22
PETER BROOKS
the University. Instead, there has been a totally centralized, rigidly
hierarchical structure of faculties grouped into academies, plus a Dum–
ber of special parallel or peripheral institutes which were set up at
various times in lieu of a real reform of structures. The conception of
the university as a place where exponents of different disciplines work
in some cooperative manner to initiate the young in a relatively coherent
way into a major branch of human knowledge is foreign to the present
French system of higher education, though it does exist in elaborate
but desiccated form in the lycees. The French faculties have existed in
a perfect vacuum, thanks to which each faculty resembles an ancient
monster feeding on its own tail. Cross-departmental programs have been
virtually impossible. New disciplines have penetrated only after extra–
ordinary delays: Nanterre, opened two years ago, provided the first seri–
ous study of sociology. Virtually no foreign blood has been infused (one
has to be a French citizen to compete for the
agregation,
which has
become close to a necessity to teach in the University), and young blood
is exhausted by the system, especially the
doctorat d'etat,
necessary to
become a professor, a massively long and usually dreary dissertation in
two parts which, in the humanities, takes a minimum of ten years, assur–
ing that the bright young man, if he does not quit the system entirely,
will be brainwashed into antiquity by the time he reaches a position of
influence, will be ready to join the "mandarins" who control so many
sectors of the university. The vacuum in which the faculties have lived
is not to be confused with autonomy: every administrative or budgetary
decision has always been referred upwards through the immovable
bureaucracy of the Ministry of Education, and all teaching programs
have been oriented toward, and deformed by, the series of competitive
examinations -
baccalaureat, concours d'entree
for the Grandes Ecoles,
agregation,
etc. - which traditionally assured the state of selection of
its governmental and cultural elites, and collaterally created a mass of
unsuccessful students branded as failures and given no alternative avenues
of study, no other useful diplomas.
The Napoleonic structure of the French University is the expression
of a dream of a rational society, the consolidation and institutionaliza–
tion of the French Revolution. It is based on the ideal of
La carriere
ouverte aux talents:
a position in society shall depend, not on the
privilege accorded by birth or wealth, but on one's superior performance
in competition with one's peers. It is an egalitarianism defined as equality
of opportunity, defined in turn by a controlled process of natural selec–
tion. Against the contrast of Old Regime France, such a conception
seemed the real expression of the Declaration of the Rights of Man: to
