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) [...]
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 [...]
Last weekend, under the auspices of a program called European Heritage Days, I went on a tour of the offices of the Minister of Higher Education. I’ve been in the building before for various academic events, but, unsurprisingly, the part that has the Minister’s office is separate from the part that ordinary visitors usually see. [...]
Looking back at my photos of Toulouse 2-Le Mirail, I’m struck by a common visual trait: the sheer repetition of cartesian grids in academic space. The very tiles on the walls are gridded. The bars and grills of the windows recede along their grid towards an unreached vanishing point. In a courtyard at Toulouse, the [...]
There have been a bunch of articles on the borders of campus spaces. One thing they all have in common is an insistence that universities in some way manage their boundaries, and usually the surrounding neighborhoods too. People have chronicled how universities put up fences to keep out the poor, how they tinker in urban [...]
In this winter’s exhibition on the history of Paris-8 at Vincennes (the university’s first site in the 70s), I was particularly interested in a text that discusses the relationship between Paris-8 and U.S. academia. The exhibit was separated into panels each starting with one letter of the alphabet, and this was one of the last [...]
For about two weeks this month, a large space by the entrance to Paris-8 was occupied by students. It had formerly been a coffeeshop operated by a private company, but had been closed months or years ago. To enter after hours when the campus was supposed to be closed, you had to climb up on [...]
As it turns out, there’s no need for me to cobble together my own maps of French higher education. A beautiful official atlas is already made available by the Higher Education Ministry, with far more detail than I would care to track down by myself. Let me reproduce a couple of their figures: As you [...]
It is a famous, even infamous fact about French universities that the system is deeply centralized, and centered on Paris. But over the years the university system has diversified and there are now 83 French public universities (of which 5 are in Corsica and the overseas territories). However, as every French academic would surely attest, [...]