30
PETER BRO O KS
certain ground rules, employing certain vocabularies, submitting to cer–
tain controls. Hence the contract passed between teacher and students
would specify the form and matter of
controle des connaissances:
exam, reports, papers. And the contract would also guarantee the stu–
dents' right to establish "counter courses" wherever they felt the teach–
ing to be biased or incomplete. Dialogue, argument, criticism would
thus be institutionalized at the center of the Critical University, now
become not a microcosm of the world outside, but a laboratory for
forging the world to come. The inalienable right of the Critical Uni–
versity would be the
droit
a
La contestation,
the right to call everything
into question, to make the apprenticeship of culture a revolutionary
experience in permanence.
Not since the Middle Ages had the French faculties been
so
alive
as they were in May and June; never, perhaps, had students and
teachers worked so hard and so passionately to give themselves an
education. And the work accomplished by the soviets was remarkable
in many domains, both on the most practical level - proposing reform
of the antiquated and mandarin-dominated structure of medical schools
and teaching hospitals, for instance - and the most "utopian": as in
architecture, where the reforms elaborated by the committees at Beaux–
Arts aimed not only at reorganization of the whole architectural pro–
fession (controlled by a reactionary closed corporation which has made
modern French architecture one of the least creative in the world) but
also at a revolution in the culture of design, in the sociology of ur–
banism, a visionary blueprint for the creation of the future City. In the
best of the soviet reports one sensed a synthesis of the practical re–
organization and the visionary revolutionary project: a real synthesis,
because education could be the meeting place of realistic apprenticeship
and vision in an experience of constant questioning, criticism, awareness.
There were some problems that the soviets were not really able to
solve, especially the particularly difficult related questions of selection,
examinations and degrees, which together form a complex that repre–
sents everything the student insurgents detest : the choice and condition–
ing of future capitalist elites from the mass of the young. With the
occupation of the faculties, one of the students' first moves was to
abolish exams altogether, to the bewilderment of most of the "reform–
ist" professors who did not see what exams represented to the students :
the principal rite of passage into the adult world they reject. The
professors countered with the old principle of
La carriere ouverte aux
talents,
the contention that democracy is based on competitive selec–
tion and that its elimination would mean return to an Old Regime
