Debout les damnés de l'Université (Arise, you wretched of the University)
Posted by Vicki Scholtz | 11 May, 2007The Cow was interested to see students in Paris behind the barricades once more - this time in protest against Sarkozy's planned reforms of the Higher Education system. Thirty-nine years after the student-led protests of May '68, students were again objecting to Right-wing intervention in their lives: in this case, greater privatisation of the universities, and greater vocationalisation.
"Funny that," muttered Gramsci. "Students here didn't protest when local universities surged to the Right with the neo-liberal realignment of the late '90s. They just stayed away and didn't enrol."
"But," the Cow reminded him, "Neo-liberalism and its attendant manifestations were co-opted by the ghost of the Left, locally. Much of the change was presented as Transformation, as progressive, as liberating. And for some sectors, excluded from the 'collegiality' of the Golden Years, it genuinely has been - if somewhat of a double-edged sword."
Gramsci was sceptical. He failed to understand how anyone could be dumb enough to believe that deification of The Market translated into a shift to the Left... but there was enough evidence to suggest that that had happened on a significant scale. Admitting that, and understanding how, were clearly two very different things.
"We could do with a bit of the Spirit of '68 here!" he sighed.
The Cow shuddered. She recalled an earlier tea-time conversation where the imminent retirement of the student activists of '66 was under discussion, together with reminiscences of those days. She wasn't entirely sure Campus was ready for that...
