31b
ANDRE GORZ
fiction: access to education is free, but education leads to nothing. The
number of graduates devalues the degree. Many are called but few are
chosen : positions are rare. The numerical reduction that student selec–
tion is not able to accomplish will be accomplished by selection in hiring.
While waiting for the "force of circumstances" to be understood
- that is, that parents push their children into "good" professional
schools (yet to be created), which will give them access to "good" jobs,
rather than into the university from which they will graduate to un–
employment - the state is keeping the university open, but gradually
reducing the value of the degrees it grants (for example, Vincennes).
In short, they're giving the university enough rope so that in the end,
they hope, it will hang itself. Meanwhile, they send the cops into the
schools so that, by fomenting disorder, the schools' lack of value can
be established.
4. These contradictions of the bourgeois university lead us to some
fundamental contradictions:
a. The economic value granted degrees until now depended upon
their scarcity and on the scarcity of the aptitude for higher
education.
If
this aptitude becomes widespread, the value of
the degree must logically disappear, and with it, the hierarchical
division of labor.
b.
If
the aptitude for higher education - certified or not by a
degree - tends to become widespread, it can no longer serve as
a criterion of selection: social stratification can no longer claim
to be based on skill and merit. The right to higher education
and the right to advancement can no longer go hand in hand.
c.
If
education no longer guarantees advancement, one of two
things is true: either it is considered a waste of time and a
useless social cost, because it is profitable neither for the students
nor for capitalist society; or it is considered as a general, non–
utilitarian training whose luxury society can after all afford. But,
in that case, the affirmation of the inalienable right to an educa–
tion has as its corollary the fact that that education, which leads
to no career, must possess for the students - who will later
become functionaries, workers or what have you - an
intrinsic
interest.
It is at this point that the contradiction of the university breaks
into the open. Against the system of selection, the student movement
asserted the inalienable right to education. The logic of that demand
(which remained petit bourgeois as a defense of opportunities for ad-
