Last week I went to visit Aix, which might become one of my major fieldsites next year. The university building itself was falling apart; as it turns out, it was the one featured in last year’s complaint about the physical decrepitude of French universities. In spite of the physical decay, it was all lush with [...]
I was reading a curious old book called The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain (by Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson, 1970) and I came across a rather shocking passage: This happened in 1860 in Aberdeen. The students wanted Sir Andrew Leith Hay, the ‘local candidate’, and there was in fact a numerical majority [...]
Last week while I was in Toulouse, I went to take a look at the local university (Mirail), to see if it turned out to be the one in the video I posted about last week. And indeed there were a large number of decrepit buildings, occasionally graced by lovely flowers. But the buildings also [...]
Liberation reports that twenty universities are still affected by student strikes, and more interestingly, that teacher-researchers are joining students in the streets. One said: «La loi attaque la fonction publique», s’indigne Noël Bernard, maître de conférence en mathématique à l’université de Savoie, à Chambéry, et membre du Snesup-FSU, premier syndicat du supérieur. Il dénonce «le [...]
Apparently there is a group of French historians specializing in academic contestation: “Jean-Philippe Legois est historien spécialiste de la contestation universitaire, membre du Germe (groupe de recherche sur les mouvements étudiants) et de la mission Caarme (pour la création d’un centre d’archives sur les mouvements étudiants).” Legois was interviewed in Liberation; he thinks that the [...]
Protests against the loi Pécresse are mounting rapidly today, it seems. The law decentralizes the universities, gives more power to university presidents, and allows universities to own their own property directly. Twenty universities are on strike, according to Liberation. Students claim to be against the “privatisation” of universities and against the police. Their communiqué is [...]