FOURTH WORLD
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which explains the power of the myth of worker-studcnt solidarity. And
the university itself must be dislodged from its role as transmitter of
the cultural ideology of the managerial class; it must be turned inside
out and made to serve, not the dominating consensus of a wrong and
sick society, but a radical questioning of the system that will eventually
provoke an explosion of the ghetto into the rest of society.
The links among
university-culture-society
and the future man–
agers' sense of themselves as a ghettoized proletariat explain in general
terms the university's vulnerability. What makes the French university
especially vulnerable, beyond the complete state centralization and
hierarchization of the system, is the fact that the three terms are out
of phase with each other: this lack of symmetry, as well as pointing up
the "contradictions" of the apparatus, makes particularly clear the
necessary interdependence and interplay of the three spheres. Gaullism,
which is on the economic plane essentially an attempt at efficient
modern management and rationalization of corporate capitalism, has
not been able - indeed, until the Faure reform elicited by the student
revolt, scarcely attempted - to rationalize and make efficient a univer–
sity structure which has undergone no major change since the time of
Napoleon, which reflects a nineteenth-century ideal of bourgeois culture,
and is by any standard an inefficient servant of its society: it does not
train the elites that modern capitalism needs; it continues to form the
vast majority of its students in a nineteenth-century humanistic tradi–
tion based on the assumption that culture is both gratuitous and a privi–
lege, a formula which equips them for being nothing but new incarna–
tions and transmitters of traditional culture - that is, schoolteachers.
And even this it does poorly, for, in distinction to the American tradi–
tion where in general all humanistic thought is oriented, directly or
obliquely, toward pedagogy, that is to the renewal of our perceptions
of culture and the reinvention of ways of transmitting it, French intel–
lectual life is such that new ideas tend to turn in their own circle, out–
side the University or on its periphery, and rarely open onto a new
pedagogy. Which is why the very humanism in which the University
revels is so often made to seem so lifeless and irrelevant to the students.
Despite their piety toward their classics, the French may reread them
less than any other people: the classics are for them lifeless monuments,
explicated for all time in the lycees and the faculties, and rendered
literally unreadable thereafter.
The university, in its classic sense, and in the modern sense which,
in the best of cases, the British and Americans give to it, has never
really existed in modern France, except as an administrative abstraction:
