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Latest update: 28/04/2009
- education - France - university
Universities protest in defence of ‘public service’
French students and lecturers have joined medical workers to protest at government reforms they claim undermine freedoms essential to keeping education a public service and not a business. It is their eleventh such protest in three months.
 Amara Makhoul |
A demonstration in Paris |
Their complaint is that a bill ("loi LRU") proposed by the Ministry of Higher Education regarding the freedoms and responsibilities of universities aims to grant individual institutions greater financial autonomy.
The law also affects the role of researchers who lecture, whose hours of work would be “modulated”, giving them less freedom in their pursuit of meaningful research, the protesters say.
Worried by the consequences
One lecturer, who gave her name as Dominique, said she was worried by the consequences of the proposed reforms.
“Access to higher education will become less egalitarian,” she said. “We will see more selection according to how much students can afford to pay.”
Yann Philippe, who lectures in American Civilisation at the University of Reims, said the future of study itself was in peril.
“Universities are in danger,” he said. “The future of the smaller institutions is in question as is the future from students from poorer backgrounds who will find getting access to the big universities increasingly difficult.”
Despite months of protests and little in the way of the government backing down on its proposed reforms, the protesters remain determined to keep up the struggle.
“It is the deafness of the politicians that fuels our determination to keep up our protests,” Yann Philippe added.
Organisers estimated 12,000 students and lecturers had joined the demonstration. The police put the figure at 1,600.
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(2) Reactions
First strike for over thirty years
In the French press, many have argued that the university movement is due to dangerous marxist lecturers. I wish it was! I am a lecturer, and I only see another Marxist on the 31st of June every year! In fact, the lecturers have not been on strike since some time in the 1970s! But this time, the governments determination to give over control of research to highly paid local managers (whereas for the moment it is guided by a national, elected commission has been too much for lecturers. The government is also wanting to transform teacher training in order to make teachers much cheaper for the state. Finally, fears that France will follow other countries like England and charge students 3 000 euros or 6 000 euros a year for going to university (at the moment in France it is around 250 euros) have encouraged revolt.
students and lecturers
Doubt in our class structured and uneducated country ie england ,the students are intelligent enough to join with the masses.The lecturers ,they part of the establishment ,unity is alien in an uneducated and class structured country living in the 16and 17th century philosophy.