Thanks for the detail, Anna!

…and so what struck me was that the (american) professor was the one who was more structurally distant, and tried to be less so. and the (french) graduate student was structurally closer to the students (in that she was a student too, unless doctoral candidate has a different significance in france, which sounds vaguely familiar…), and asserted herself as less so.

and more than that what struck me was that both cases the structure of the school remains one of educator vs educatees. and it doesnt seem like that has changed so much (the two things that would maybe breach the gap would be in the genre of course evals (m.bishop inspired) and in student-organized classes (which in the states are a rare occurrence, yes? and seem to spring up mostly in small “hippie” schools) or open uni sort of movement (maybe).)

in any (other) cases (particularly in france) is this different/challenged? the first thing that comes to mind is protests, which would be emblematic of the administrators vs administratees categories (where administratees = professors + students). but does it go beyond that, or outside of that?

[tangent, obvious] and then if you want to convert it into a factory, which you can if you maybe oversimplify things and think about how a lot of professors go into administration, thus making professoring a sort of middle-management, you have… euh, well, a lot of fun images to play with and even more fun tangents to weave together, but for the sake of (relative) brevity i’ll leave this as you also having, perhaps, even more reason to want to challenge the structure…

what font is this?

I certainly agree that cultures and values influence the incentive structure adopted by institutions, especially government funded institutions. This does deserve analysis, as does the origin of the cultures and values.

Part of the difference in pedagogy between the U.S. and France is because the current set of profs and students in each country have a taste for different pedagogy.

Government policy (and private organizations like ratemyprofessor or U.S. News & World Report) can act fairly directly on the incentives faced by profs/departments/universities. So it seems to me that understanding what the incentives are and what would change them is vital.

I’ve got more questions, but don’t feel obliged to try to answer them:

If the ministry was paying salaries, how did they decide how many new faculty in which departments?

To what extent do students have a choice of university?

Is faculty salary data public?

The kinds of data that are considered important — here’s something that perhaps should interest you — turn out to be culturally variable and hence culturally dependent; there’s more data on immigrants and “socioprofessional” origins of students’ families, and none on race, for instance. (Being an immigrant is of course sometimes a code word for being not white, though, kind of the way that “illegal immigrant” in the US tends to connote latin americans.)

But again I will check into some of these things and perhaps clarify. Baptiste and other Francophones, please chime in if you’re reading!