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elite of the elite (the mass of university students) will really ever
be
equipped with degrees that have meaning and subsequent positions that
have value. Unlike the situation in American universities, which are
clearly objectively, experientially, the freest enclaves of the society, life
at the Sorbonne is the daily experience of unfreedom, of irrelevance, of
a cynical Darwinism. Hence, if one part of the French student revolt
was directed at the society of one-dimensionality - "We don't want a
world where the guarantee of not dying of hunger is traded against the
guarantee of dying of boredom" - another part was directed to the
instauration of a free and rational system of education.
Spender warns the students against destroying the university while
they are trying to revolutionize society: the students' base, the source of
their intellectual weapons, must be preserved. But it is not at all certain
that most of the French students were in any important sense destructive
of the university. They assumed that the university was both necessary
and indestructible, and also that a good part of it could be reformed
only if destroyed. Unlike the American students, they were fighting an
institution that directly, legally and ever so bureaucratically represents
the State, and in which the State plays a directly oppressive role,
decreeing each year how many students will
be
allowed
to
accede to
the top distinctions, attempting to suppress certain student groups and
to
subsidize others, fixing salaries, hours and all the modalities of study
and teaching. The students' first call was for autonomy and self–
governance of the universities; they were really asking, "Whose uni–
versity?"
If
this inevitably led to a degree of political romanticism, it
was because possession of the university, its mode of existence in society,
could not really be analyzed without attention to those it served and
those it excluded - there was and still is the irrefutable fact that less
than ten percent of the university population is from the working classes,
and the percentage of these that succeed is smaller still. Hence the
gesture toward the workers, both futile and necessary, the attempt to
bring the university "ghetto" into the real currents of society, which
made inevitable the rehearsal of a general revolution. Hence too the
explosion of talk observed by Spender, the need to create an accession
to language for those whom culture had rendered silent, the call for a
Cultural Revolution. The ludic element of the revolt, the surrealist
poetry and games, was indeed a necessary step in the creation of a
revolutionary community.
Spender is skeptical about claims that "more work was done" at
Columbia and the Sorbonne during the weeks of the revolts than at any
other time. Yet the claim may be justified for the Sorbonne, because
for the first time in its modern history students and those faculty mem–
bers
who did not emigrate talked
about
their subjects, what these
sub-
