FOURTH WORLD
27
reform before the crisis came
IS 1Il
fact somewhat typical: despite the
image of modernism that it projects, Fifth Republic France is a maze
of contradictions between new efficiency and dynamism and the pre–
servation of archaic structures and privileges. The Gaullists argue that,
despite the government's virtually unlimited political powers, the Fifth
Republic simply has not had the strength, in terms of economic power
and popular support, to impose far-reaching structural reforms; and it
is unquestionable that any talk about University reform over the past
years has met with immediate resistance from within the University
itself, from the enchaired and entrenched professors, from such organ–
izations as the
Societe des Agreges,
which regards any modification of
that sacred institution, the
agregation,
as a rape of French culture
bound to assure the immediate collapse of French grandeur. Yet I
think it can fairly be said that the Gaullists lacked not so much eco–
nomic strength and popular support as imagination, interest, new ideas
and daring: they waited ten years before getting around to their heralded
annee sociale,
then promulgated by decree a reform both timid and
retrograde.
The same is true in the domain of University reform, where the
Fouchet Plan, it was clear from the start, could only be a disaster.
With its new intermediate diplomas, its earlier specialization, its further
hierarchizations, its new requirements for attendance at
travaux pra–
tiques,
the Fouchet Reform meant infringement on students' traditional
liberties with no real compensations in terms of reformed structures,
for
it
didn't really touch structures; it seemed a new and vexing
paternalism in the guise of efficiency, and it raised the specter of
further "Malthusianism" in the system, further selection and elimina–
tion both within the Faculties and at entrance into them. Tocqueville
said that the Old Regime was too authoritarian for its complexities;
the Fouchet reform, by imposing arbitrary authoritarianism upon a
complex system whose principle virtue was the liberty it gave to stu–
dents, set off the revolution.
What I have said about the inadaptation of the French University
and the culture it diffuses to the modern economy should suggest why
there has always been a basic contradiction, a necessary contradiction,
in the student protest, and why it is more complex than the student
attack on the efficient and inhuman brain factory of Berkeley. On the
one hand there are the students who complain about the lack of prac–
tical orientation of their education, the scarcity of job openings for
the graduate, the failure of diplomas to guarantee proficiency in parti–
cular fields, the wasteful creation of failures with no useful achieve-
