Over in France, there’s a controversy brewing over a conference on Israel that was going to be held at Paris-8 next week. It’s been covered in a range of newspapers. The gist is that the conference, subtitled “Israel, an apartheid state?”, had been authorized to be held on campus, but when a major French Jewish [...]
In France, one way that the Sarkozy government has been financing major projects on universities is with a large loan it took out in 2010, termed the “Grand Emprunt.” (I would translate this as “major loan” — “grand loan” would sound a bit silly in English.) Part of the funds have been directed towards so-called [...]
Continuing my analysis of the April 2010 debate at Paris-8 over the passage to “Expanded [Managerial] Competences,” which I invoked in my last post, I wanted to give a snippet of that discussion, since it says a lot about how French academics grapple with the future of their institution. I haven’t gone through the whole recording [...]
I happened to discover the other day that if you display photographs from my fieldsite at full vertical resolution, while reducing the width, you get a vertiginous sense of height. This here was the light of late afternoon as it fell through low bushes across the windows of an amphitheatre in Bâtiment D (D Building) [...]
I’ve just started reading the most prominent book on French university reforms of the past year, Refonder L’Université: Pourquoi l’enseignement supérieur reste à reconstruire, which translates to “Refounding the University: Why higher education awaits reconstruction.” It came out last October from La Découverte, and has spawned debate at, for instance, ARESER (the Association of Reflection [...]
The following is the text of an open letter sent to the President of the University of Paris-8 by a teacher in visual arts. She’s losing her job because of a particularly Kafkaesque circumstance: she doesn’t make enough money from art to maintain her tax status as an artist, and in France there’s a regulation [...]
This is from my field notebook earlier this spring, as I returned to France after spending some time back in Chicago this winter. march 2 – on returning to france the sky hazed and prongs of sun forked into the railroad cars and the gravel ballast of the tracks. in the tunnel the buckles of [...]
So as everyone who reads the news has probably heard, there has been a major “social movement” here the last few weeks, basically opposing the government’s reform of the pension system. There have been a number of street protests, major strikes of public transit and railroad workers, and fuel shortages because of industrial strikes. I’m [...]
Earlier this fall I wrote to someone I’d met at Paris-8, a professor, to ask if we could meet and talk about campus politics. “Actually I just dropped out,” he said. (By which he meant “retired,” though it was in difficult institutional circumstances.) “But you’re welcome to come visit me in Brittany,” he added. Not [...]
This post will make for a strange contrast with the last one, since we move from looking at the most noble of French spaces to the most profane. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had the privilege and burden of living in a number of short-term apartment situations here, and in the shared student apartment where [...]