The party's over now
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
I have just run into an academic acquaintance of mine who is from a distinguished 'liberal arts' college in upstate New York. Since this is a college of considerable wealth, it seemed ex- tremely unlikely a priori that it would stage a rebellion. But the student rebellion was a re- bellion against the racial policy of a student fraternity, a rebellion backed by many of 'the faculty'; the students won the battle and forced the fraternity to reform itself. My friend said he thought the students had been totally justi- fied and that in fact the outburst of political awareness in this college was novel, but very welcome to him. With this point of view, I am in general sympathy. I do not want students who are 'idiots' in the Greek sense, and I can put up with a good deal of youthful impatience. Yet I have been reflecting on the general wave of student revolt and especially on the highly dramatised outbreak in France, not only in the Sorbonne or even in Nanterre, but all through the academic world in France, even in the nor- mally tranquil university city of Strasbourg.
Howzver, just as the political revolt has fizzled out, so I believe the student revolt is about to fizzle out. The leaders of the revolt are issuing noisy threats of resuming the campaign after the holidays, but I fear that these leaders will have few troops behind them. One of these leaders has just announced that M Raymond Mon will not be permitted to lecture next term. I think M Aron will not be upset by this threat which is extremely unlikely to be effective.
The French student rebellion has not been, on the whole, very well reported. One of the best accounts of it is in Time. Time points out the importance of the fact that the grander ecoles did not take part in any of the student risings. It does not really matter a great deal what happens at Nanterre if the grander ecoles, the heart of the educational system of France, do not join in. After all, it was the Ecole Poly- technique which was the great revolutionary centre of the nineteenth century, and largely brought about the fall of Charles X. But the grander ecoles are elitist and their students have very little in common with the students of Nanterre or, indeed, with students of the Faculty of Letters at 'the Sorbonne' who are en masse not perhaps the most distinguished products of French education.
It was very significant to read in Le Monde of the continuing howls about the system of 'selec- tion.' The outbreak at Nanterre was partly pro- voked by a very distinguished professor who argued for 'selection,' i.e. against letting students who have passed the bachot into any university of their choice. As two professors have written in Le Monde, the students who are demanding this universal admission were also demanding 'autonomy' for universities, which involves the right of universities to choose their own students. They cannot, it is suggested, have it both ways. But one of the least charming aspects of youthful exuberance is the belief that you can have it both ways.
I was highly entertained by reading in Time of the revolt of the parents against the strikers in the grands lycies in Paris. Parents descended in their thousands on the striking teachers and students and pointed out to the striking teachers that they were paid for teaching the young, and would they kindly go back and do their job. This attitude seems to have extended far down the educational system. Time tells of the village in the Midi whose baker refused to supply bread to the local teacher until he re-opened the school. I was also entertained to notice that one of the lycies on which the parents de- scended was the Paris lycee which, I had just been told, by a young woman whom I admire a great deal, was a great centre of student re- volt. It has ceased to be since the parents brought their children to heel, and brought the teachers to heel too.
The outburst of student strikes reminds me of a school strike in my small home town in Scotland just before the First World War. It was a very mixed school (as my brother Cohn has described it in this journal), and very
many of the students were children of miners. It occurred to some of the boys to stage a school strike while their fathers were staging a real strike. They drew up a programme de- manding pocket money to be issued by the school, the abolition of homework, the aboli- tion of corporal punishment, and the provision of cushioned seats. As a good middle-class child, I did not join the strike : it would not have amused my parents if I had. The day after the strike broke out, the headmaster went round the school with his cane; he had a very busy morning indeed, and the strikers had the best reason in the world for wanting cushioned seats when he had finished. I am sure that many of the parents of the strikers were entirely on the side of the headmaster.
In the same way, the French strike has appar- ently been breaking down over the fact that parents wish their children to pass the bac- calaureat examination. There have been -re- forms in favour of the students : the oral examination is now given much more weight than it used to be given in the past. One result has been a very high passing rate in the lycie at Bastia in Corsica. I am afraid that, with the general French suspicion of Corsicans, this magnificent passing rate of eighty per cent will be taken in the rest of France not as the result of the excellent teaching system of Bastia, but as a proof of the Corsican talent for what the Americans call 'cutting their ethical corners fine.' Time has pointed out, and Le Monde has confirmed this, that while the students rebelled in the Sorbonne, the grander ecoles were carry- ing out their tests for the aggregation as usual.
There was another aspect of the student strike which seems to have been largely ignored. The strikes of the workers are often based on reasonable fears for the workers' future: :for example, it was not really surprising that: most effective strike took place in the nation- alised Renault plant at Flins. This is one of the most highly 'automated' automobile plants .in the world. The workers there are intelligent enough to know that the job of the skilled Work- man at Flins is going to disappear quite soon except for a highly select minority group. I have heard the same problem gloomily discussed by union leaders in Detroit, worried by the in- creasing automation of automobile plants in the state of Michigan. The same apprehension explains if it does not justify the revolt of the London dockers against container ships. These are real dangers, and it is not surprising that the French workers hoped to hold up, if not to prevent, the increasing mechanisation of in- dustry and the increasing down-grading of skilled workmen in the great modern industries which M Servan-Schreiber is so pleased to see spreading all over France.
The French student revolt is affected by the fact tnat, compared with Britain, very few French workers have kinsmen in universities. From the point of view of a French worker, many students are idlers, layabouts, pampered children of the bourgeoisie. I also think that Mr Gordon Walker, in one of his last speeches as Minister of Education, was hitting the• nail on the head when he warned university students that the workers may object to more money being spent on students. As Mr Colin Clark has pointed out, it is the workers who subsi- dise the education of the middle classes and if anything must be sacrificed, it should be the universal claim to enter any university on what seem to me, as a retired don, often inadequate grounds.
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