Why French Universities are on Strike

Before the usual article appears about French workers going off the deep end again, launching themselves into a ruinous strike, I wanted to get my two bits in. I have lived in France and worked at a French university for about seventeen years and seen many strikes and supported some, but this time we professors voted clearly. We are putting our names on a list, exposing ourselves, to permit the government to dock our pay if it has the nerve to do so.
Everyone knows Eugene Delacroix’s painting of 1830, “Liberty Leading the People.” Excited and disheveled men, women and boys, their vulnerability made plain by naked and slain comrades at their feet, follow a bare breasted woman or allegory against the forces of arbitrary rule. That’s how we feel. Come Thursday, January 29, however, when the strike will be “general,” the traffic will be hopelessly blocked in much of Paris. There will be people stranded on railway platforms. There will be small businesses losing needed custom, and in the January cold, that bare breasted woman won’t be visible. I will be responsible for a bit of that, so I want to do some explaining.

First, the paralyzing strikes are an essential part of the democratic process here. That is worth repeating because for international travelers and business people (a big slice of Americans interested in France), all the human interest is on the side of those inconvenienced by the strike, while the strikers seem part of some futile unreadable ritual. They strike. The country suffers. How has the strike moved things forward? With me on strike, my students will lose a couple of weeks of class. Will that change the government’s course? But this is how we communicate with the government. We send petitions; we supply our representatives in the Assemblée Nationale with questions to put to ministers; we send messages to the press; but the reforms keep coming at us as decrees from the highest level of the government, with no consultation down here where we live. Yes, decrees, that’s what they are called, like the ruling that “went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.” Can anyone imagine what would have happened if, say, the former Secretary of Education, William Bennett had made up some rule for all the universities of the United States and those universities depended exclusively on him for their budgets and their buildings? Well that’s what “reform” is like here. Of course we are on strike.

But hold on, a well informed reader will say, the last reforms were to make French universities autonomous, to allow them, or their presidents, to make their own decisions and control their own budgets, even to manage the real estate that the university would own. That was several reforms previous to the one we are striking about, but it certainly shook things up and can be considered to be the foundation baggage upon which the present load of reform has been added. All together, the reforms have produced an astonishing unity of resistance, from physicists to literary theorists and across the political spectrum as well.

In this French context “autonomy” looks like the choices one gives to a recalcitrant child at meals: “if you don’t like the spinach, then take a fork full of Brussels Sprouts or leave the table.” Presidents of universities will no longer act under the control of the National University Committee (CNU), a body that undertook peer qualification of the value of research and made decisions about promotions. Instead presidents will make decisions to match employees to income. That income will still come from the minister of education and its size will be determined by the “excellence” of the faculty, and that will be determined by a system of quantitative evaluation based on how prestigious and how numerous their publications are. The budget will shrink for the foreseeable future because it is the intention of the government to reduce the public payroll by half, through attrition. All this was in previous reforms and the professors grumbled, but thought they could manage. Maybe they could publish enough to keep those budgets coming; maybe they looked around during faculty meetings and picked out the dead wood that could be sacrificed for the good of all. They all have colleagues in the US who have survived the mania of publish or perish.

But then the government of Nicholas Sarkozy—he was to bring change and innovation into things French—followed French tradition with one reform too many sent down from on high. Education is by far the largest budget here. If the president of France wants to find money to save banks, beef up his foreign policy, give dinner to the hordes that stream through his palace night after night, education is a target. The latest reform hurries the streamlining of attrition by separating research from teaching. Some faculty will about double their teaching while the researchers will halve theirs. It is not certain how to decide who does what, but the quantitative analysis of productivity will be an essential tool.

Here the professors did their arithmetic. The numbers on the payrolls are to be reduced by about half. For demographic reasons, the number of students has gone down some, but not by half, and the largest cohort ever is coming up. Thus doubling the teaching load of a large proportion of professors and designating a tiny number as researchers with a light teaching load is an inevitable part of the reduction of numbers.

The numbers show that no one can think he or she is safe from that doubled teaching burden. And once a professor undertakes to teach the expanded hours, he or she will never publish at a level that can regain the status of researcher. In France we are allowed two six months sabbaticals in a career. Here there are few possibilities of grants and aid that support American professors while completing work on leave. University students will no longer share the ever changing intellectual landscape of research with their professors, but will struggle with a faculty trying most efficiently to reproduce the minimum requirement for this or that diploma.

This Thursday in France, while stuck in traffic or suffering delays, think of the freedom you and your professors had at your university to explore whatever was new or drew your attention, and if you didn’t go to such a university, dream with us of what a remarkable place it might be.