minister Bertel Haarder attributed the decline to what he called "Marxists", whom he accused of being "more loyal to what they believed politically" than to the discipline itself.

While universities routinely discontinue individual courses or programmes, the closure of an entire academic department remains relatively unusual. This is the story of how Denmark shut down its sociology departments and what led to their eventual return.

COPENHAGEN UNIVERSITY HAD TWO SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENTS. THEN CAME LEFTIST PROTESTS

According to Danish sociologist Kristoffer Kropp, sociology was institutionalised in Denmark in 1950, when the University of Copenhagen appointed Norwegian historian Kaare Svalastoga as professor of sociology. He subsequently established the Department of Sociology in the university in the same year. The University of Copenhagen was the only Danish university with dedicated sociology departments. However, sociology was taught within other programmes at Danish universities in Aarhus, Odense, Roskilde and Aalborg.

In 1964, Danish lawyer Verner Goldschmidt was appointed professor of cultural sociology, who established a separate Department of Cultural Sociology at the University of Copenhagen.

Both departments expanded through the 1960s, although Kropp wrote in a French academic journal in 2022 that they would also attract "a number of teachers with little expertise in sociology and limited reputations and academic networks".

Then, everything changed after left-wing student protests that swept the country in 1968. This was the peak of the Cold War when the USSR tried to spread its socio-economic and political ideology and influence in its immediate neighbourhood and beyond.

On the university campus in the Capitalist nation, Leftist protests demanded a greater say of students in the framing of their curriculum and what the professors taught them.

AS POLITICS TOOK OVER, PROFESSORS LEFT

While Danish historian Kaare Svalastoga "categorically rejected" student participation in decision-making, Verner Goldschmidt agreed to a joint committee of students and management.

Kropp, in his 2022 piece in a French academic journal, said that the committee soon became an arena, less for sociology and more for "political debates", and Goldschmidt eventually left in 1977. Svalastoga also became increasingly isolated and relinquished control of his department in the early 1970s.

For the next decade, both departments — Sociology and Cultural Sociology — were "left in the hands of students and a few young professors who attempted to realise their ambitions in teaching and research, in the spirit of the 1968 protests", Kropp wrote in the French academic journal.

The consequences were severe. Student numbers fell from around 90 in the late 1960s to 25 first-year students in 1976. When Svalastoga retired in 1984, all tenured positions were vacant.

Peter Gundelach, then a sociology student in the University of Copenhagen, in 2012 recalled speaking to the Danish magazine Djofbladet, that "Wars were being waged on all sides. The curriculum was unclear. There was no teaching, and you didn't know when you were going to take the exam."

Heine Andersen, who studied sociology in Copenhagen in 1966, similarly recalled in the University of Copenhagen's newspaper Uniavisen that the ideological divisions. "Marxist ideas swept into sociology," he said in 2013, describing the period as "a frustrating period of intense conflicts and factional divisions."

Amid these ideological divisions and turmoil, the Danish government stepped in as the situation became a matter of criticism in various quarters.

HOW GOVERNMENT TOOK DOWN SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT AT COPENHAGEN

By the 1980s, sociology had become a political target at the University of Copenhagen. Kropp wrote that criticism came from the Danish education ministry, the media, academics and university administrators, with questions about the discipline's academic rigour, organisation, and usefulness.

The education ministry was also increasingly scrutinising all the social-science programmes as Danish higher education placed greater emphasis on their usefulness to society and the labour market.

In 1986, an external evaluation of the University of Copenhagen's two sociology departments by a panel of three sociologists found that research in sociology had become non-existent, and graduates were struggling to find jobs. They recommended that the departments be closed and fundamentally reorganised before any possible reopening. The education ministry then decided to stop admitting new students to the sociology programmes, setting the closure in motion.

In 1987, under then-Education Minister Bertel Haarder, the closure was completed, ending Denmark's only dedicated university sociology departments.

Haarder later rejected the idea that the departments had been shut because they were full of "Marxists", and rather because them being "Marxists" had thoroughly compromised their work.

In a 2021 interview with Danish newspaper Information, Haarder said, "The problem with the Marxist movements in universities back then wasn't that people were Marxists. They should have been allowed to be." Rather, he said, "the politics overshadowed the integrity of the research and teaching. And many were more loyal to what they believed politically, instead of being aware that research must also be documented and verifiable."

"The sacred Marxist insight was more important than the honest one, and we students shared each other's ignorance guided by the older students, whose most important quality was their political views. There was a denial of the research tradition at the time, where experience and knowledge had to give way because society had to be changed," Haarder added.

COPENHAGEN SHUT ITS SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENTS, BUT THE DISCIPLINE DIDN'T DIE

After the closure of the departments, Sociology did not disappear from Denmark. It survived within other disciplines and research environments. But it took years for a dedicated department to return. Kropp's research said a new sociology department was established nearly a decade later, while contemporary accounts note that no new students were admitted to sociology programmes for eight years until 1994 after the closure in 1986.

Heine Andersen, who studied sociology at Copenhagen, in 2013 recalled the condition of the discipline after the turmoil, saying the department "looked like a desert after a Nato bombardment".

So, the Copenhagen episode offers a perspective amid the debate now unfolding around humanities courses at the IITs. Denmark's sociology departments were not shut down because sociology was found to be unnecessary. Their closure followed years of disputes over teaching, research, academic standards, the discipline's usefulness and accusations of being taken over by Marxists. Sociology eventually returned as a dedicated discipline, and is flourishing in the country. In 2026, the University of Copenhagen admitted 98 new students to its bachelor's sociology programme.

For the IITs, now, the question is what purpose the humanities courses intend to serve, how they should be taught and where the line lies between academic enquiry and ideological advocacy is drawn. As our in-house columnist and satirist Kamlesh Singh, aka Tau of the Teen Taal podcast put it, "IITs should teach humanities, not to produce humanities graduates, but to produce better engineers. Engineering education isn't just about building technology, it's also about understanding the world it lives in.

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