• A License of 3 years is approximately analogous to an American Bachelor’s.
• A 2-year Master, similar to an American Master’s, can be either a “Research Master” or a “Professional Master.”
• The Doctorat (Ph.D.) theoretically takes 3 years, but often more, after which one gets to be called Docteur. (The doctorate in French had a great deal of institutional complexity over the years which I won’t go into here.)
• The Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches is derived from the German Habilitation: it’s a post-PhD degree usually given mid-career and required to supervise doctoral students. (Fortunately, this has no equivalent in Anglophone academia — though overproduction of PhDs is such that one might venture that something like it would logically have to be created as a new form of status differentiation.)

Thus the most advanced degree types are both named after German precursors; the License is strictly a French invention; and the intermediate degree, the Master, borrows its name from English. If this was a hierarchy and not a historical accident, one would see that the academic system put Germany at the top, Anglo-America in the middle, and France at the bottom. (German and American universities have been the dominant foreign references in modern French academia, as Christophe Charle has shown.)

That’s not the funny part, though.

What’s funny is that when the Master was first introduced in 1999, it was spelled in weirdly Frenchified form as mastaire. I imagine this was partly to make the spelling more pronounceable in French (since “er” in French is typically pronounced “ay,” and moreover usually signals a verb, not a noun). But also it indicated a minor attempt to “nationalize” the foreign loan word.

Yet as you see from my table, it’s not called a mastaire any more. Three years later, presumably to cohere with the international norm (and perhaps with the Bologna Process standards), the degree was renamed to just use the English spelling, Master. Since the names of degrees are spelled out in national statutes, this required statutory action to correct. An amusing official decree of April 2002 thus reads:

Article 1 – Dans le titre et dans toutes les dispositions du décret du 30 août 1999 susvisé, le mot : “mastaire” est remplacé par le mot : “master”.
Article 2 – À l’article 8 du décret du 4 avril 2001 susvisé, le mot : “mastaire” est remplacé par le mot : “master”.

(Essentially that says: “In official documents from 1999 and 2001, the word ‘mastaire’ is replaced by the word ‘master’.”)

And while the revised spelling was no longer very consistent with standard French orthography/pronunciation, I found in my field research that that made no difference. There are lots of borrowed English words in French already; I never saw anyone have problems pronouncing them. Le master ended up sort of halfway between French and English, usually getting pronounced something like “luh masterre,” with a standard French r sound.

It’s interesting, though, that the possessive part of the English “Master’s” has vanished in the French borrowing, as has the disciplinary marker we append to the formal degree name (“Master of Arts” or “of Sciences”). Translations are always messy, never more so than when they involve institutional and juridical categories. Le master ends up being English and yet not English, French and yet not French.

Camarades, merci de votre accueil, c’était sympa, on a bien ri, ici, il fait beau, pour une fois!

Votre fac c’est joli (si on regarde Bron) mais c’est un peu mort quand même. C’est vrai qu’on peut pas tout avoir. Si vous venez pas le 14, je sais où vous habitez.

Je n’oublierais pas de vous inscrire sur le ML de XYZ.

Voilà. Je me casse et je rentre à ma maison. Gros Bisous. 

Which one could translate loosely as:

Comrades, thanks for having us, it was chill, we laughed a lot here, for once it was nice out.

Your campus is pretty (if you look at Bron) but there’s not much going on here. I guess you can’t have everything. If you don’t show up on the 14th, I know where you live.

I won’t forget to add you to XYZ’s mailing list.

Voilà. I’m out of here and I’m going home now. Big hugs.

This text is more or less straightforward, though there are always a few references that are hard to figure out from a distance. For instance, I think the comparison to Bron must be referring to the Université de Lyon 2’s campus in Bron (a suburb of Lyon); I haven’t seen that university, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was indeed less pretty than the Dijon campus. In any event, details aside, I like this text because of the obvious affection and warmth it shows among French student activists.

But there’s another part of it that I find more puzzling: the huge red writing overlaid on the letter that says DIJON VOUS CRAIGNEZ.

Craindre is the French equivalent of the English verb to fear. Normally it’s a transitive verb, and if it were conjugated in the third person here (Dijon vous craint), the sentiment would be something like “Dijon fears you,” that is, “Dijon is afraid of you, the protesters.” But here it’s conjugated in the second person plural, craignez, so vous has to be the subject rather than the object. Apparently there is a more colloquial sense of craindre that’s intransitive — Larousse glosses this as “ne pas être à la hauteur de la situation, être nul, mauvais, détestable,” which comes to “not being up to a situation, being good for nothing, detestable.”

So maybe if Dijon is being weirdly addressed in the second person as vous, we could understand this as something like “Dijon, you’re no good,” or even “Dijon, you suck.”

Which might indeed be a fitting sentiment for someone who had just been to a disappointing, heavily-policed protest.

But I wonder if any Francophones can shed more light on this?

– Normalement j’aurais dû faire ma thèse avec XYZ, car c’était lui qui m’avait le plus inspiré, mais je connaissais suffisamment XYZ pour savoir que je ne réussirais jamais à faire une thèse avec XYZ.

– C’est-à-dire ?

– C’est-à-dire que c’est quelqu’un dont la moindre remarque m’aurait blessé au profond, et comme c’est quelqu’un qui ne menage pas ses critiques, je pense que, euh, j’aurais pas pu, quoi. Bon, je vais pas raconter ça, parce que c’est un peu intime, mais c’était pas possible, quoi. Voilà.

In English, here’s how that comes out:

“Normally I should have done my thesis with XYZ, because he was the person who had inspired me the most. But I knew him well enough to be sure that I would never manage to do a thesis with him.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that he’s someone whose tiniest comment would have hurt me so deeply, and as he’s someone who doesn’t hold back his criticism, I think that, uh, I couldn’t do it. Well, I’m not going to tell you about that, because it’s sort of personal. But it wasn’t possible, eh? Voilà.”

The cruelty of criticism can shape an academic career,  we see. Personal acquaintance with academics can trigger revulsion. And pure intellectual commonality (“inspiration”) is no guarantee of human solidarity.

That’s what I learn from this little moment. That, and the sheer sense of blockage that can set in when academics stop to retell their lives. You’re reminded of moments of impossibility, of those structural dead ends that are as much subjective as institutional. “It wasn’t possible, eh?” he summed up. As if that was the whole story (even though he also told me he wasn’t going to tell me the whole story).

(On a more positive note, this interview does remind me of one piece of practical advice. If you are interviewing in French, and are otherwise at a loss for words, c’est-à-dire? — “meaning?” — is almost always a good way to get people to keep talking.)

Philosopher: But I don’t know — you aren’t interested in the solutions to problems?

Ethnographer: The solutions to philosophical problems for example?

Philosopher: Problems! Real ones! For example do you consider that the word “being” has several senses? Or not? Fundamental ontological question. Do you accept that there are several senses or one? It changes everything. And what are your arguments one way or the other?

Ethnographer: Well me personally I’m not an expert—

Philosopher: But it’s a really important question. Do you accept a category like for instance the possible?

Ethnographer: Yes OK—

Philosopher: Between non-being and being? Do you grant an ontological existence to the notion of the possible? Me, no. Others, yes. And one tries to say why and why not. If you grant something like human dispositions, do you grant a distinction between for instance what one calls the faculties— understanding, imagining, dreaming, are these the same things or not? Do you grant something like freedom? Do you not know how to answer these questions? And do you say yes or no or something else? The response to these questions isn’t of the order of metanarratives. It’s of the order of the truth, pure and simple.

Ethnographer: Sure, I can agree.

Philosopher: But it’s really important. This is what philosophy is!

Ethnographer: Well I’d say that what interests me as an ethnographer is that, being able to ask these sorts of questions, not everyone asks them in the same way, and what interests me as an ethnographer is the different ways of situating these questions, of raising them.

Philosopher: You’re not interested in the truth of the answer?

This was a relatively traditional philosopher who was invested, as you can see, in a fairly standard view of philosophy as “solving problems.” Here, he pressed me quite hard to express interest in that project. But I felt obliged to insist that adjudicating local truths is not what ethnographers are usually interested in!

It’s interesting to me that he found my refusal baffling. It’s as if at heart it was hard to imagine that other disciplines worked on profoundly different questions from those of the traditional philosophical canon.

But what goes unsaid in this interview is that I, the ethnographer, was not the only person who wasn’t trying to “solve problems.” In fact, many of the radical philosophers I studied in Saint-Denis were also quite uninterested in this problem-solving approach to philosophy. More often than not, they sought to produce new concepts, to re-reading classic texts, to reflect on the present, to “intervene” critically in debates — and all of this could happen without necessarily solving any of the classic philosophical questions.

I expect my interlocutor here would have dismissed some of his colleagues, as well, as not being interested in real philosophy.

But if I learned anything in my research on philosophers, it’s that there can be interesting disputes over what philosophy is. (Every orthodoxy involves heterodoxy, after all.) To claim that philosophy is a well-defined field would seem, in that light, somewhat fraught.

Je définis l’utopie comme de l’ordre du non-réalisable mais cela n’empêche pas de la penser et de vouloir la faire être. La pensée utopique est très réaliste car elle s’appuie sur des choses incontestablement réelles, c’est-à-dire les sentiments, les passions, les attractions mais sans se préoccuper des moyens de la faire être. Par exemple, Fourier parle de travail attrayant. À l’heure actuelle, il est peut-être impossible d’avoir un travail attrayant. N’empêche que cette idée doit à tout prix être maintenue. Le fait de donner à chacun des occupations selon ses désirs, de ne pas mobiliser quelqu’un sur une unique activité mais de diversifier toutes ces participations aux travaux, c’est irréalisable. Mais on doit maintenir cette utopie contre vents et marées sous peine de perdre le sens même de la vie. Je ne pense pas que l’utopie soit une projection vers l’avenir mais c’est un mode de vivre. À tout moment, il faut ouvrir dans sa propre vie d’autres possibles. Même si on ne les réalise pas, cela évite d’être bloqué à l’intérieur d’une sorte de fatalité. Il faut résister à une fatalité historique. 

I define utopia as the order of the unrealizable, but that doesn’t prevent thinking it and wanting to bring it into being. Utopian thought is quite realist, since it draws on incontestably real things, that is, feelings, passions, attractions; but without worrying about the means for bringing it into being. For example, Fourier talks about worthwhile [attractive] work. At this point in time, it’s perhaps impossible to have worthwhile work. But this idea must still be maintained at all costs. The fact of giving everyone an occupation corresponding to her desires, of not recruiting someone into one single activity but of diversifying all one’s involvements in labor: it’s unrealizable. But one must maintain this utopia, come what may, or else risk losing life’s very meaning. I don’t think that utopia is a projection towards the future; it’s a way of living. At every moment, one must open up other possibilities within one’s life. Even if one doesn’t realize them, this prevents you from being blocked within a sort of fatalism. Historical fatalism must be resisted.

Two points here are important to stress. 1) Utopianism isn’t necessarily affirmative. Indeed, what makes something utopian is that it rejects something about the present: it is necessarily a critique of the present. 2) It needn’t project a wish for a whole entire “new society,” not be centered around a futurism; it can center around something smaller-scale, something in the here and now. For instance, the desire to have an attractive or worthwhile job.

Alas, even this more modest utopianism isn’t always easy to realize in the course of everyday life.

Outre les qualités intellectuelles qu’elle amène à développer, l’université, par la diversité de ses étudiants et de son corps enseignant apporte des qualités humaines à celui qui y étudie. L’université est le lieu transitoire entre la vie d’un adolescent et la vie d’un homme, qui devient autonome, assume ses choix, ses études et par là même, ses résultats.

Cette formation est un des piliers qui permet à chacun de se construire.

Un deuxième pilier est cependant indispensable pour aborder efficacement le monde du travail, je veux parler de la formation professionnelle.

Beyond the intellectual qualities that it helps to develop, the university, by the diversity of its students and its teaching staff, brings human qualities to those who study there. The university is a transitory place between the life of an adolescent and the life of a man, who is becoming autonomous, accepting responsibility for his choices, his studies, and thus also for his results.

This education is one of the foundations that allow each of us to construct ourselves.

A second pillar is nevertheless indispensable for efficiently entering the work world, I mean professional training…

The proposed law would thus require that university students spend five hours weekly on getting a BEP or CAP, which are both secondary-level education certificates, on the level of American vocational-technical diplomas. Typical specializations for the BEP or CAP are things like carpentry, retail sales, automobile maintenance, graphic design, secretarial work, and restaurant work: they are degrees that, in essence, aim to produce the specialized “technicians” who make up the French working classes in an increasingly post-industrial era. Given widespread complaints about out-of-work university graduates, it isn’t surprising that this proposed law hopes to enhance job placement prospects, while also (in a charming moment of humanist pragmatism) allowing students to “balance their knowledge” between pure theory and pure technique.

Let’s be clear: this is a proposition that comes from a specific political position, that of the French center-right. Five of the six senators who propose it are from UMP, the party of Sarkozy; one additional senator (Marcel Deneux) is from the centrist MoDems. Given the UMP’s well-known affinity for the business sector, it isn’t very surprising to see this proposal to shift higher education in a vocational direction; there have been plenty of more subtle versions of the same proposal over the years. To be sure, given the current left majority in the French Senate, it isn’t remotely likely to become law, and no doubt there are some internal French politics here that I don’t follow. Sauvons L’Université describes it sarcastically as “the UMP’s generous contribution to the debate,” which suggests that it’s a purely symbolic proposition.

There is, however, an interesting expression in the proposed law that merits commentary: la vie active. It translates simply as “active life,” which probably will strike an Anglophone reader as pretty vague. In French this is a conventional expression that denotes what in English would be called “working life.” It’s used in expressions like this one (in the proposed law):

Le baccalauréat professionnel permet l’insertion dans la vie active…
The vocational diploma allows entrance into active life…

It’s one of those expressions that always puzzled me in French: why should “work” be glossed so poorly as “activity” in general? Surely, I always thought to myself, “activity” encompasses a much broader range of things than just paid labor? Finally I thought to look it up in a French scholarly dictionary:

14. RELIG.  Vie active. Mode de vie des personnes vivant dans le monde, par opposition à la vie contemplative des religieux ou religieuses cloîtrés.

Étymol. ET HIST.
I. Adj. 1. 1160 « (en parlant d’une pers.) qui est dans la vie active, laïc, par oppos. à contemplatif »; vie active « vie séculière, p. oppos. à vie contemplative » (BENOIT DE STE MAURE, Chron. ducs de Norm., éd. Fahlin, 13 355 : Soz icez [chanoine e clerc] vit li ordres lais, E cist en sostiennent le fais. Actif sunt qui si faitement Vivvent au siècle activement, E vie active est apelee); 2. 1360 « qui déploie de l’énergie, travailleur » (ORESME, Éthique, Table ds GDF. Compl. : Actif est de action, et selon ce l’en dit que ung homme est actif, qui est praticien et bien besognant);

In short, this tells us that in the medieval period (or at least around 1160 A.D.), the phrase “active life” was used to distinguish those who were living secularly from those who were in the “contemplative life” of the religious orders. By 1360 the expression was also used to describe a person who “deploys energy, a worker.” Curiously, then, when we read about current French debates over job placement, we find ourselves in the presence of distinctions between action and contemplation that derive rather directly from the culture of medieval Christianity. One might even go so far as to say that this very distinction between “action” and “contemplation” is something that encourages today’s right-wing senators to view a university education as entirely theoretical, the utter opposite of a practical education.

It’s a bit curious, because French university curricula have increasingly shifted towards professional topics like business and economics over the past forty years. But no anthropologist should be surprised to find that symbolic systems of classification work to conceal as well as to reveal.

To the university community,

The University of Paris-8 was recently asked to give its authorization for a conference on its campus entitled, “From new sociological, historical and legal approaches to the call for an international boycott: Israel, an apartheid state?”, planned for this February 27-28.

Initially, the President of the University did give an authorization to the conference organizers, on the condition that a certain number of obligations be scrupulously observed. These involved, on one hand, an absolute respect for the principles of academic neutrality and secularism [laïcité], and on the other hand, the removal of the university’s logos and visuals, since the university is not the organizer of this conference.

In giving this authorization, the President was mindful—as in every case when he is asked to approve public events—at once of the rights of freedom of speech and of assembly for campus users, of the maintenance of public order on the premises, of the institution’s intellectual and scientific independence, and of the principle of neutrality in public service vis-à-vis the diversity of public opinion.

However, today it appears that respecting these conditions will not be enough to guarantee the maintenance either of public order on the premises, or of the institution’s scientific or intellectual independence, given that the pluralism of scientific approaches, the pluralism of critical and divergent analyses, must be regarded as intangible academic obligations.

Indeed, the presentation of this “conference” as “academic,” along with the repeated presence of “Paris 8” on the conference publicity, could be, in themselves, of such a nature as to create confusions that may infringe on the requirement to keep the university free of any political or ideological grasp. The reactions elicited by the conference, which have begun to compromise the university itself, reveal that confusion has set in, and that there is a real risk to the principle of neutrality of public services in research and higher education.

The theme of the conference, the nature of the planned presentations, as well as of the contributors’ titles, strongly polemical in nature, have caused strong reactions that foreshadow a serious risk of disturbances in public order, and of counter-protests that the university is obliged to prevent.

In such circumstances, the President of the University has decided to withdraw the previously given authorization.

The President’s Office has contacted the organizers to propose that on-campus space should be allocated for a day of public debates, in the framework of a diversity of views.

Concerning the organization of the conference on February 27 and 28th, it is decided that the President’s Office will offer the university’s services in locating other premises off-campus where the conference can be held.

-The university administration

This decision has prompted a fair amount of outrage from faculty (including American intellectuals like Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky), who, naturally, invoked the same principles of academic freedom (“intellectual and scientific independence”) that the campus president (Pascal Binczak) had invoked in defending his change of views. I think it’s quite interesting that the principle of academic freedom can equally be invoked to license or to deny campus space for controversial events — the proponents of an event can argue that political interference shouldn’t be allowed to censor campus events; the opponents can argue that politically charged topics are insufficiently academic to deserve campus space. At the level of principle, I think this is more of a real dilemma than most parties want to acknowledge. Not many people today want to live in a static university where ancient, let’s say Aristotelian, intellectual doctrines are the only ones allowed to be presented on campus. But most campuses these days also want to set limits on acceptable speech. And it’s not clear to me that there is a principled way to set such limits on a purely intellectual basis.

Ultimately the relevant “principle” seems most often to be “what’s currently acceptable given the social mores of the moment” or “what some plurality of current scholars think is acceptable,” but given that both of these are historically contingent and variable reference points, I’m not sure they are extremely defensible. It seems to me it would be much more honest if administrators admitted that the main principle, in moments like this one, was just to save face or to avert conflict, was in short a principle of sheer expediency. My sense is that large bureaucracies make decisions for such reasons of expediency much more than they can possibly admit in public.

Monsieur le Président,

I must say that it is with consternation that I read the letter you sent to university administrators in your region. This letter has made the rounds of the country, since I myself received it nine times. I can understand your disappointment in learning that the Idex wasn’t chosen in the Grand Idex Sweepstakes. I understand as well that, faced with drying up ministerial funds for higher education and research, the regions have done what they could to help their academic institutions—yours perhaps more than others.

But how is it possible that this desire to do right, this will to defend your region has managed to blind you to the point of not seeing how the “Major Loan” in general, and the “Idex” even more so, are fraudulent? Maybe you forgot that the President of the Republic himself announced that the interest paid out from the loan will be compensated by deductions of regular funding—making it quite officially a zero-sum game, where the losers pay for the winners? Moreover, you obviously haven’t taken into account that the loan procedures are aimed at systematically removing any role from elected academic bodies and at further demolishing our system. How can you not see that it takes a grandiose stupidity to put Montpellier and Marseille, Lyon and Grenoble, Bordeaux and Toulouse, Paris 2-4-6 and Paris 3-5-7 in competition? That in such tournaments, whole territories in the West, the North and the Center will not have the slightest chance, in spite of their efforts?

In the words of a party you may know: “Competition is one of the engines of research. But exacerbating it, as the government is doing, is counter-productive. Instead of the systematic and permanent competition that’s being imposed… the accent will be on cooperation.”

Today, I am convinced that the staff of your academic institutions expect the following from you: aid for survival, in the first place, but most of all political support in reconstructing the academic system on a new basis, rather than playing the game of its gravediggers.

Please accept, Monsieur le Président, etc.

Henri Audier

I love the tropes of death, of “gravedigging,” of “grandiose stupidity” and “demolition” and anti-democracy, of fraud. We see in letters like this a whole moral universe of indignation, of hostile critique, of political opposition. We see that university politics arouse real anger, an anger irreducible to any simplistic rational calculus, an anger stemming from the fact that people really get attached to their university systems. The institution of a competitive grant process is likened to the irrationalism of a lottery.

My guess is that Audier’s use of this kind of rhetoric of anger is, while no doubt personally felt, also a political tactic. The question—one which could only be answered through empirical research—is: is it successful?

I may write more about this in the future (once I’ve finished it!), but I was struck by the very beginning of the introduction (pp. 15-16), which gives a nice capsule summary of how the university is seen as being at the absolute bottom of the prestige scale in French higher education. I’ll translate; bear in mind that “la fac,” short for “the faculty,” is French slang for “the university.” Bear in mind, also, that a major distinguishing characteristic of French public universities is that they’re open to everyone with a high school diploma, while other kinds of higher education have more selective admissions.

Bastia, August 2008. Conversation with a taxi driver. He finds out that his passenger is an academic. He brings up the case of his daughter, which he’s worrying about. She has just received her high school diploma, science track, with high honors. She wants to enroll in a private school in Aix-en-Provence to be a speech therapist. It’s a dream she’s had since childhood. This is the best school for it, it seems, but the tuition fees are high and you have to pay for lodging too (no dorm housing if you’re not enrolled in the public university). But above all, the results are uncertain: there are only a few dozen places for several thousand candidates. The academic tries to convince the taxi driver that it would be good for his daughter to enroll simultaneously in psychology at the university. That would at least guarantee that she’ll get a degree. Neither the taxi driver nor his daughter seem to have thought of that…

Paris, November 2008. Conversation between two academics. They’re talking about the problems at school that one of their sons is having: he’s a brilliant adolescent, but slacking off [passablement dilettante] in senior year, studying economic and social sciences in a “good” Paris high school. When he turns in his homework, he can get an A [18 sur 20]. But, often, he doesn’t turn anything in and ends up with a zero. So, of course, the average gets weighed down. The principal meets with the father and warns him: with these grades, he won’t get into selective (non-university) schools; and then, forgetting who he’s talking to, he lets go a little: “You know, Mister, with a file like this, there’s nothing left but the fac.”

“There’s nothing left but the fac!” This sentence by itself sums up the crisis of the French university. Testimonial abound of meetings for the parents of high school seniors, where teachers and administrators explain the different options for further studies after graduation. First there are prep classes for the elite schools [grandes écoles]. Then there are technical-vocational classes, organized by the high schools themselves [STS]. Finally there are university technical institutes (IUT), which are institutionally part of the university but, like the aforementioned programs, have the right to choose their students and to group them together by class, like in high school. Finally, “there’s nothing left but the fac,” that is the university, the “broom-wagon” that picks up the stragglers of higher education, tasked with accepting those who can’t get in elsewhere.

This whole logic will, I think, be unfamiliar for Anglo-American readers, for whom it’s probably not easy to imagine a system where the universities aren’t the most prestigious form of higher education. But such is the French case — at least at a very crude level of first approximation. It is, of course, the case that there are some kinds of prestige you can only get from a university; you can’t get a Ph.D. anywhere besides a university in France, to the best of my knowledge, and some universities are considered more prestigious than others, and some majors more than others… But it’s true that there is a very common French discourse about how the public universities are no good. About how they’re abject. About how they’re falling apart and don’t give you jobs and hence don’t give you a future. Well, Anglophone readers, here in this text you have a couple of examples of people who think the fac is no good or who just forget about it altogether.

Among other things, this is a text rich in the imagery of social status. Since I am in cultural anthropology, I feel a compulsive need to comment on a couple of these images, which tell us something about how the texts’ authors think that status works.

The first paragraph gives us the intriguing case of low status figured by forgettability. “Neither the taxi driver nor his daughter seem to have thought of that…” — thought of the university, that is. For the authors, this apparently is a striking thing, a striking case of absent interest. They, of course, as academics, seem to value the university very highly. But what’s interesting isn’t that they value the university but simply that they seem to be drawing a symbolic equation between being forgettable and being low-status. Between being ignored and being abject. I’m curious: is this something that’s generally true about status systems? Does being low-status normally correlate with being forgettable?

The last paragraph proposes the voiture-balai, the “broom-wagon,” as a further symbol for the abjectness of the university. I would assume that many anglophones are also not really sure what this is, a “broom-wagon”: apparently it’s a car with brooms symbolically strapped to its sides that brings up the rear of bike races, and picks up stragglers. Basically, a car to pick up the losers. This is something of an interesting symbolic move because, I would argue, it’s not obvious that college students should be ranked in the same way as bike racers; there is no rule that says that college students must be classified as clear winners or clear losers. To employ this image of the “broom-wagon,” then, would seem to suggest, if not reinforce, a more deeply hierarchical and stratified notion of the student body.

A broader suspicion starts to emerge here: that it is all but impossible to have a value-neutral description of a university system; that to describe a university is already to assume a particular political stance towards it…

Paris
April 28, 2011

Mr. President,
The honor I feel in writing to you is coupled to the hope that you will be able to spare a few moments.

In terms of the facts, all resemblance to the life of Christine Coënon is not accidental; in the form of the writing, all resemblance to John Cage’s Communication (Silence, Denoël Press, 2004) is not accidental (in italics).

I am a visual artist, an adjunct [chargé de cours] in Visual Arts [Arts Plastiques] at the University of Paris-8 since 1995.
I am 48 years old. High school diploma in 1980, two years of college (Caen, 1980-82), five years in art school (Caen, 1982-87) and then the Institute of Higher Studies in Visual Arts (Paris, 1988-98).
Holding a degree in art (DNSEP, 1987), more than twenty years of research and artistic production, fifteen years of teaching at the University of Paris-8… my pay as an adjunct in visual arts is rising to 358€ per month.
EVERY DAY IS BEAUTIFUL.
What if I ask 32 questions?
Will that make things clear?

Every week I teach two classes, a practical and a theoretical class, which comes to 128 hours of teaching per year.
All my classes are paid at the “discussion section adjunct rate [chargé de TD].”
Do you think my pay is fair, compared to the pay of a tenured professor whose hourly quota is less at 200 hours?

The adjunct is paid for the time spent in class: two and a half hours, although the time slots are currently three hours long. Should I refuse to answer questions after class? And course preparation? And correcting people’s work? And grading? And tutoring the seniors?
What is the difference between an adjunct and a baby-sitter?

In 2005, the semesters were changed from 15 weeks to 13 weeks; after which adjuncts were paid for 32 hours instead of 37.5.
32 = 13 x 2.5?
Why didn’t someone teach me to count?
Would I have to know how to count to ask questions?

Why, when a visiting lecturer [vacataire] gets a gross hourly wage of 61.35€, am I getting 40.91€ (compare to the rate of a visiting foreign lecturer)?
I was told that the hourly rate of 61.35€ corresponded to what an adjunct costs the university.
So if I just add the bosses’ overhead to my own salary, everything adds up.
Do I understand that adjuncts are supposed to be paying the bosses’ overhead?
These things that are not clear to me, are they clear to you?
Do you think it’s fair, this special system?

Why don’t adjuncts, who agree to work for a trimester or a year, get contracts?
They do, however, sign an agreement to work, and after that it’s a “maybe.”
If I start a semester, am I just supposed to imagine that I’ll be there at the end? The same thing for a year?

The adjunct is paid hourly, and thus doesn’t have the right to paid vacation or to an end-of-contract bonus. [NB: The French have something called an indemnité de précarité, which is supposed to be paid at the end of short-term contracts to “compensate for the precarity of the situation.”]
Is there any point in asking why?

Why is it that an artist must have money to make money?
Why does the university refuse the House of Artists’ regulatory framework? I pay them fees as a good taxpayer. [NB: The House of Artists is the professional association chosen by the French state to handle artists’ social security.]
Why does Visual Arts at the University misrecognize the artist’s situation, characterized by precarity?
(The median earnings of affiliated artists are 8300 euros per year, which is below the poverty line, and 50% of artists earn less than that…)

Is an artist who has “insufficient earnings” insufficient?
Why do I have the feeling of only being a chit for the accountants?
Why is the teaching artist considered “lucky” to get underpaid for teaching only if her research is profitable?
Why, paradoxically, does the University only recognize artists’ sales, and under no circumstances their research and teaching?
(I’ll permit myself to mention that in 2008 I got a research fellowship from the National Center of Visual Arts [CNAP]).

Is this the 28th question?
Have we got a way to make money?
Money, what does it communicate?
Which is more communicative, an artist who makes money or an artist who doesn’t?
Are people artists within the market, non-artists outside the market?
And if people on the inside don’t really understand, does that change the question?

Why do I teach at the University? (Some say there are Art Schools for artists!)
Why? Because I was invited there and, naturally, I found myself a place there.
I say “naturally” because, whether at an Art School or at the Institute for Higher Studies in Visual Arts, I have always felt a complementarity between the historian and/or theorist and the artist.
Too naturally, no doubt, I got invested and, too passionately, I have continued in the conditions that you know.

Is there always something to wonder about, never peace or calm?
If my head is full of uncertainty, what’s happening to my peace and to my calm?
Are these questions getting us somewhere?
And if there are rules, who made them, I ask you?
In other words — is there a possible end to these uncertainties and, if so, where does it begin?

Are there any important questions?
The semesters are getting shorter, the quota of students per class is rising…
60% of teachers in visual arts are precarious, their pay rising a few hundredths of a euro each year.
I ask you, given that experience emerges over time, what will happen if experience is sacrificed for momentary profit?
Are these questions getting us somewhere?
Where are we going?

Mr. President, I hope that you will be able to understand these questions, and able to answer them too.

I inform you that in spite of the recognized interest in my classes, they are going to be canceled because I am subject to the House of Artists system (which is not even a professional obligation for me), and my earnings are below the threshold for being a full member.
“Fired for insufficient earnings”: my courses are being canceled because my earnings are too low.
Faced with the aberration of this situation, and without a response on your part, I will choose to make this letter public on May 19, 2011.

Please accept, Mr. President, this assurance of my best regards,

Christine Coënon

Commentary
Just a few quick notes here:

• The basic economic problems of adjunct work are recited here with perfect clarity: you’re underpaid with respect to the cost of living, underpaid in relation to permanent staff, have no certainty of keeping your job, no benefits, and no employment contract (which seems to mean, in this case, that you promise your employer that you’ll work while they don’t promise you anything).
• The bad pedagogical consequences of paying teachers by the hour also emerge: notably in the thorny question of whether one should still interact with students “off the clock.” It’s not clear that that is part of one’s job… Is one getting paid nothing for grading students? For mentoring them? And, as Coënon notes, the teaching conditions deteriorate as class sizes rise.
• The bad relationship with the administration is also quite apparent: the administration seems to set an arbitrary and unequal pay scale, and to justify it, when asked, with fairly irrational explanations (e.g. “your pay is less than X’s because we’re taking the administrative overhead out of yours and not theirs…”).
• There’s a whole subtext here about the relationship between money and respect, and an equally important reminder that, as the 2010 national study on precarity showed, many precarious people hate their precarity but — paradoxically — really want to stay in higher education. In case anyone needed a reminder, there are reasons other than strictly economic rationality driving people to work at universities. A pity that this attitude seems to make them all the easier to exploit.
• It would be good to say something here too about what’s signified by the use of art, and in particular the re-use of that poetic text by John Cage, but I don’t have time today to really think this through… It’s a rather poetic form of public desperation that we have here. Is the aestheticization of this text supposed to help make its hostility and resentment seem less blunt? Is it supposed to be a way of reminding the reader that the author is a cultivated person? Is it a claim that the artist can make art even out of the worst situations? Is art a way of making a more powerful political claim on, say, your job? Or is it that things get aestheticized as a way of compensating symbolically for an impending defeat?

To be honest, as an ethnographer, I haven’t been extremely curious about this whole political affair; it’s only peripherally about the universities, and I’m mainly interested in the politics of the university system. And I’m not the only one who feels separate from this movement: at a faculty activist meeting a week ago, teachers commented that their concerns about the institutional situation were radically different from their students’ involvements in the pension question, and they weren’t sure (at that point) what points of commonality with the students they were going to find.

University discussion of the movement has, nonetheless, been ongoing, and I was particularly interested in one sociology student’s testimonial from the barricades in Lyon. I’ve taken the time to translate it; there’s something important to learn, I think, from stories of what happens when privileged, educated people suddenly find themselves subject to irrational and overwhelming state violence.

Thursday, October 21, 2010. Testimony of events on Place Bellecour, Lyon.

I arrived around noon at Place Bellecour, accompanied by some student friends. A protest was supposed to start at 2pm, on Place A. Poncet just beside Place Bellecour, with college and high school students, partnered with the CGT [a major union] and SUD [a left autonomist union]. A number of young people were there, mostly high schoolers and middle schoolers. You crossed a police cordon to enter the square. There were several dozen of them at every exit from the public square, which is one of the largest in France. They were armored from head to foot, with helmets, shields, nightsticks, pistols… There was also a truck from the GIPN (National Police Intervention Group, who had an armored truck and wore masks) and two anti-riot water cannon trucks. A helicopter surveyed the site from a low altitude. Half an hour later, after a few stones were thrown towards the police and their vehicles, the cops went into action and fired tear gas grenades. The crowd dispersed.

Around 1:30pm we start moving towards the Post Office, where the protest was going to leave from. The police cordon was still there, separating the protesters already on Place Bellecour from those on Place A. Poncet. They refused to let us through. After half an hour of discussion, probably with the help of the unions, they opened the cordon and let about thirty people through, after which they abruptly closed the cordon again. Apparently, the population going through didn’t fit the criteria for a “good protester” (light skin, not too young, no sweatshirts or hoods). No one else was allowed to leave Bellecour. Tensions rose. A few projectiles were thrown, and the police responded by firing tear gas, nightsticks raised. For more than an hour, we tried in vain to rejoin the other group of protesters, who were waiting for us on the other side. They also got teargassed. The crowd on Bellecour was broken up.

At 3:30pm, finally, the “free” protesters decided to leave on the march. For our part, we waited. There were several hundred of us on the Place. It was relatively calm. We waited, splintered into little groups all across the square. The cops said that we could leave once the protest had left. We waited. The helicopter hovered over us with a deafening roar. There were a few movements in the crowd, but the scene stayed calm. Frankly, we were getting pissed off. I was just planning to go on the march, and I had brought nothing with me: no water, no food, nothing to do. I waited like the others. A little later we decided to leave with a friend. But the cops still refused to let us out. It was probably about 4:30pm, so they had been holding us for three hours. I told them I needed to eat and piss, but they said no way. I started to get seriously pissed off, and it dawned on me that I was being forcibly retained. The cops told us it was an order from the Prefect, and that they didn’t know when they would be authorized to let us leave. To a friend who asked if it would be possible to get a soccer ball from the outside, to have something to do, the cop says that he should just take the inflated bladder of the young girl who had just asked to leave to go to the toilet. Then he and his colleagues burst out laughing.

No one understood the situation. In spite of everything, the square emptied out somewhat. Some people managed to leave, helped by the residents and shop-keepers who opened up their back doors. I heard that the police had let some students leave, but that, on the other hand, the young maghrébins [North Africans] right beside them were kept back. Systematically guilty of not being white [Le délit de faciès est systématique]. On the square, we didn’t organize ourselves. Everyone stayed in their corner, we were bewildered, we just expected to be let out. The average age of the people detained wasn’t over 18.

It was around 5pm, and we heard that maybe we weren’t going to be let out before 9pm. People began to panic. I heard middle schoolers on the phone trying to explain to their parents that they couldn’t come home because the police were holding them. It got colder and colder. I went back to see the police for some explanations. One of them explained to me that “we’re lucky to be in France because if were in Spain we would already have been beaten up by the Civil Guard,” and that “when there are problems of public order, freedom of movement can be suspended.” The square, at this point and for more than an hour before, was perfectly calm. A little bit later, when some kids gathered to protest in the middle of the square, the cops we were talking to turned their weapons towards us (I don’t know if they were tear gas launchers or rubber bullets) and told us to get back. Which we did. Tear gas was fired all across the square: the grenades shot into the sky and scattered out, falling, in incandescent form. People ran in every direction. We tried to stay on the sidewalk, along the buildings, to protect ourselves as much as possible. A young man was on the ground. Others came to help him, and ten meters away the police still threatened them with their pistols. I heard that he was hurt, and kids, with their hands in the air, asked the cops not to attack. Eventually the cops made everyone get back. They came to get the young man, who resisted. Three of them held him down on the ground, and then they dragged by him by the arm for 20 meters to their truck, which he disappeared behind. In front of me was a 15-year-old girl, in tears, in the arms of her friend. They went to see the police, asked to leave, crying, said they couldn’t take any more, wanted to go home. The cop told them to get lost. Explosions kept ringing out, smoke covered the square. It was hard to open your eyes and to breathe. Thirty meters to my right a girl was stretched out on the ground. People gathered around to help her. I didn’t see her react, I don’t know what was happening to her. Maybe an asthma attack, maybe a rubber bullet shot? (In the end I don’t think they shot any rubber bullets.) People shouted to call the firemen. Eventually, after maybe ten minutes, the police pushed everyone back farther along.

The helicopter hovered, still, above our heads.

Seeing our incomprehension, a cop told us: “It’s a policing innovation.”

I walked. People began to assemble in the middle of the square. Everyone had had enough. We started to be afraid that we wouldn’t be able to get out. Shouts of protest. A few stones were thrown. They respond, again, with tear gas and deafening sounds of explosions. Eventually they decide to get out the anti-riot water cannons. They fire. People are dispersed. We wait. They come back once or twice with the water. We stay dispersed. We wander around. People walk. I’ve had too much. I start to break down. The sun has set. It’s cold. I haven’t eaten since morning. We started walking, more or less in groups.

Around 6pm, the cops tell us that we can leave from the north side. Everyone goes over there. They respond with tear gas. People shout, hands in the air: “They told us we could go out this way!” Repeat. Tear gas fired, dispersion. On the third try, they let us approach. They finally let us leave. They make people leave one by one, stating their name and address, doing body searches (“checkup [palpation?]” they called it), and emptied people’s bags. As there were more than 200 of us, this took a long time. We lined up in the queue, docilely, heads down. They brought all the prisoners to one end of the square. They told us that we would all get out, but only one drop at a time [au compte-goutte]. We waited. People without their identity papers were put to one side. Eventually they let us through. While she searches me she tells me that she’ll be quick. I’m disgusted [écoeurée]. It had been more than six hours since the police had gotten the order not to let anyone leave place Bellecour. Six hours that some 200 people (at a minimum) were deprived of basic freedoms: moving, eating, drinking, going to the toilet. Six hours that we were held on a public square, battered [sonnés], confused, encircled by more than a hundred police, pointing their weapons at us with the least movement in the crowd, and firing on us… and the helicopter that hovered permanently overhead. The cop who checked my friend’s ID told him, “at least, eh, you won’t want to come back [vous avez plus envie de recommencer].”

It’s disgusting.

Nerves fraying, a policeman saw that I was in tears and took it upon himself to bring us past the last line of cops that separated us from the outside. He led us through the middle of a group of thirty or so kids, all Africans or Maghrébins, who were getting on a bus. They weren’t more than 18 years old. I asked where they were going: to the police station, to have their identities checked. It was 6:45. The cops said they would let them go that evening. Two buses left for the Commissariat.

Once I was past the riot police [CRS] lines, I rejoined the free protesters, who came towards the Place Bellecour to support us after the protest. They invited us to eat, to regroup. The protesters tried to stop the bus from leaving. Undercover cops [la B.A.C.] intervened, and the buses left.

A very bad experience, this situation, yes. Shocked, yes. To conclude, I went to the first bar I saw, to go to the toilets. The owner refused, he told me he had just refused ten other people and that he wouldn’t make an exception for me. I piss in the street, watched by protesters and passers-by.

Humiliated, yes.

They took away my right to protest, they took away my right to move freely [on m’a retiré le droit…]. We were packed like animals, attacked from one side of the square and then the other by armed groups. I didn’t insult a single person; I didn’t raise my hand against anyone. Six hours of open-air detention with police intimidation. During these six hours, no window on the square was broken, no damage to public property. But I can tell you that, after several hours, even me, a pacifist, began to feel a certain anger growing. Need to protest. Yes. Because need to say No to “policing innovations” of this order. This detention was unjustified, abnormal. We were put under constant pressure, and the weapons deployed were not proportional to the crowd at hand. Like many of those present that afternoon at Bellecour, I was simply going to a demonstration, one that was declared and authorized by the police.

That night, I couldn’t get to sleep.

Lou-Andréa, student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, sociology MA program.

(Note on the language: I’m less sure of some of the expressions in brackets. Francophones, don’t hesitate to chime in.)

As usual, I don’t have time to really analyze all this. I’ll just note two things. (1) The idea of a “right to protest” ingrained in French national ideology is quite interesting, especially given that the author makes much of the fact that the police don’t even obey their own orders or live up to their own promises. It’s as if what produced anger was a failure of the expected bargaining with the state over the right to deviate within pre-arranged limits (eg, to go on a pre-approved march). As if, as long as the state respects its side of the usual bargain, the activists will do the same. It’s as if all political normativity was supposed to be mediated by the state, as if only the state was a truly legitimate authorizing agent.

(2) I’m struck by this being a story of the development of political anger, even fury. There is a great sense that things are undignified and that this indignity is really the chief thing that brings anger into being. The sense of having put up with too much. The sense of having exceeded the standards of emotional tolerability. Of being deprived of basic human rights. Of being subject to useless, gratuitous cruelty. As if the affront was partly a matter of the police being morally and intellectually incomprehensible. (Clifford Geertz liked writing about this: the intolerability of the incomprehensible.)

To me, most of the time the basic policy issues in French debates are more or less comprehensible, but what’s harder to relate to is the whole emotional world that the policy debates elicit. I mean, I just don’t have the same relationship to the State as your average French militant. I don’t have good intuitions for what makes people annoyed and what they tolerate, for what makes people feel like they’ve just had it and are going to crack… But narratives like this are good for trying to relate to that emotional world.

Mobilize together!

Working and studying conditions in research and higher education

As this school year starts, staff and students are seeing no improvement in their working, studying and living conditions. The government’s reform of teacher education [mastérisation] is showing all its negative effects: there are former job candidates who can’t apply twice, candidates who pass the hiring exam but still don’t get jobs [reçus-collés], acrobatics aimed at creating [new] “teaching MA” programs after a parody of accreditation, interns put in front of classes without any real professional training, whose secondary school colleagues have refused to tutor them… The university and research map has been profoundly modified by the accelerating restructuring of research organizations (new Instituts at the CNRS, merger between the INRP and the ENS-Lyon) and of universities (with processes of inter-campus “fusion”), which have lurched into being through bidding on the government’s recently borrowed infrastructure funds [Grand emprunt]. The multiplication of individualized research grants (PES, PFR, …) threatens teamwork, essential in our sectors. Precarity is rising among the students, under the combined effects of rising fees set by the government (tuition, student health insurance [sécurité sociale], campus dining halls) and rising housing expenses.

Job cuts

We have already seen a freeze in government workers’ salaries for 2011, cuts of 36,000 public sector jobs, and a drastic fall in the number of teaching jobs up for hiring (11,600 jobs versus 15,125 the year before, with a 55% decline for primary school teachers). Under the cover of “deficit reduction,” the latest government announcements presage new public sector blood-letting, further falls in our purchasing power, accelerating degradation of the services offered to the public, and accelerating degradation of staff working conditions, with an ever-rising growth of precarity.

Xenophobic and securitarian attacks

During the summer, the government has stepped up its xenophobic interventions and expulsions, especially of undocumented foreign students. Foreign professors and researchers have been frightened in France or been prevented from coming here. More and more unionists or social activists have been taken to court. To push back against these attacks, a citizens’ petition has been set up: “against xenophobia and the politics of pillory: liberty, equality and fraternity,” which the undersigned organizations ask you to sign: http://nonalapolitiquedupilori.org/

Pension counter-reform

The government’s pension “reform” project, which exacerbates the effects of the 2003 Fillon Law, will be brought before the National Assembly on September 7. It involves major benefit reductions for everyone. It means:

• Obligations to work more for smaller and smaller pensions
• Major increases in already massive youth unemployment
• Falling net salaries for public-sector workers [fonctionnaires]

For research and higher education, it also involves a refusal to give pension credit for the years spent on education, writing a thesis, working abroad (post-docs), professional service work, or late hirings.

A completely different pension reform ought to aim at improving pensions for everyone, as much for people on State retirements as for everyone else. It would especially allow:

• The right to retire at 60 with a full pension, calculated as 75% of the average salary for the past six months for public-sector workers.
• Maintenance and improvement of women’s rights.
• Indexing the pensions according to reimbursement rates themselves indexed by the cost of living [indexé aux prix].
• Taking into account the structurally short careers of research and higher education staff.
• Taking years of higher education into account in pension calculations.

This calls for other financing, based on a redistribution of wealth more favorable to workers [plus favorable au travail]. Exemptions to employers’ contributions must be revisited, and corporations’ financial products must be made to contribute. This requires an employment policy, especially a public employment policy, that’s equal to our needs.

While young people are having such a hard time finding jobs, we refuse to see old people forced to stay at work longer in hopes of a decent pension — which will augment youth unemployment even further.

Opposing this policy

The undersigned organizations call on all university staff and on the whole university community to massively react:

• Respond to the petition “Against xenophobia and the politics of pillory: liberty, equality and fraternity,” by participating in the demonstrations of September 4th.
  Paris: September 4th at 2pm from République to Nation under the Higher Education Research balloon.
• Participate massively in the September 7th day of strikes and public-private sector protests over “Pensions, employment, salaries.
  Paris: September 7th at 2pm from République to Nation under the Higher Education Research balloon.
• And throughout September, we’ll be amplifying our mobilizations in order to make the government back down.

Signatory organizations: FSU (SNESUP, SNCS, SNASUB, SNEP, SNETAP), CGT (SNTRS, FERC’Sup), UNSA (Sup’Recherche, SNPTES), Solidaires (Sud recherche EPST, Sud Etudiant), CFTC INRA, UNEF, SLR, SLU.

(I should note that a few of the French expressions in square brackets are ones that I’m not 100% sure of knowing how to translate. Corrections welcome.)

I won’t give much of an analysis of this text, except to note that it seems to revel in a certain political eclecticism, drawing together immigration policy, pension policy, public-sector job cuts, and the arcana of university policy into a sort of buckshot critique of the government at large. This political eclecticism, moreover, apparently gets knit together largely through a sort of temporal rhetoric designed to instruct the reader about the state of the political present, to predict the bad future ahead, and to conjure up the optimism of a political mobilization that might avert the worst of what’s to come. In other words, a major implicit project of an activist flier like this, I would argue, is to say to the reader: this is the moment in history where we are now; here’s how we can intervene. I know this point is totally obvious, in a sense, but it seems to me that it’s worth thinking, as analysts, about the fact that political practice involves trying to alter people’s sense of time, to make them realize that they are in a political present, backed up against the wall of the future… And again, it’s banal to observe that political mobilization involves creating a sense of urgency, but it’s worth thinking twice about the fact that urgency involves a whole relationship to time and crisis.

Hello,

You will find below a proposal for an alternative seminar.

A seminar titled “The expression of social malaise” will be held every monday at 9pm. Drawing on the recent works of our colleagues from Guadaloupe and those of our working-class neighbors from 2005, we will learn to generate acts of symbolic, media-ready disobedience.

The seminar will begin with a theoretical exposition of alternative means of expressing social malaise (occupying train stations and commercial buildings, setting garbage cans on fire, vandalizing bus stops). The practical application of these means will be open for discussion, and there will be a presentation on indispensable information for strikers (about the cracks in the riot police’s armor, protecting yourself from tear gas grenades, and practical legal advice).

The second part of the seminar will be dedicated to physical exercises relevant to this expression of social malaise (exercises in dispersion, intensive running, basics of close combat, unarmed and with blades, throwing paving stones, fabricating Molotov cocktails, and so on).

Course credit for students will involve an individual and spontaneous student project, preferably of a practical nature. This seminar can be counted for credit either in Law or in Communications.

Participants from the experimental centers of Clichy-sous-bois and Villiers-le-Bel will intervene in the seminar.

A and M

PS: If this proposition is taken seriously, the organizers of the seminar are not to be held responsible.

Some of the listserve participants then chimed in with suggestions on the grading system; whereupon a professor suggested rather more seriously that even in fun, such discussions probably shouldn’t be left in the public record.

It’s probably superfluous to note, at any rate, that the humor of the proposition apparently derives from the juxtaposition between the register of illegal street violence and academic discourse. The former is mockingly dignified by the latter; the latter is profaned by the former. One is left wondering, though, what sort of impulse towards imaginary disobedience motivated the authors, and what sort of social function this humor is serving or undermining.

Philosophizing in senior year???

1) The 2003 “official instructions” for the philosophy teaching program in senior year say: “Philosophy teaching in senior year… contributes to forming autonomous minds, warned of reality’s complexities and capable of putting to work a critical consciousness of the contemporary world.” What do you think of this?

These formulations pose two major problems.

First, it strikes me as shocking that a philosophy textbook should begin with a series of “official instructions.” An instruction, in the sense of a directive, is entirely contrary to the “autonomous minds” that we are told to “form.” Are we told to “force our students to be free”? Moreover, in the context of schools, “instruction” has a second dimension: we still talk about “public, obligatory, civic instruction” [in connection with public education]. But instructing is not educating. Instructing basically means shaping someone’s mind to fit the competences that the institution judges socially useful. Educating on the other hand means communicating a potential to a mind which, one day, will allow it to help define what is or isn’t valuable for its society. Yet according to the “official” declarations, we’re still on the model of instructing, in both senses of the term.

Second, the goal proclaimed for high school philosophy teaching is completely exorbitant. I know that many people subscribe to it. But we should be astonished by the excessive disproportion between the end and the means: they have groups of thirty pupils, a very limited range of practical exercises, lecture courses, etc. And above all, it’s impossible for philosophy teachers to “form autonomous and critical minds” if the pupils haven’t been invited to be autonomous or critical since the day they arrived in the schoolhouse. Not to mention that the art of thinking isn’t reserved for philosophy. Would one be exempted from “thinking for oneself” in history, literature or physics? It must be said that the goal [of our philosophy teaching] is, in our present circumstances, pretty disconnected from these realities; and we might therefore give up on grading students’ homework against an ideal that very few people can claim to have attained. We could, at least for starters, propose simpler exercises that would be better adapted to our students’ competences (the ones “formed” by our instruction) and to our own. At the university we do all this readily enough.

2) What should be at stake in philosophy teaching? What should be its goals?

Well, I don’t want to say that there’s nothing special to expect from philosophy teaching. To my eyes, philosophy is in essence a critique of our values and an effort to demonstrate, by one method or another, the legitimacy or pertinence of the values we hold. The philosophers who we’ve read and reread over the centuries have all undertaken an examination of the values of their times. That said, these philosophers don’t play the moral purity card [la carte de bonne conscience]. They direct their critical examination at themselves, working with their own keen perceptions of the possibilities and blockages of their epoch. Today, as in the past, many people, including our official instructors, defend some values without examination and try to impose them on others. Wondering where our values come from, going over them with a fine-toothed comb and sorting them out, creating new ones, scrutinizing the motives for our adherence to them and the mechanisms that inculcate them — that’s what a reading of the philosophers can invite us to do. And that’s a truly priceless service.

Like Zask, I’ve been struck by the official rhetoric in France about teaching people to have free and critical minds, which always seems to entail, as Zask points out, the contradictory project of “making” people free, and to presuppose the unlikely premise that educational institutions know what freedom or criticality are. But I’m most interested, here, in the part of the interview that proposes a definition of what’s essential about philosophy: a critique of values.

It’s not an easy exercise, at present, to come up with a well-defined area of inquiry that’s essentially philosophical. Many areas of inquiry that formerly “belonged” to philosophy — physics, society, politics, the nature of “man” or of language, the structure of thinking — have over time (and not without struggle) developed autonomous disciplines of their own, which contest and quite often dominate the intellectual terrain formerly occupied by philosophers. There are plenty of philosophers who still write about all this stuff, of course, but these objects are no longer exclusively philosophical, and as André Pessel has put it, “if this link with constituted knowledges [in other domains] disappears, philosophy sees its field extraordinarily limited and reduced to an exclusive study of subjectivity.”

Without going into great detail about competing conceptions of philosophy (see some American examples), it seems to me that some of the more obvious options aren’t terribly thrilling. Consider some of the most well-known: there’s philosophy as the conceptual foundation of all the other sciences, or (in an alternative version) philosophy as the conceptual handmaiden of the sciences (ie, the philosophers show up to help scientists “clarify” their theoretical ideas); there’s philosophy as a specialized conceptual inquiry into fairly narrow but autonomously philosophical domains; there’s philosophy as the history of ideas; in a more instrumental version, there’s philosophy as a place for building “skills” in critical thinking (as in the lycées).

It seems to me that there’s something to be said for most of these fairly academic projects, though I’m especially skeptical of the first one. But most of them (leaving aside the first and last) don’t afford a particularly exciting public role to the field. Of course, in France we also see more politicized conceptions of philosophy: philosophy as (in effect) the training ground for public intellectuals (always a small group), philosophy as “class struggle at the level of ideas” (via Althusser), philosophy as an emancipatory project (often cited at Paris-8). Here again, however, the latter two are extremely marginal and the first, ultimately, is fairly elitist.

Zask’s proposal for philosophy as a critique of values, in this light, has the advantage of being potentially open to all, sociopolitically interesting, and not necessarily a buttress of the status quo — without, however, necessarily becoming self-marginalizing (as so much marxist philosophy tends to). As an ethnographer of philosophers, obviously my relationship to philosophy is a bit strange, but let me just say that while I’m ambivalent about some of the field’s more grandiose claims, the idea of a field that does critique of values seems pretty compelling. A lot of anthropologists want to do work like this, but disciplinary norms of empiricism and relativism tend to prevent us from producing very well-theorized normative work.

Questionnaire on Sexuality

• Where do you think your heterosexuality comes from?
• When and under what circumstances did you decide to be heterosexual?
• Could it be that your heterosexuality is only a difficult and troubling phase that you’re passing through?
• Could it be that you are heterosexual because you are afraid of people of the same sex?
• If you’ve never slept with a partner of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer one? Could it be that you’re just missing out on a good homosexual experience?
• Have you come out as heterosexual? How did they react?
• Heterosexuality doesn’t cause problems as long as you don’t advertise these feelings. Why do you always talk about heterosexuality? Why center everything around it? Why do the heterosexuals always make a spectacle of their sexuality? Why can’t they live without exhibiting themselves in public?
• The vast majority of sexual violence against children is due to heterosexuals. Do you believe that your child is safe in the presence of a heterosexual? In a class with a heterosexual teacher in particular?
• More than half of heterosexual couples who are getting married this year will get divorced within three years. Why are heterosexual relationships so often bound for failure?
• In the face of the unhappy lives that heterosexuals lead, can you wish for your child to be heterosexual? Have you considered sending your child to a psychologist if he or she has turned out to have heterosexual tendencies? Would you be ready to have a doctor intervene? Would you send your child to in-patient therapy to get him or her to change?

After this mock questionnaire, the flier remarks that “these questions which marginalize, psychoanalyze and denormalize (anormalise) — non-heterosexual people suffer from these questions, and face them on a daily basis.” And it goes on to enunciate a political agenda which argues, in effect, that queer and women’s issues belong together, “because heterosexuality,” in addition to harming gay, lesbian and trans people, “is a political system which divides the world in two, into men and women, and which assigns one side to maternity and domestic labor while giving the others privileges and power.” Their list of political demands hence included not only equality and an end to homophobia but also (and this struck me as being a little more unusual) an end to the traditional system of dichotomous sexual classification. Indeed, they claimed “the free disposition of one’s body and the free choice of one’s sexual identity, sex and gender.”

This placed them in the paradoxical position, it seems to me, of being a feminist group trying to undermine the category of ‘women’ that served as their tacit basis of political unity: while open to all, as of yesterday no males had joined. I’d guess that they’d interpret this apparent paradox by saying that in fact they’re brought together by shared domination on the basis of their gender, and that of course the whole point of the project is to overcome this domination. But the political horizon of this project is very far off; the moment where gender domination will be overcome is infinitely far in the future from the point of view of the present.

A further note on this data: The last question here deals with wearing religious signs (strongest among the Greek Orthodox, as you’ll see). I’d emphasize here that our analysis of these religious artifacts ought to be somewhat different from our analysis of the rates of evil-eye-belief. A worn artifact is a sign of external identification (or verification) of one’s social identity in a way that a mental acceptance of some phenomenon (e.g. djinn) need not be. Even religious signs that are worn under the clothing, it seems to me, still have this characteristic of identity marking, even if one is thereby only signaling to oneself one’s own identity. (It’s interesting to note that among these signs of identity, only one, the headscarf, seems to have become a major public controversy. But we won’t get into the French politics of the veil just now.)

So without further ado…

Table 2: Belief in the Evil Eye by religion

Table 3: Belief in djinn (spirits) by religion

Table 4: Belief in astrology by religion

Soulié comments:

Astrology concerns first of all the Buddhists, those who belong to other religions, the Catholics, and the Greek Orthodox. Leaving aside the Catholics, we observe that within this population women (35.5%) believe in astrology more than men (20.5%), and that believers who are moderately practicing believe in it more than others. (This fits with the results of other studies of this matter by Daniel Boy and Guy Michelat.) Globally, the Protestants subscribe the least to magical or paranormal beliefs, and bear the fewest religious signs. Inversely, while Catholics tend not to be practicing, they do tend to wear religious signs more frequently (along with the Greek Orthodox and Other Christians). Muslims tend not to wear religious signs; although wearing the veil does characterize Islam, it ultimately involves only a very small minority of respondents.

Table 5: Wearing religious signs by religion

Table 6: Type of religious signs worn by the students

(Table numbers come from Soulié’s original document, available on request.)

This report looks into the ways that undergraduates [étudiants de 1er cycle] at Paris-8 relate to religion, and into their opinions and practices about their customs and politics. It is based on a questionnaire and interview study conducted in 2004-5 with a group of undergraduate sociology students at Paris-8 (Vincennes-Saint Denis). The project looks at these students’ undergraduate classmates who were present in class across a selected sample of some ten disciplines. It was initially planned as a form of research training through research practice.

The framework of inquiry

Paris-8 has the greatest fraction of foreign students of any French university. In 2003-4, grouping all levels together, they formed 34.7% of enrollments. At the same time, as a result of its location in Seine Saint-Denis [a working-class suburb just north of Paris], this establishment has a high percentage of immigrants’ children. The high proportion of migrants, and of children of migrants, thus makes the establishment a privileged observatory of the processes of religious, moral and political acculturation.

(…)

1,280 students responded to the questionnaire and around thirty interviews were conducted. 65% of respondents were first years, and 67.6% were women, the percentage of women ranging from 85.6% in psychology to 19.4% in computer science [informatique]. 80% of the students were French, 10% came from the countries of North and Central Africa [des pays du Maghreb et d’Afrique noire], 5.6% from Europe, 2.9% from Asia and 2.1% from America or elsewhere. The majority of foreign students at Paris-8, therefore, come from the countries of North and Central Africa, which are largely Islamic.

The proportion of foreigners varies by discipline. It’s highest in French literature (57.9%) and computer science (45.8%), and lowest in history (7.8%), plastic arts (9.9%) and cinema (10.2%). The particular nationalities also vary by discipline: the Europeans are most present in French literature and communication, the North Africans [maghrébins] in computer science and economics, the Central Africans in economics, and the Asians in French literature and computer science. This distribution also generally corresponds with the observable tendencies on the national scale.

We must also add that the notion of a foreign student, beneath its apparent bureaucratic simplicity (being a foreigner means having a foreign nationality), is a complex and ambiguous one. For some have lived for a very long time in France, or were even born here, while others are in positions of mobility; and this varies greatly according to nationality. 37% of North African students have a father who lives in France, against 20.8% for European students and 12.5% for those from Central Africa. These students’ family roots, and hence also their social, economic and cultural roots, thus differ strongly.

To the question about methodology, this was a survey administered in class across the disciplines. I don’t know the exact criteria for which disciplines were chosen. I do know that, in 2005, there were some 10,049 students enrolled in the first two years of the undergrad program (formerly called the DEUG), so it would seem that this survey reached more than 10% of its target population. (I might point out that Soulié, in the first paragraph above, is tacitly emphasizing that this is a survey of the fraction of the student body that actually comes to class. It doesn’t claim to represent the large absentee population.) I’d imagine that most of the students who got a survey would have filled it out, since it was administered collectively in a classroom setting.

On a more substantive level, the interesting thing here is that, again, foreign students from relatively poorer regions of the world (mainly North and Central Africa in this case) seem to tend towards more professionally, vocationally oriented fields. The case of French Literature, however, seems to be an interesting one in terms of this question of professional motivation, since it’s almost 60% foreign students but leads to no obvious professional future. I’m wondering what motivates people to come from abroad to study French literature, especially if we’re talking about undergraduate degrees. It makes more sense for graduate degrees, since France would presumably be the best place to write a dissertation on the national literature. But the professional stakes of a doctorate are quite different from an undergrad degree. All I can really imagine is that students who are becoming fluent in the French language might be drawn toward a field where they can keep immersing themselves in increasingly high-status language registers. (More “orthodox” French students of French literature, by the way, most likely don’t go to Paris-8, but more often to more traditional institutions like the Sorbonne.)

The extreme feminization of psychology and masculinization of computer science is worth noting too, in passing. I can only say it doesn’t seem too shocking.

Charles Soulié, of the Paris-8 sociology department, kindly shared with me some unpublished results of a survey project on campus religious belief that he conducted in 2004-2005. I’m going to post my translation of it in three segments: first the basic figures, then his comments on foreign students, and finally some very interesting results about campus beliefs in magical phenomena like the Evil Eye (beliefs which, moreover, aren’t as extinct as one might expect in our supposedly postmodern era).

Here’s what the figures look like, broken down by discipline. (I’ll post some details about the survey later; for now let me just note that it’s a survey of undergrads.)

* None designates no religion, atheist or no response.

Soulié’s commentary on this goes as follows:

50.1% of students are religious believers, the Muslims (19.8%) being more numerous than the Catholics (11.4%) or the other Christians (9.4%). The believers, in other words, are a majority at Paris-8, which is at the very least surprising in view of the history of this university. For it was created in 1968 by academics at odds with authority, academics who often claimed the banners of Marxism, Nietzscheanism and psychoanalysis, and who cast themselves, in some cases anyway, as the apostles of a way of life liberated from all constraints, especially sexual ones.

This said, the rate of religious believers varies strongly by discipline, seeing as it runs from 77% in economics to 28.6% in cinema. The Nietzscheans and Freudians are certainly more numerous in cinema, plastic arts, or philosophy than in economics, computer science or law, which moreover holds true for teachers as much as for students.

In addition to the historical irony that Soulié notes, I’m amazed to see that economics students are the most religious on campus. My amazement emerges, I guess, from my own American cultural prototype of economics students as the least spiritual people imaginable, as embodiments of sheer economic practicality. And conversely, it’s a general symbolic surprise to see that some of the most impractical humanities are simultaneously the least religious disciplines. The American stereotype, it seems to me, would be that religion and religious studies are more closely linked to the humanities than to any other disciplines, sharing with the humanities a common concern with moral, cosmological and existential issues. It makes me wonder if people who go into philosophy, anthropology or the arts are finding in these fields more a substitute for religious worldviews than a complement to some prior religiosity. It’s almost as if the humanities were competing with religion to offer students a symbolic relationship to the world. (I’m probably biased here by personal experience: I feel like anthropology does for me pretty much what religion does for many others, i.e., offers a meaningful way to interpret and inhabit the social universe.)

At the same time, one gets the sense that the more religious people are tending to go into practically oriented fields, as if their interest in higher education tended to be oriented more towards the economic and material than the philosophical. Of course, the figures (the disciplines are ordered from least to most religious, by the way) don’t give a completely clear picture; French Literature for instance is a relatively religious field, while something like Psychology is the third least religious while being a fairly “practical” field (in the sense that you can get jobs with a psych degree, like social work I guess). But even more importantly, it needs to be said too that religion can have a class correlate, such that an apparent correlation between being religious and choosing a more practical, job-oriented field may actually just reflect the fact that people from working-class backgrounds tend to choose practical, job-oriented fields. In particular, being Muslim (the biggest religious group) probably correlates with being working-class or at least not from the haute bourgeoisie, while some of the students who go into vocationally futile fields like, say, cinema are from wealthy Parisian backgrounds and not needing immediate economic returns from their education.

Soulié doesn’t give us figures on class background, but in the next installment we’ll look at the Paris-8 immigrant population, a social group that itself has fairly definite class trajectories.

Management at the University

Managerial university administration supports itself with numerous organizational measures; computer software on the corporate model, for example, has already profoundly modified universities’ operations. And the language of entrepreneurial discourse — “efficiency,” “control,” “evaluation,” “project,” “objectives” — is being transposed onto centers of teaching and research which worked, until now, according to other logics. The critical and cumulative temporality of knowledge, after all, has nothing to do with a realized project’s profit timeline.

Nothing shows this penetration of managerial ideology better than the realization of university “newsletters” (journaux). We find in these newsletters a clear expression of this “enterprise culture,” a cleverly disguised and hence valorized means for the indoctrination of a firm’s employees, whose aim is an interiorization of the objectives of productivity and an acceptance of organized forms of domination. These newsletters aim to give a handsome image of the university, without wrinkles or folds, which has no more relation to reality than advertising icons have to social reality.

The newsletter delivers an official lie: “Everything is going great.” It is in no way a public space that would allow a debate about campus participants’ activities and conditions of existence. One doesn’t talk about the misery of foreign students who go to the hospital in a state of physical deterioration because of malnourishment, nor about the short-term jobs that other students string together, nor about anguish in the face of precarity, nor about academic failure. Neither does one talk about the working conditions in the university’s offices or among its laborers. One doesn’t talk in this newsletter about the faculty’s working conditions, nor about the reactions to the latest ministerial injunctions, nor about the problems of research work. The newsletters keep silent on the reforms imposed on university workers, even though they could be the best placed to forecast the University’s development.

As the University is also a center of research, one can only be amazed to see that the newsletter doesn’t open up its columns to notes on current research projects, on the ideas currently up for debate, or on the knowledges currently being developed. In reality, the newsletter is copying business newsletters: it wants to be the vector of an “enterprise culture.” But everything shows us that the University, a place of confrontation between different knowledges and truths and research projects, loses itself in wanting to “sell itself.” It ceases to be by wanting to be what it’s not.

(pp. 46-47).

I’d have to do some library research to be sure, but I get the impression that PR-style university newsletters are a very recent innovation in France, perhaps dating from the last fifteen years or less along with the rest of the “managerial” innovations that de Montlibert deplores. In some ways, these newsletters seem similar in form and function to the U.S. institution of alumni newsletters, but I suppose that even in the U.S., alumni associations are sometimes organizationally distinct from the university administration itself, so that even if they frequently dispense hollow propaganda, the origin of their propaganda is slightly different from something coming straight from a university P.R. office. My sense is that elite schools have long had alumni associations, serving to obtain donations and to maintain a sense of exclusive institutional identity. A quick look at JSTOR indicates that American alumni associations have been around for almost two centuries — the first one was formed in 1821 at Williams College. I initially guessed that American university public relations offices would be a much later creation than alumni associations, but interestingly enough, it turns out that they came into being as early as 1904, and formed a national association, the American Association of College News Bureaus, on the very same day in 1917 that the U.S. entered World War I. The next year, it appears that the alumni associations had grown to such an extent that they too formed a national group, the Alumni Magazines Associated. By the later part of the 20th century, in fact, the university PR association had even merged with the alumni association — which gives the lie to my supposition, earlier in this paragraph, that these are separate entities.

But in France the situation seems to be different. French public universities — which are quite different from, and much less prestigious than, the elite grandes écoles here — have never had alumni associations, although some groups currently advocate them. The grandes écoles, in contrast, seem to have quite strong alumni associations; the Ecole Normale Supérieure is famous for producing an elite academic fraternity that sticks together for life, and French engineering schools turn out to have had alumni associations since the late 1840s (caveat: I’ve only read that article abstract so far).

In the universities, however, it seems that the absence of alumni associations was coupled, until recently, to an equal absence of public relations departments. I suppose the centralized French university system, earlier in the 20th century, probably saw no reason to give each university its own press office; official communication probably used to be handled by the Ministry. But the more that French universities are asked to be autonomous, the more they need (or are forced) to develop and differentiate their identity. The campus newsletters that de Montlibert attacks, I suppose, are just one piece of the longer history of newly developed “branding” activities on French campuses. I’ve seen some curious examples of this here, which I’ll write about soon, I hope.

I also hope that de Montlibert’s comments speak for themselves (which would be a good indicator that my translation isn’t a total failure), but let me just signal in closing that I’m very curious about his emphasis on the university’s “being,” as if the university was constituted by a sort of transhistorical essence which consists in being the site of a perpetual confrontation between different “knowledges.” This, I would emphasize, is one major rhetorical strategy of the academic corps faced with neoliberal assaults: to claim that the reforms undermine the very essence of the university.

The problem, of course, is that these critics seldom manage to acknowledge that the university’s “essence” is itself largely fantasmatic. I suppose there’s a broader theoretical question here about whether or how much any institution can be rightly said to have an essence (is the essence of business to make money? is the essence of government to maintain a monopoly on legitimate use of force?), but I’ll leave that aside to point out that even by de Montlibert’s own provisional definition of a university, most universities aren’t and never have been universities. Most modern universities are places where interdisciplinary conflict is an exception to the rule and where conflict is averted by increasing hyperspecialization (which means that we seldom have to talk to people we deeply disagree with). Many universities have been places where knowledge was, if we believe Thomas Kuhn at least, neither extremely cumulative nor particularly critical. If the university has an essence, I don’t think we’ve figured out what it is yet.

But I can’t be too hard on de Montlibert, because there’s another interesting thing about this little passage. In short, there’s a sort of textual clash between his idealistic definition of what a university at heart “is,” and his list of all the university’s undiscussed problems. To me it seems contradictory for de Montlibert to define a university as home of a “critical and cumulative temporality of knowledge,” while immediately going on to acknowledge that campuses are rife with misery, precarity, bad working conditions, and malnourishment. The former points towards a defense of the university as it is or could be; while the latter tends to suggest that actual universities are deeply problematic institutions.

This thought crosses my mind: Shouldn’t de Montlibert also admit that the traditional humanistic definition of a university is itself another nice official lie? At any rate, he seems caught in the rhetorical tension between the actual and the desirable. But I won’t try to resolve things here. I just find it an interesting page in an interesting book. And I appreciate his historicization of a campus artifact that I might have otherwise taken for granted.

(One last note on translation: the polemic is about university journaux, which might sound like it should be translated as “campus newspapers,” but as there don’t seem to be student-run campus papers here in the American mode, I’m assuming he refers to the glossy little publications that campus administrations put out here to trumpet the latest local achievements. They tend to have carefully uncontroversial little stories, as far as I’ve seen.)

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 of them: “W – Go West.” François Noudelmann, the author, kindly gave me permission to post a translation. So without further ado:

W — Go West

And if Paris 8 was the most American of French universities?

Just kidding, of course: that would be forgetting all the isms (anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, …), forgetting that Vincennes’ breath comes instead from the East, or even the far East where the Cultural Revolution rose up. 1969: East Wind by Jean-Luc Godard, co-written with the future Dany the Red. Today the compass would be set South instead, towards that pole that defines non-rich countries in terms of the North. And as for the West? The response from the dictionary of received ideas would be: turn your back on it!

But the West may thus have taken advantage of us without our knowing it. While here new ideas [la pensée vivante] are forced to settle in the margins on the outskirts of the Sorbonne, in the United States they have grown so far they have their own label, French theory. Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard and so many other children of Paris-8 have inspired American campuses for the past forty years. And the contemporary minds of Saint-Denis are exporting themselves faster than foie gras: Badiou brings Mao to the far west in California. “Rancière is so cool!” New York galleries announce. And Obama’s America creolizes itself with the thought of Glissant.

In the flux of transatlantic import and export, Paris-8 too plays its part. The United States no doubt produces the best and the worst, and one wonders why the world always chooses the latter: the reality shows, the industrial food, the world music, the quantitative ideology, the drive towards security… but the worst does not always come to pass, and when it comes to academic matters, Saint-Denis is the place where people study gender, queer, cultural,  post-colonial studies and theories, which are still distrusted by the mainstream French [franco-française] academy.

Are they products made in the USA? No, because they bring with them India, Africa, Australia, the Caribbean… these others of a Europe encircled by its borders. Walls always end up crumbling and ships always come to birth.

The University-World doesn’t have a statue, but it does have an address: liberty.

I suppose I should start by clarifying a few references. The “University-World” is the current official slogan for Paris-8, a concept-slogan that draws on the large fraction of foreign students at the university. Historically, it’s been a radically left-wing campus, hence the significance of the orientation towards the formerly socialist East. The university is currently located in Saint-Denis (if you haven’t picked that up from my earlier posts). And in Saint-Denis, the university’s mailing address is on the Rue de la Liberté, which is used here in the last sentence to amplify the consonance between the United States and Paris-8.

Now, I have to tell you that this text would come across as pretty counter-intuitive to most French readers. American universities in France are pretty often pictured as the incarnation of pure neoliberalism, of entrenched business influence, of massive structural inequality between rich and poor. In that light, it’s a bit of a shock to see the American university portrayed here mainly as a bastion of intellectual progressiveness, as the home of new ideas, of the “French Theory” of Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Cixous & Lyotard, of what Noudelmann called la pensée vivante, literally living thought. That goes against the stereotype.

Of course, and this is what I like about the text, it has some interesting ambivalences in its characterization of nations. France is cast as at once the bastion of a conservative, quasi-nationalist Sorbonne but also as the home of Paris-8, the radical institution from which much French Theory is said to have come. The United States, for its part, is painted as “producer of the best and the worst,” its trashy culture industry clashing with its intellectual openness. On the other hand, Noudelmann’s ambivalence about the U.S. is hardly identical to his ambivalence about France. One notes a certain asymmetry: France never appears here as a definite entity, but only as a cultural and institutional context designated by the adjective French. The United States is on the other hand made into an entity by being called by name. It’s as if France’s contradictions were spread out spatially and institutionally (the Sorbonne appearing, for instance, as the locus of conservatism), but the United States’s contradictions were condensed into one being.

The key conceit of the text, given the France-USA opposition, is to make Paris-8 into the key mediating figure between France and the United States. The U.S. appears here at moments as a massively magnified projection of Paris-8’s intellectual life. One wonders, of course, whether Noudelmann isn’t a bit overly optimistic about the life of French Theory in America. Many would argue that it became a radically apathetic, professional-intellectual commodity in its passage to the American humanities. I can certainly testify that the link between French radical thought and social movements, precarious even here, is dramatically more absent in the United States, so that there’s an effect of political deracination in reading, say, Foucault. And, of course, Paris-8 as a mediating institution is far from being without contradictions. A full analysis of this text would have to examine what it means that the text was displayed in an exposition on the history of Paris-8 that was derided by students as being an excuse for the past generation to relive their past radicalism in the glossy form of an exhibit. (I’ll have to come back to the exposition another time.)

In a way, this text is a commentary on the way that political space is nationally marked. At the start of the text, the (once socialist) East opposes the (emblematically capitalist) West, leaving France is somewhere in the middle. But by the end of the text, Europe is cast as a walled global center, encircled by its post-colonial others (Africa, India, the Caribbean) whose intellectual presence in France is thanks to their passage through the USA, where post-colonial studies has been more successful. In this later passage, the USA is cast as a point of intellectual mediation between Europe and the postcolony. I’m not sure what to make of this, to be honest, though it’s a good reminder that any understanding of French politics would seem to demand a fairly complex account of spatial metaphors.

There’s something to be said here about style, too, about the sly turns of phrase (not all of which I very adequately translated), about the sense of a continuous stream of thought created by the narrative’s twists and turns (is Paris-8 the most American of French universities? No! Unthinkable! And yet… And yet…). There’s something to be said about the paradox of a text that describes the globalization of ideas in a language that’s so full of local references as to be barely translatable (who abroad has ever heard of Saint-Denis, to say nothing of Liberty Street?). One sentence in the second paragraph was especially hard to translate: “l’Ouest nous a peut-être fait un enfant dans le dos.” Faire un enfant dans le dos can mean “take advantage of” but also has a more specific sense of getting pregnant against the wishes of one’s partner. Noudelmann explained to me that the idea is that the United States has given birth to French thought without France wanting it to, which is a rather striking sexualization of intellectual traffic, and one that reverses the usual “France is to the USA as feminine is to masculine” imagery.

There’s something curious about this text for an American reader too: doesn’t this tale of Paris-8 as the origin of French Theory run counter to the simplistic ways that French Theory is typically recontextualized in the United States? As far as I can recall from my undergraduate education, we weren’t taught to think of French post-structuralists as coming from a precise institutional location in France; rather, they were contextless ideas that seemed to come from “France” in the abstract, subliminally playing on the high-status connotations that French culture and language still enjoys in the American cultural imagination. There are in fact famous American academics who visit Paris-8, but I think most Americans of my acquaintance who read “theory” have never heard of it.

Well, my American readers, now you have.

Paris, February 22, 2010

Madame Minister,

I’ve decided to write to you to offer my personal testimony about the current conditions of doctoral students in France. It is exactly 10:30pm, and after a day of full-time work (to make ends meet), I’m starting the second part of my day, the part dedicated to my research work. In the fourth year of my dissertation, I should be putting real effort into writing up my thesis, but given the lack of time and resources, I’m just trying to keep these activities afloat. Some days, my will to continue emerges from my intrinsic interest in research; other days, I’m remotivated by the long years I’ve already spent on my work. And on other days still, I work double shifts because of the 552 euros I had to pay at the start of the academic year. In the end, on certain evenings like this, I find it hard to see the sense in this situation. I’ll sum things up: I had a good academic record, oriented towards professionalization (with publications, conference talks, fieldwork, teaching…), with encouraging results; but in spite of all this work, all this willpower spent, I don’t know how, materially speaking, I’m going to be able to finish my thesis.

I’m from the silent majority that doesn’t have a research grant, that juggles between paid work and self-financed studies. I’m from the silent majority that has no real status: as a student and a worker at once, I get neither the advantages of workers nor the advantages of students (discounts and such…). I’m from the silent majority whose future opportunities look like a dense fog. This last sentiment is particularly strong among my colleagues in human sciences, in spite of the fact that, when it comes time for a debate on national identity or some other media polemic, people go straight to the researchers in human sciences — to historians, sociologists, anthropologists — to take the pulse of our society. I am one of these future PhDs in human sciences, I’m eight years into university studies and, when I find I can’t trade a job as a receptionist for a better job in administration somewhere, I find myself worrying about finding the nth next short-term contract — the idea of a paid vacation not yet being part of doctoral students’ vocabulary. We hear talk about billions of euros that the government is about to release for higher education and research. Me, I’d just like to know how to pay my bills and defend my thesis. That said, I don’t mean to draw an intentionally miserable picture of my situation. I made the choice to get involved in research, and I made it with conviction. I believe in my abilities and competences as a young researcher, and in those of many of my colleagues; I believe in the quality of francophone research and of its scientific results. I’m only wondering about what’s becoming of it. What is happening, Madame Minister, when ultimately the only option that presents itself to new French PhDs is to look abroad if they hope to make a living in their fields?

I am not a renowned researcher or recognized specialist; I am only a doctoral student among many others; I am not up to date on the latest figures, statistics and predictions that your Ministry has available; I have nothing but a few figures I’ve discovered, my coping strategies, and a lack of visibility on the horizon. But I’ll keep going tomorrow, keep working on my research project somehow, not just so I can frame my diploma on the wall, nor even to open up new job opportunities. I’ll keep going tomorrow because I believe in my work. The one thing I deplore is simply that in France, the country of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, I find myself faced daily with the echo of Precarity. And in thanking you very sincerely for your attention, I hope you will accept, Madame Minister, this expression of my best regards.

Klara Boyer-Rossol
PhD Candidate in History, University of Paris-VII

I’m really not sure I’ve captured the prose style of the original, its peculiar mix of bluntly personal revelation with courteous formalities; and I worry that this blog is becoming more of a private translation laboratory than a useful resource. The more I translate, the more it feels like translation is a craft of its own demanding a long labor of apprenticeship. There’s no choice there, of course, but to keep doing it and see if things get better; though I do find that publishing, even here on this blog, is a good minimal guarantee of quality assurance. The thought of having a reader is a good motive for proofreading…

Analytically speaking, I’m struck by the strong rhetoric of French national-scientific virtues that comes out in the last paragraph. It’s as if, as the conclusion of the letter drew near, it suddenly wasn’t enough to base a moral critique of the institution on the fact that it produces precarious, anxious, inefficient actors; and it suddenly became necessary to make a further appeal to apparent contradictions in national ideology. In other words the argument here isn’t just precarity is unlivable but also that precarity is out of place in the revered French national image.

I guess I’m just much more cynical than this author, but I’m also struck here by the rhetoric of sincerity (a term which also rhymes with “precarity,” by the way). In particular, I’m interested in the moment where the author says: I assure you, I actually do believe deeply in my work. This reminds me a lot of the general conclusion drawn by the national report on precarity I wrote about a few weeks ago: there too the general contradiction was that many people believe that their precarious work is unlivable and yet they remain deeply committed to it. Maybe one of these days I should find out what philosophy folks of my acquaintance are talking about in their incessant references to La Boétie’s “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.”

Moderator: We have all been precarious at one time or another… perhaps not all but many of us. We have picked a few people who represent the different categories [of precarious work] we presented a moment ago, with all their complications. Our precarious colleagues aren’t here to cry over their lot… Do you want to introduce yourself?

“Aurélie Legrand, I’m 33 years old, I’m at the master’s level in my studies [bac+5], with a decade of professional experience in the private sector. It’s been a little more than a year that I’ve been a contract worker at the university, and so I’m part of what they call the precarious workers of higher education. So I work on a short-term contract (CDD) as a research engineer (ingénieur d’études) in a social science lab at the university. The post became available on May 1st, 2008. I came to apply for it in December 2008, and… I can tell you that it was a little bit hard for me to accept this post, even though it did represent a good opportunity for me at the time. It was hard to accept because they offered me a very short-term contract. So, I had an interview in December, and they offered me a short-term contract (CDD) from the beginning of January 2009 to May 1st 2009, so a 4-month contract, because the permanent occupant of the job who went to the private sector on May 1st of the year before could return to their job on May 1st the year after. So… I had to leave the region where I was coming from because [unclear], anyway for this 4-month contract.

“Finally I accepted this offer, and the permanent person [titulaire] didn’t take the job back on May 1st in 2009, so they had me sign a second short-term contract from May 1st to June 30th. A two-month contract. It had a gap of two months built in for the summer. So honestly the situation wasn’t really good at all. But finally, when they brought me in to sign this second short-term contract, they realized it was a category A job, so there wouldn’t be a break in the contract. So they extended the contract to August 31st 2009. And… what else was I going to tell you… so during that summer, sometime around mid-July, I got a letter from human resources indicating that I was summoned on September 1st, in the early morning, to sign a new contract, this time from September 1st until August 31st — so a year-long contract. So I was brought in to sign this new contract and things more or less worked out because that was the end of this deal with the two-month summer interruptions.

“That said, I was pretty much astonished by the way the human resources people had us sign the contracts. We were brought in collectively, all the contract workers summoned on September 1st. They had us in a room that might be about the same as this auditorium. There was no real group welcome, everyone waited in their own corner, and finally two people came in with the contracts. The group was divided in two, maybe from the letter A to the letter L on one side and the rest on the other, and everyone lined up to sign their contract. So you didn’t have the time to really read all the conditions in the contract; you signed, and if you had questions it was pretty hard to ask them, to have any personal discussion of your work contract. Voilà.

[Inaudible question.]
“Yes, I found out that I was pretty privileged after all, I realized that among the contract workers of my university, well, this contract starting September 1st was what I was expecting, a contract for the same job for the whole year. On the other hand, I heard other people around me who were summoned by mail, who were brought in on September 1st to sign a contract that was only ten months long. Eventually, when they got to the table, and they got to read their contracts, they found out that they were only getting hired for three months at one site and then for four months at some other university site, which they weren’t expecting at all. Others found out that they had an initial contract one month long and after that they weren’t getting any guarantees of further work. So I saw some people refuse to sign these contracts and leave. Voilà.”

I’ve tried not to clean up the very “oral” quality of this discussion. It’s full of redundancies and not always perfectly clear. That’s as it should be, it seems to me. I should admit that the translation is a bit loose; I don’t have much practice translating oral discourses.

What we have here is a personal story that reveals a structural situation whose dry bureaucratic parameters themselves become grounds for all kinds of emotional reactions. A robot programmed like a sociologist might make the mistake of believing that the length of someone’s work contract is a purely quantitative variable, a simple matter of longer or shorter; but we can see here that, in reality, quantitative differences get magnified into local dramas. Ask yourself: what’s the difference between a 10-month and a 12-month contract? Two months, the math types will say. But they’ll be wrong, wrong; the difference between 10 and 12 months of employment, for Aurélie Legrand, is the difference between having relatively steady year-round employment and facing a huge seasonal layoff.

And we can see too that, in the algebra of precarity, the variable of “contract length” is multiplied (metaphorically speaking) by another anxiety factor: the uncertainty of contract renewal. The problem with having a succession of four or two or one-month contracts isn’t just short duration as such; it’s also the accompanying anxiety of constant contractual renegotiation and uncertainty. After a few months of such circumstances, we can see here, even a meagre year contract — itself hardly a recipe for long-term stability — comes to seem a blessing.

And farther along towards the end of this discourse, we see a new theme emerge: the theme of precarity’s place in a differentiated field of suffering, of precarity’s place in a world where some people have it worse than others. Needless to say, a peculiar feature of the panel presentation “where the precarious themselves will speak” was that the participants were publicly interpellated as precarious workers, with all the implicit stigma that that entails. Early on we can see Legrand accepting her classification among the “precarious workers of higher education”; but what’s interesting is that, by the end of this discourse, she is claiming in effect that she doesn’t have it so bad, that she ended up pretty much with what she wanted, and that it’s the others who really have it bad, the others who are really getting shafted with their 1-month contract offers, the others who need to negotiate but can’t. The most critical, outraged part of this discourse is also the part that does the most to minimize the subjectivity of the speaker, as we see her turn from describing her own circumstances to critiquing the collective misery of human resources’ assembly-line method of contract signing. As if there were after all a certain desire to ascend to a somewhat detached critical standpoint, one that would critique precarity while attempting to avoid entirely identifying oneself as its victim. The discourse on precarity is not without its internal contradictions.

Part of the answer involves this poem I came across today, by Jean Herold Paul, a Haitian doctoral student in philosophy at Paris-8 (a department that turns out to have long-standing links with Port-au-Prince). I’ve translated it with his permission for you all.

The night that we are
(in memory of Jésula and Wilmichel)

bric-a-brac of apocalypses
bric-a-break of our utopias

and if…
and then…
but are we still?

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
a horrible night
where only our dead appear dimly
without name or register
without farewell or burial

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
what’s left of us?

bric-a-brac of apocalypses
bric-a-break of our utopias

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
it’s still night
at least our presence is reflected there
a simple sensation of being somewhere
without knowing who we are
where we are
without knowing with what or with who we are

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
when will we be able to mourn
for ourselves?

I’ve been listening to the results of your debates with great interest.

It’s remarkable that we’ve been able to bring students, young graduates, university actors and business representatives together for this debate on the “new resources for enterprise” that the human and social sciences represent.

The question that has been discussed here for the past three-plus hours is essential. It’s at the heart of my activities at the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

There was a time when, among employers, the universities had a bad reputation in relation to other establishments of higher learning. This time has passed. For almost three years now I’ve led efforts that aim to restore the universities to their full place in the country’s instructional programs.

Graduates in the human and social sciences deserve to be supported in their search for employment. To be sure, three years after the end of their studies, graduates with a license in classics, languages or history have unemployment rates around 7%, which is actually lower than those with the same degree in physics (8%) or chemistry (12%). But these encouraging statistics should not hide a worrisome reality: these fields also see a process of unacknowledged selection — by failure. This failure extends to as many as 50% of enrolled students, in both the first and in the second years [of the 3-year license].

For too long, we have let things be without reacting.

The fields of social and human sciences have welcomed many of the students coming from the second wave of massification of university enrollments, the one that began in the 80s. But the democratization of access to higher education has remained unfinished. We have too often neglected to support these new high school graduates. They have been driven by the system’s inertia [les pesanteurs] towards the social and human sciences, without really having chosen them.

It was in order to reverse these tendencies that the law of 2007 set disciplinary and professional placement [l’orientation et l’insertion professionnelle] at the heart of the university’s missions. The “License plan” has offered universities the means to bring students up to speed and to better prepare them to enter professional life.

It was not acceptable that many enrolled students never showed up to take their exams, nor that the university had such high exam failure rates. From this point forward, troubled students should be able to leave the university better armed for professional life. And, starting this year, universities should furnish their professional placement indicators.

In other words, students and students’ issues have been brought back to the heart of the university. Henceforth it will be possible to respond to their legitimate needs for disciplinary placement, for training [formation] and for preparation for professional life.

In this room we have actors with years of experience in professional placement. But until these last few years, their initiatives remained isolated and lacked sufficient overall coordination. That’s why, for the last three years, I’ve pushed to regroup our job placement efforts and to make them more coherent.

Little by little, the universities have reorganized their forces of professionalization within job placement offices (BAIP). And placement indicators are just the start of an immense effort to constitute a set of figures, which will make it possible to closely follow the impact of degree programs on students’ employability. At the same time, universities are learning how to emphasize the competences that go along with each of their programs. This is essential for letting employers know where to turn to diversify their hiring.

The coming years will involve reinforcing and diversifying the job prospects [débouchés possibles] for all students who pass through the human sciences and social sciences. Taken together, these fields represent 56% of students at the university — and this figure remains stable from the license to the doctorate. That means that the human sciences and social sciences have an immense need for placement.

In addition to teaching posts, the public sector in general offers the human sciences and social sciences a number of openings. On one hand, this is a good thing: the renovated State of the 21st century will have a need for “general culture,” for the spirit of synthesis, for the attention to the human factor that we get from the sciences of man and society. But an efficient State does not multiply its employees until they stretch out of sight. One must go where jobs are being created. It is the private sector where one can expect the diversification of openings and the multiplication of jobs for the graduates of the human sciences and social sciences.

That’s what gives today’s meeting its importance. I’m happy that it has taken place so soon after the Council for the Development of the Humanities and Social Sciences suggested it, in the report that it submitted to me last January 14th. The large crowd we see here today confirms that this Council, with its eminent and rich reflections on the future of the sciences of man and society, was right to make reflections on professional placement a priority.

This morning’s debates will have contributed to the emergence of a new state of mind; they will have let people working on the same thing nation-wide meet each other; finally, they will lead to concrete progress on these issues.

I know that a certain number of you, among the university placement officials, are going to meet this afternoon, after this meeting, to get to know each other better, to discuss your experiences and to reflect, concretely, on how to improve placement efforts. Your experiences are diverse, often rooted in the regional reality of an employment pool. However, students’ expectations, universities’ ideas, and recruiters’ worries are often very similar across regions. You have much to gain by networking on the supraregional and even national scale.

On the recruiters’ side too, a holistic vision needs to be put together. Operation Phoenix has played a pioneering role in organizing high-quality recruitment at the master’s level in SHS [social and human sciences]. The graduates involved are being hired with permanent contracts (CDI) and are getting instruction that should rapidly adjust them to the realities of business. This involves a demanding procedure that makes some enterprises recoil: some feel that they don’t yet have the means to correctly evaluate the value of an SHS degree; others feel that they don’t have the size necessary to support the necessary financial engagement. Nonetheless, Operation Phoenix has the great significance of having constituted a reference: it sets the standard for best practices in professional placement in the human and social sciences.

Of course, faced with the realities of economic life, faced with the diversity of situations that businesses confront, it would be absurd to want to impose a standardized procedure. The Elsa procedure, which has also been in place for a few years now, has done very important follow-up work to better adapt student profiles and business demand. Other initiatives have been taken elsewhere, to adapt to particular regional contexts or sectors of activity. The variety of these formulas deserves to be encouraged, provided that one respects quality requirements and that SHS graduates are not treated as second-rate.

Over the term of its work on graduates’ employability, the Council for the Development of the Humanities and Social Sciences has recommended, among other things, the creation of a “good SHS placement label” that would be given to businesses that perform well in this domain and that follow a chart of best practices. The use of such a label would have the advantage of taking into account the diversity of experiences while still fixing quality requirements at the national level and in giving the means to “pass to higher speed,” to borrow the title of the second roundtable.

The considerable work done in Operation Phoenix or in the Elsa process has produced results that are qualitatively appreciable but that remain quantitatively limited. I would thus like to encourage the actors in these operations, and all those who work on similar initiatives, to imagine how such a label might be put in place. It would of course be necessary to consult the universities, especially via the Conference of University Presidents, in specifying the details [modalities]of such a labeling process. Everyone will get something out of this operation: students, universities, and enterprises alike.

There is no question here of confounding roles. The Ministry’s role is to guarantee the quality of educational programs and to officially recognize them. Its role is also to encourage the universities to rapidly constitute reliable placement indicators. Today, I think, the objective is not to multiply professional programs, but to make sure that programs in human and social sciences are recognized alongside the professional degrees. And the labeling we’ve discussed concerns recruiters too. I imagine that the promoters of Phoenix, of Elsa and of other similar operations will put in place a “labeling committee” constituted by independent actors, one whose first task will be to elaborate the guidelines for “best practices in SHS placement.” At this moment, it will be possible for the Ministry of Higher Education and Research to be represented on this committee.

A few quick translation notes… (a.) the license is the introductory French university degree, approximately like a bachelor’s but three years long and generally more specialized. (b.) I’ve had a lot of trouble translating formation, which is something like education but has the connotation of “forming” a person in a specific field. Often formation designates a sort of specialized education, more or less professionally oriented. (c.) “Placement” or is my translation of insertion, a word which means getting “inserted” into some professional workplace. I’m not sure it quite captures the same connotations, but it will have to do for now.

Also, as usual in this translation game, the text refers to other entities that I’m not well acquainted with. I’ve never heard of Elsa, but I did look up Operation Phoenix and it’s apparently a project that gets MA graduates (of some nine Parisian universities) hired at several major corporations: Axa, Coca-Cola Entreprise, Danone, HSBC, Marine Nationale, L’Oréal, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Renault, Société Générale. It’s paradoxical, to say the least, that there would be so much emphasis on finding jobs for French graduates at the same time that precarious labor within the university system is so low on the ministry’s priority list.

I’m interested by a number of other features of this speech, from the bureaucratic and organizational futures it envisions to its absolutely unquestioned emphasis on job placement (which infuriates so many of the faculty critics here), from its vision of a shrinking French State to the emphasis on “quality” and “best practices” combined with clear job outcomes. But above all I’m struck by the fact that, in this vision of things, the integration of public higher education into the business world is total. Total.

Madame Minister,

For the past two years, we—teachers, researchers, staff and students—have declared our total disagreement with the LRU university law, with the teachers’ education reform, and more generally with the spirit guiding the majority of measures and initiatives that come out of your ministry.

In spite of the longest strike the university world has ever known, you have refused all negotiations on the universities’ status, concerning yourself solely with your career as a politician.

In spite of last year’s general refusal to fill out the auditing forms that inaugurated the teachers’ education reform, this year your government is set to continue every measure that brought us out in the streets last year. You are even adding dangerous, aberrant rules about internships.

Madame Minister, our profession does not easily accommodate resignation.

Research, creativity and the transmission of knowledge all imply a freedom quite at odds with the reforms, these reforms that are turning us into petty administrators of social selection. For us to accept these reforms in silence would amount to renouncing our own idea of what a university should be, a university bolstered by a centuries-long tradition of research, a university engaged in creating a future that cannot be dictated by short-term economic needs.

Madame Minister, the university will not understand itself, it will not manage itself, and it will not evaluate itself in terms of productivity and profitability, for it is based on the inherent risk of research. This risk is at the base of the formative gesture that brings students and professors together, and it falls to universities in the public service to keep this risk alive. Yes, the university needs reform—indeed, we know this better than you do, we teachers, researchers, staff and students who ARE the university in all its contradictions, and who are devoted to preserving and restoring a democratic future for the institution.

Madame Minister, on every one of our campuses, we are working to invalidate each one of the measures you hoped to use in your project.

Madame Minister, beyond these points of resistance and days of protest that will mark our defense of public education from nursery school to the university, we believe it is indispensable to show the public that we resist your policy of dismantling the university, to re-establish the truth against your lies, and to remind the world that the university is a common good that should not be open to corruption by politics. This then is the reason why, having already held vigil for a thousand hours last spring in front of the town hall, we are now going to revive this Infinite Round of the Stubborn. You can find us every Monday starting at 6pm, from here until the day when real negotiations over the universities’ status are opened.

Our stubbornness is total because, in wanting to transform our universities into corporations, you have gone past the limit of what is tolerable.

Our stubbornness is total because we are in no respect inclined to renounce the freedom without which there would be neither research nor creativity.

Our stubbornness is total because, whatever the difficulties of battling your policies, we know that the university community is massively hostile to them.

Our stubbornness is total because of the high stakes we defend, stakes which go far beyond any simple categorical reading of this conflict.

[Second Page:]

Why we are stubborn:

-To remind everyone that the university is a common good, one not open to corruption by a political ideology.

-Because we refuse a third-rate teacher’s education brought about by the disappearance of practical training.

-Because we refuse a university conceived as a business, thrown open to competition between campuses, between employees, between students.

-To defend everyone’s access to quality education—freely chosen, secular, and free of tuition.

-To defend independent research.

-Because we refuse the coming rises in tuition fees and loans that logically follow from the reforms.

-Because we refuse the social selection that will become part of the university admissions process, as budgets come to be calculated in proportion to graduation rates.

-To show the public our resistance, in the face of the dismantling of the whole system of public services.

AGAINST THE LRU

The Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn
meets every monday starting at 6pm
in front of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, 1 Rue Descartes

http://rondeinfinie.canalblog.com
[email protected]

Just a few really quick points here, since I don’t have time for a real analysis (wait for my thesis, I guess).

1. You can see a number of characteristic points of French university political vocabulary, a vocabulary substantially different from that known in the United States. The whole system of public service looms large, as one might expect from a university world that has long conceived of itself as a unified, public, national system; “public service” serves here not only as an organizational and legal status but as an object of attachment. Some of the dangers to this public service are also unfamiliar to American readers, like for instance social selection (séléction sociale), a term which echoes Darwin’s “natural selection” and is supposed to designate the process of selective university admissions according to criteria which, according to critics, can only wind up disadvantaging the disadvantaged. The very term “social selection,” as far as I can tell, embodies a claim that all selective admission is necessarily prejudicial to some social groups over others. A lot of the policy measures mentioned are, of course, also locally specific. For instance, the “teacher’s education reform” I mentioned is actually called masterisation, an unwieldy term that designates a controversial initiative to integrate the national teacher’s exams into master’s degree programs. And the infamous “LRU Law” of 2007, put into place soon after Sarkozy came into office, deserves an exposition of its own which I can’t manage here.

2. There’s a huge rhetorical emphasis on “We” and the collective body of the universities. On reflection, this fits with the fundamental premise of the Ronde Infinie, which is that no matter how many people do or don’t show up, the people marching are there to represent the university world as a whole. In other words, the Ronde participants (as far as I can tell) see themselves as working on behalf of thousands of their colleagues and hence distinctly not as some kind of sectarian group. Several people at the Ronde say that it makes a difference that their colleagues elsewhere know that the Ronde is continuing.

3. Stubbornness as a political affect. In practice, I have to say, this stubbornness is not as total as it appears rhetorically; in my fieldsite at Paris-8, people are talking about how to adapt to the government’s new regulatory regime, and are far from being in a state of pure anti-pragmatic obstinacy. But it takes stubbornness, all the same, to keep coming out week after week to the Ronde and to stay attached to a political movement. And two things strike me about this stubbornness. First, it isn’t a pure, mute feeling; it actually has a ton of cognitive content and instrumental purpose (enumerated in that list of reasons “why we are stubborn”). Second, it is something other than a more pragmatic political hope that believes it might realize its objectives; to be stubborn is to believe that whether the objectives are realizable or not, it would be even worse to give up. Stubbornness here implies a complicated political temporality, something like our desired future is blocked and inaccessible, but we nonetheless plan to blockade the Minister’s future, as if all futures could be put on hold until a less unacceptable one surfaces…