Your opinions, please.

Today, I began to lose my certainty with the school strikes. I’m supposed to have three classes today, and one of them’s offered by my exchange program. It’s usually at the Sorbonne (the old, famous building), so I took a bike there this morning because it’s too far to walk. When I got there, there were fairly large crowds at each entrance, which were all still shut at around 9:15 or so. By the time 9:30-9:45 rolled around, the students had literally blocked the doors, so people couldn’t really get through without a fight. Annoyingly, I had to get over to the exchange program’s office for my class because at the last minute they changed the location.

After that class, I went ahead over to Censier, which is where I have my other two classes, and it was physically blocked, as in there were tables piled up in front of every door (except to the library). I asked the kids what was up and if I could go in, and it turned out that every normal undergrad class was cancelled; the only classes to be held were special international student ones (like French as a second language ones, not like where I take a class that’s mostly international students but still considered a French class) and masters programs. Tomorrow at noon they’ll be voting whether or not to continue the blockage. So I went over to the library where I found my friend Raoul (he’s French), who asked me whether I was for or against the blockage, and I automatically said yes. I didn’t really have an answer as to why, so he proceeded to explain to me why he’s against it, which is where my confusion started to come in.

What the students are striking against is this law Sarkozy wants to push through that makes universities have the choice to be autonomous. Currently, they are entirely state-funded, and only ‘poor’ students get financial aid (there’s no merit-based financial aid), though schools cost nothing in France compared to what we pay in the US. The autonomy law would allow schools to choose to be financed (partially) by outside organizations, which would then open up more jobs to students who had graduated from the university they finance. According to Raoul, students who couldn’t afford to get to a university would still be funded by the state. Students would also still have the choice to go to whichever university they want.

The problem most students see with this law, like one of the kids holding up the blockade told me, is that they think it is a step toward privatization, like in the American system. However, autonomy does not mean independence; at the end, the government is still going to have a hand in direction of the French university system. I sort of feel like this system can never be completely privatized – in the US, schools were private from the beginning, and it’s kind of a whole, whole different system of who directs what (as in states directing public universities and the national government not really having much of a hand in anything). The problem seems to come in with the difference between autonomy and independence – and there is definitely a huge one (think about Finland, it was autonomous, it had a form of self-government, for years under both Sweden and Russia but wasn’t actually independent until 1917 – and in a case like that, we’d never mistake autonomy for independence).
Raoul and I were discussing how paradoxical this total blockage of the school is. If students want school to be free and free for everyone, how does it make sense to not allow people to do go school if they want to? They are imposing their opinions on everyone else, and now it’s some students who are taking away other students’ independence. The blockage was decided by a popular vote (and will be decided to continue or not tomorrow – potentially until Tuesday, when teachers and public workers are striking). For the French students, it’s no big deal, the school can’t fail over half the students for striking and missing a month of classes. But for the exchange students, we risk being required to stay over the summer to make up classes or not getting credits transferred because we haven’t had enough hours of classes. How is that fair to others who also deserve an equal education? When Raoul asked another kid from our class if he was for or against the blockage, this is what he said: “I’m not really for or against it, I voted for it...” so Raoul asked him why, and he basically said that it was because everyone else was voting for it. He said, “If everyone votes to go to class, I’ll go to class, and if everyone votes for a blockage, I’ll go to protests.” Really well thought out. It made me lose a lot of the confidence I had previously in the well-founded decisions of the French students.

I’m interested to see what others think. I know many of you are really not into the higher education thing, or government funded anything, but please consider what the reality is for France at the moment, that the government funds all transport and all universities, and let me know what you think. I feel like on principle I should be supportive of the strike, but I also feel like there’s something much bigger here than one principle. I’m just really questioning whether or not this is the most effective way to show that people are really against this new plan.

So, please let me know what you think about this, I'm really having a hard time with it.