The debate in the French Assembly on the Government's modi-
fication of the Universities Act of 1875 have been very hot and somewhat protracted. The proposal of the Government is, as our readers are probably aware, to leave the teaching power of the free Colleges untouched, but to abolish the system of "mixed juries" for the conferring of degrees, and to take back the right of conferring degrees completely into the power of the State. Even by the Act of 1875, the Government had a preponderating influence on these "mixed juries," but the teaching body was also repre- sented on them, and it is to this representation that the new Government objects. It is said, on the one side, that the State ought to be responsible for the worth of the degree to which it gives validity, and that, therefore, officers of the State ought to confer it, and that the State may be quite trusted not to place young men who have been educated at any special religious seminary at an artificial disadvantage. On the other hand, the Catholics say, with some justice, that on the faith of the Act of last Session they have made appeals for support, which have been liberally responded to, whereas this new Bill alters the whole condition of the question, and the new teaching bodies will now be so impotent to secure fair degree examinations, that they will no longer be equally deserving of Catholic support. Nevertheless the Bill was carried against the Ultramontane-Buonapartist alliance by a majority of 365 to 143. The controversy had become so embittered between the Republicans and the Conservatives, that perhaps there was no choice for the former, if they were to keep their influence with the people, but to pass this Bill, otherwise we should have thought it imprudent and un- necessary to disturb the settlement of last year. The French bachelor's degree did not rank so high, even before the Act of 1875, that it was at all undesirable to try the experiment of the multiplication of free academical bodies, with a certain carefully checked and regulated influence over the conditions of the degree examinations. Almost all our British and Irish degrees rank higher than the corresponding diploma of the French bureaucratic system.
Previous page
