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PARTISAN REVIEW
319
Save the University
Must the university be destroyed? Yes, Andre
Gon
has just
asserted in a provocative article, because it is not in a position to function.
According to
him,
for almost ten years the contradiction has been
clear between the vocation of the bourgeois university to perpetuate this
society by the selection of elites and the rapidly growing number of
adolescents who wish to acquire either high culture or degrees guar–
anteeing "social advancement." The result: degrees, devalued by tae
"inflation" of the number of graduates, can no longer play their role
of placement certificates, while the kind of culture dispensed, not func–
tional enough from the point of view of employers, also lacks
intrinsic
interest for students, and therefore no longer satisfies anyone. Student
insurrection, according to
Gon,
is
therefore reasonable and legitimate,
even though it can only be effective
if
it becomes part of a general
movement, with the working class as protagonist, which confronts the
fundamental problem: no longer the "democratization" of the univer–
sity's selection of elites, but the questioning of the social division of
labor, that is to say, of all "elitism."
This position has a good deal of strength;
it
could find further
arguments in the exciting and systematic book by Pierre Bourdieu and
Jean-Claude Passeron
[La Reproduction: Elements pour une theorie du
systeme d'enseignement,
Editions de Minuit, 1970]. For these two so–
ciologists, any pedagogical activity inside an organized educational sys–
tem perpetrates "symbolic violence" which plays the role of maintaining
the existing social and cultural order, all the more effectively because
this role is unconscious and because it develops under the illusion of
the university's autonomy from the surrounding society.
"
It is easy to deduce from this that equal access for everyone to cul–
ture - in other words the democratizatien of education - is a typically
bourgeois objective; further, an illusion that camouflages and prot€cts
social stratification and the social division of labor because it promotes
a certain number of exemplary individual successes, which are, however,
necessarily exceptional. The worker who becomes a boss, the son of a
peasant who becomes a university professor, are arguments used to
justify, and therefore maintain, in the name of an illusory social mobility
limited to a few specimens, the existing social stratification and organi–
zation of labor. For my part, I am convinced of it.
Save the University
first appeared in
Le Nouvel Observateur,
May 4, 1970. Copy–
right
©
1970 by
Le Nouvel Observateur.
