L'Assemblée Générale

So I thought I'd follow up a little bit, because today I spent 4 hours in the 'Assemblee Generale' of my fac (university, but who wants to write it out every time?) to figure out what exactly people are against and what exactly they're trying to do to get Sarkozy to break. Of course in heated debates, I can't understand all the French, but this is what I found out.

The Assemblee Generale is pretty neat, it really does consist of an enormous group of people being fairly democratic about every single thing. At the beginning, they explain what they'll be talking about and why for the rest of the meeting. Then they had a debate about the law, each person got to speak for 3 minutes (called interventions) where technically no one's supposed to interrupt but people do anyway. Then they had some 'perspectives,' some ideas they had about other things to move to next (like another Assemblee Generale and the Assemblee Nationale and stuff like that), and they had proposals, again a bunch of people speaking for 3 minutes each. At the end, we voted for 14 proposals as well as whether or not to recognize the strike and whether or not to block the school.

Basically the law is how I explained last time, and most people are in agreement the things need to be changed in facs because of the huge numbers of students going to them and the fact that government funds are changing around. The problem is that there will be some pre-inscription requirements, I think, and less public funding, so there will be a lot less students each year (ok, I admit I am not entirely clear on this point, but I'm working on it). However, about the companies financing schools, basically they're trying to create facs with special niches that will only send students with special degrees to those firms - problematic because those degrees have no value outside of some big organisation that's financing the school. Most people support the 'abrogation' of this law, which means that people are recognizing there needs to be a change but are refusing this law (la loi Pecresse) entirely, they think it should be thrown out and something new started. Some people think, though, that some parts of the law should be kept and other parts negociated, because if everyone agrees there needs to be a change, then why start over entirely?

Either way, I have resolved that I'm against this proposed law. My problem is still with the reaction of the blockage of facs. I still can't understand how this is an affective way to show Sarkozy that they disagree with his law. "OK Sarko, we don't like your laws, so we're not going to go to school - nor are we going to let people who want to go to school go - until you let up." If they're talking about equal education and autonomy for students, then they are being completely paradoxical. They are only hurting themselves and other students by shutting down schools. There are much better ways to mobilize as students and show solidarity for one another. They are also discussing blocking train stations; this is the goal for tomorrow - but the railway unions have already expressed their disapproval of this idea. If students want to show support for the rest of the unions trying to mobilize against Sarkozy, that's not really the way to do it.

I'm almost sure they're going to vote for another blockage Monday, so that it holds over at least until Tuesday when the other major strike should be happening. The potential to be really affective is there, I think, I just hope they let me go back to class eventually...