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?

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.

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.

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.

This fellow was from UNEF. As I asked to take his picture, an older man he was talking to edged back out of the frame, and the activist drew himself up in a sort of pose.

The local leader of the Mouvement Étudiant. I think he was sort of like the boss of the other Mét militants; one of them later stopped talking to me because, he said, he was afraid the boss would be annoyed he wasn’t giving out fliers. I’m struck by the definite posed look here too. I guess you can’t just ask to take people’s photos and then expect them to not pose.

This person sitting at the left-wing Fédération Syndicale Étudiant table was actually from the CGT (a larger labor union). He wanted to know what the labor situation was like in the US. Looks a little more relaxed than the others, perhaps in part because he’s sitting down.

A militant from the Confédération Étudiante.

A trashcan by the student election tables labeled “trashcan for tracts” where you could throw your political fliers once you’d voted. I guess we should applaud their dedication to recycling, but it somehow seemed funny that ten yards from where they gave out the tracts, there was a place for you to throw them away. These tracts have a very short lifecycle and duration of meaningfulness, it would appear.

I have to remind myself at times that an anthropologist’s careful scrutiny of a local artifact like a tract is totally alien to the inattentive, half-bored way that most students seemed to regard them. Very few tracts are actually read, people say here. Some people throw them out immediately, without even looking, as if the only reason they accept them to begin with is to humor the people distributing them. Others refuse them outright — which seems far more honest.

Actors in masks, some with stockings over their heads, made a pretend argument for burning the university. For the foreigners in the audience, a disjointed translation of their performance was projected on a screen like so:

We want Godard, Proust, the Princess of Cleves, not commercial trash culture

Let us burn the university! No! The University is not for profit! It is there to create more freedom, more riches (that are not material), “Latin is useless and that’s why it’s beautiful!” against the death of “dead languages”, let us burn the university! In the name of all erasmus students, I would like to say I had no time to write a speech, because I work to pay my way and so we say “let us burn the university”!

[They shouted their discourse from the stage.]

Experiment time! First we will build a fire, the first spark. Take your sheet of paper, fold it over, then again, and cut it, and lick it and keep your strip of paper (etc),

[The actors circled back into the aisles of the large lecture hall with sheets of paper, with which they mimed an effort to create fire.]

It doesn’t work!!!!!

[—they said as they pretended to discover that rubbing two pieces of paper together doesn’t make a spark.]

It would be crazy; it would be like killing oneself; like putting one’s head in the freezer, like throwing oneself under a car, like…

[As if they were delighted to discover that they didn’t need to burn the university after all… but the translation trailed off and the actors came through the aisles hugging the audience. Even including the ethnographer, yours truly.]

The more serious debate went on with a panel discussion.

However, among the panelists was the university president. And every time he opened his mouth to speak, people in the audience booed and hissed. He waited for them to finish; the moderator made failed pleas for civility; he spoke some more; his face became agitated.

In essence, his speech was a failure, blocked by the crowd. “By anarchists,” someone claimed later. He didn’t stay to the end of the debate, leaving by the side door soon after his (interrupted) speech had come to an end.

One of the other people talking was a representative of a squatter campaign. He explained to us that squatting had the advantages of being exciting and rent-free, but that, of course, there were “strong chances of legal trouble”… at any rate, I was interested in his negative comments on traditional protest forms. “Internships mean that corporations use young graduates for months and then dump them instead of hiring them. This will be your future if you don’t resist. New forms of protest must be invented against the Thatcher-like governments that resist “traditional” protests by waiting them out.”

And this has indeed been one of the common remarks about last spring’s university protests: that traditional protest forms (i.e., street marches) seem ineffective against a government that can simply ignore them.

Now looking back up into the auditorium, we can see one of the protestors standing up. He was shouting about the undemocratic format of the event and about how the voice of the audience had been excluded. The original format dictated that panelists spoke first, followed by “invited” audience comments, and finally general comments. That fell apart when the “general” audience wanted to speak sooner: after the speech you see pictured here, the event never returned to the sedate form of a well-groomed public event. Rather it hissed permanently with the noise of loud conversations among the audience, it hissed with interruption, it hissed with anger and incoherence.

Incidentally, it doesn’t look like such a large crowd in this photo, but there may have been a couple of hundred people there all told.

A number of foreign activists were present. At the end, an Austrian fellow took the stage to give a sweeping critique of the chaos of the event and to express a general sense of disappointment. He was speaking English, so the translation was into French. I’ll translate back:

We cannot simply talk about politics, we must act! It is a matter of respect not to insult others during the debate; we’ve gotten results at the end of six weeks of occupation of our university. The presidents of the university and of the region were obliged to negotiate with us. I’ve been surprised to see that this debate has been so philosophically oriented… and not adequately pragmatic. We’ve come a very long distance to bring you ideas and not to talk about philo[sophy]! Let’s move on!

Since I’m interested in the relationship between philosophy and politics, this last remark interests me. It seems to say: philosophical discussions are antipolitics. Philosophy discussions are a withdrawal from action. Philosophy is mere metadiscourse.

A minute later, someone, perhaps the protestors in the audience, set off firecrackers in the auditorium. Naturally, everyone jumped up out of their seats. (Including me.) We waited anxiously to see what would happen; another little explosion went off, even louder than the first. The crowd became muddled and people started to walk out. The security personnel showed up on the stage and waited outside in force. Someone made a half-hearted proposal to “occupy” the Sorbonne but I don’t think it got anywhere. At any rate, I got out of there and went home, not even stopping like a good ethnographer to survey other participants on their reactions.

1. State disengagement. The law mandates that universities manage their own budgets (a major innovation in the French context); it increases the power of the university president and diminishes the power of currently-existing administrative councils. Students fear that this is just an excuse for the state to abandon universities to their own devices, decreasing state funding for higher education.
2. More social selection. The law mandates “l’orientation active,” which is defined as “aider le lycéen à faire un choix d’orientation éclairé,” i.e. helping the lyceén to make an enlightened choice of their program of study. Students view this as a process of “sélection,” which corresponds loosely to what in American universities is called “selectivity,” that is, the screening process by which some students are chosen over others. And they view this as a disavowed means of reproducing social inequality. (See also a longer analysis of social selection at café pédagogique.)
3. Increased registration fees. Official statements to the contrary, students say it’s obvious that in the absence of state funding, universities will look to their students for financial resources.
4. Closing of fields of study. The law says nothing about this, but the worry is that universities will be inclined to get rid of un-profitable fields. Interestingly, it seems to be students in human sciences and languages who are the most worried about the law in general. Also, Libération comments that:
   

   Derrière cette crainte, il y a aussi le refus de la professionnalisation des filières, des licences pros trop liées aux besoins du marché, et la volonté de défendre une université lieu de transmission du savoir.

   Behind this fear, there’s also a refusal of the professionalization of academic fields, of professional degrees too closely linked to the needs of the market, and the will to defend a university as a place of knowledge transmission.

   The whole problem of the university’s general societal role comes up here, and of its dependence on, or partial autonomy from, its economic circumstances. Even in the U.S., there are periodic conflicts over whether college education should be directly vocationally oriented. It’s remarkable that French students, not just professors (whose self-interest is obvious in this context), would defend the right to an economically irrelevant field like philosophy.

5. The two-speed university. According to the law, each campus will be treated equally. Students suspect, however, that there will be increasing differentiation between major Parisian research universities and small provincial teaching campuses.

Last month, some visiting French anthropologists suggested that I look into the workings of the Pécresse law as it takes effect. Along these lines, I’m tempted to think of this Libération article as a set of five empirical hypotheses whose truth will emerge over the coming years.

Greenberg starts with a general history of Serbian universities, saying that they were “decentralized,” with each faculty an autonomous legal entity. (Universities in Serbia date from this century, several having been started in the 1960s and 70s.) Apparently they were an instrument by which the state could consolidate its power — although the threat of subversion from within the universities remained a real concern to state power, and the university thus became “a highly politicized site of critique and protest.” Greenberg adds that “student protest was often exacerbated because expectations created by ideals of higher education were constantly foiled by social and material practices within the everyday workings of the university” (7). (Of course, this is true in America as well, and in France – although I wonder whether it also works in reverse. Is it possible that our social practices are constantly being foiled and disrupted by our dysfunctional educational ideals?)

Serbia is an interesting case of student activism, anyway, since it seems that students had a major role in the defeat of Milosevic in 2000. But after this victory, the student movement lost its unity, refocusing itself on reform of universities. In the context of traditional pedagogy and limited institutional resources, “many student leaders saw the forms of standardization, credit systems, quality assurance and transparency of testing and educational requirements as the solution” (14). Moreover, it was evidently viewed as “a way to make Serbia more properly European” (15). Indeed, Greenberg’s work centers on how Serbian students work through the difficulties of citizenship and democratic organization in their universities. Unfortunately, from the introduction, I get the impression that she doesn’t investigate the university as such, as an institution, as a complex social structure – it seems to be very much cultural anthropology. But for the time being, I just want to emphasize this fascinating case of a neoliberal, regional reform – the Bologna process – being reused and reappropriated in local politics.