Student Protest in the French Way
Bernstein, Paul
THE JLT11,,RXJTIVA January, 1971 One of the latest additions to liberal dogma is the explanation of student unrest that pins the blame on Mr. Nixon and his Washington cohorts. According to this...
...These are not martyrs suffering under the yoke of a government that will not listen to them...
...and that if the French experience is in any way typical, student unrest will be with us for some time, whatever the national administration, the universities, or anyone else tries to do about it...
...In one sense, French students are simply a more radical breed...
...Their conclusions are now wellknown...
...Maoists, Guevarists, anarchists, and nihilists abound...
...The number of radicals has grown rather than decreased, and rioting and vandalism are still frequent...
...The problem of overcrowding and the strain on the university facilities of Paris could not be solved as quickly...
...The French government was quick to see that educational reform could defuse the students' protests and be a considerable good in itself...
...Despite their profound influence, the demonstrators of May 1968 did not immediately realize what they had started, and were eventually manipulated by the traditional French Communist Party...
...The talk of overthrowing the "bourgeois capitalist system" continues, although a more specific grievance has still not emerged...
...Unfortunately, the significance of all this has been lost on the students...
...The French student movement presents something of a puzzle, if we apply the reasoning that where there are student uprisings there is at least one significantly unpopular government policy...
...even the moderates are Trotskyites...
...I am reminded of a comment that a Maoist acquaintance of mine made after the first day of a sit-in at the University of Chicago...
...Fully aware of this past, they do not doubt that they are capable of bringing the government to its knees...
...There is certainly no room for Jerry Rubins or Timothy Learys in this movement...
...They also have, a better knowledge of revolutionary literature than American activists, and as a result their ideological commitments are less vague...
...Even in this more serious ambiance, Student Protest in the French Way By Paul Bernstein however, there are more debates and discussions than actual programs for action, and most of the uprisings have been spontaneous...
...We would do better to remember that the phenomenon is not uniquely American...
...In the aftermath then, analysts conceded that the disturbance had not been planned and began searching for a root cause...
...It was found that despite all the anger expressed against the "bourgeois capitalist system," the real source of frustration was the universities themselves...
...he fumed...
...the biggest national problem issues from old-fashioned economy And yet French universities--devoid of fraternities, football, or beer parties--are more genuine hotbeds of radicalism than even their American counterparts How can we account for this...
...He was horrified when he discovered that many of the so-called demonstrators had really joined in the occupation as an experiment in communal living...
...Political activity on campus was authorized for the first time, a rigid year-end examination system was streamlined...
...According to this theory, many if not all of the troubles that beset our campuses would disappear, if only the national administration would alter those of its policies that are most unpopular among students (Just coincidentally, these policies are also unpopular with the proponents of the theory 4 Before we accept this reasoning and conclude that unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam is necessary in order to prevent further disturbances on campus (this is a dubious criterion for making policy in any case), perhaps we should ask whether the causes of student protest are as simple as this theory makes it appear One way of putting the theory to the test is to consider student protest in another country, France...
...The unemployment crisis has been aggravated by the fact that the huge majority of students are majoring in liberal-arts disciplines, although the country cannot use them and desperately needs more scientists...
...There actually are kids in the building who believe in American democracy...
...Not so in France Here radicals inherit a romantic legacy that includes the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the Commune of 1871, and of course the near-revolution of 1968...
...And should they graduate, their future was by no means secure, due to a high national rate of unemployment...
...But it at least goes deeper than the kind of theory mentioned earlier...
...In light of the available evidence, it seems foolish to wring our hands over student unrest wondering where we have gone wrong, and to prescribe as remedies a cooling of the rhetoric or an exercise of "moral leadership" by the President...
...Rather they are adolescents unwilling to accept the realities of mass education, searching for a "meaning" to their studies and to their future that can never exist, unable to see the intrinsic value of intellectual pursuit--and prepared, of course, to attack any obvious symbol of authority...
...Due to the post-war baby boom and an even-greater percentage of secondary school graduates enrolling, universities were hopelessly overcrowded The construction of new campuses had not compensated for an increase in the number of students from 170,000 in 1958 to 600,000 in 1968 Laboratory and classroom space was critically insufficient, and the studentfaculty ratio never lower than 50 to 1 Nowhere was the overcrowding more serious than in Paris, which had attracted most of the best professors and researchers in the country, and about one third of its students There were other features of university life capable of producing widespread disenchantment among students Many who had been accepted under the easy admissions policy (in France, any student who passes the baccalaureate examination at the end of secondary school is entitled to enter into a university) found the work to be more than they could handle...
...student-faculty committees were given an influence in the administration of individual universities...
...The inescapable conclusion is that the students are not hostile towards the structure of the university so much as towards its role, which they see as that of a factory developing parts for the nation's economy In this contest, changes in the university's size or in its decision-making process are irrelevant: the source of disgruntlement seems to be a basic uncertainty on the part of the students as to why they are at a university, and what they will do when they get out Meanwhile the government, after facing disturbances last June that were reminiscent of May 1968, has no doubt resigned itself to the fact that no amount of university reform will de-radicalize the students There is then, I think, a fundamental similarity between the student protestors of France and America...
...Finally, students had no influence of any kind in the running of the university, with all important decisions being made by the Ministry of Education in Paris...
...Indeed, here there are no issues such as Vietnam, racism, or even environment...
...Despite reports that we are alienating our youth to the point of no return, the average American student protestor is no revolutionary, as any SDSer can tell you...
...Under the supervision of Edgar Faure, Minister of Education and former Premier, important changes were instituted...
...0...
...An oversimplified generalization9 Inevitably it is...
...but the government did accelerate the expansion of provincial universities and the creation of new professorships...
...Yet at several universities, students have opposed the creation of a job-placement office, saying that it would pervert their education by shuffling them into work like cattle...
Vol. 4 • January 1971 • No. 3
