… going cosmic?
During months of campus protests here, the only serious violence erupted one evening when student activists got in a fight over which movie to show during the all-night occupation of a large classroom.
Police rushed in after one side started shattering windows, student strikers recalled, but the officers were quickly ordered to back off, and the strike went on. And on. For more than three months, Paul-Valery University, the University of Montpellier’s liberal arts campus, was paralyzed by an ill-defined movement set off by changes that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government tried to impose on France’s long-ailing public university system.
“Block everything,” a slogan spray-painted on a classroom wall, became the university fight song. Student protesters, allied with some professors, prevented anyone from entering offices or classrooms, caused classes to be canceled and grades to be withheld, and threatened to stop final exams.
Paul-Valery, with its leafy campus in a suburb of this southern French city, was one of more than 20 universities — a quarter of the country’s university network — that ground to a halt when the “blockages” began in February, affecting more than 350,000 French students.
… [B]efore long, in the course of endless student assemblies, the strikers slipped toward broader political goas… Non-students and other activists joined, steering student anger toward Sarkozy’s business-friendly government, the world financial crisis, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and, one student said, even a debate over the qualifications of Vladimir Putin to be Russia’s leader.
“You start with a clear goal,” [one student] said, sucking on a cigarette during a break from researching her thesis. “But you end up talking about the war in Israel, swine flu and all the rest. And pretty soon, outsiders come and things harden.”
Worried about impending exams and no longer entirely sure what the protests were about, students voted in recent days to lift the strike at several universities, including here…
May 8th, 2009 at 1:54AM
> " the only serious violence erupted one evening when student activists got in a fight over which movie to show during the all-night occupation…"
Having just read a moving account of the hundreds of tiny private elementary and high schools that have sprung up in the slums of India, where illiterate parents pay $10/month so their children can get a good education, I’d have to say my sympathy for the undergraduates of France is limited.
(Indian story in pdf or in converted HTML.)
May 8th, 2009 at 7:14AM
Aux barricades, ma little cherie!
After all, we attend Paul Valery.
We must fight for the cause
(Let me suck my gauloise)
I demand to see "Aliens 3."