28
PETER BROOKS
ments:
111
general tlus, like the Caen Colloquium, is a call for the
University to put itself into phase with modern society and advanced
cultural models. On the other hand are the students, less important
numerically, but more articulate at moments of crisis, who refuse the
University's role as servant of the bourgeois capitalist state, who reject
the idea of selection of elites, and repudiate the possibility of a Uni–
versity organized along more "productive" lines, with better channels
of communication to industry and modern management.
If
they recog–
nize the need for a rational reform of the University, they did not fight
the battle of May merely to see the University better adapted to a
sick society. They propose rather to sever the links between
university–
culture-society,
to make the university and its culture out of phase
with society and society's culture in a new, progressive, revolutionary
manner. To them, the University should be the privileged scene of the
Cultural Revolution, of a continual calling into question of the ideologies
of the bourgeois capitalist state, the cell from which will come the
forces that will eventually destroy capitalism and its culture. What
they want is the institution of a kind of anti-university or counter–
university within the University: what they have named the "Critical
University."
The student movement, then, was from the start built over a gap
between the reformists and the revolutionaries, between the desire to
move more efficiently into the knowledge required to exercise the
managerial function and a general
non serviam.
After the Student Com–
mune had taken form and gained cohesion, the problem of its leaders
was to keep the gap from becoming a real split, to maintain the spirit
of revolution as an ongoing force that would not be satisfied by mere
reformism, yet at the same time to produce the needed concrete results
in the domain of university reform.
Tout commence .en mystique, tout
fin it en politique,
said Peguy. The student movement was subject to the
demands of both
mystique
and
politique,
and the solutions it proposed,
or ratller discovered, seemed for a time to turn the contradiction into
a strength, to raise the problem to a new dialectical synthesis. The solu–
tion was adumbrated in a series of inspired decisions on May 13: after
their occupation of the Sorbonne (followed by occupation of virtually
all the faculties of France), the students' first move was to declare
the autonomy of the "free universities," their second to make this
autonomy real by putting
in
place a new power structure: committees
of occupation and, more important, working committees in each disci–
pline charged with creation of the new university: with elaborating, not
proposals for a future discussion or negotiation, but new constitutions
