320
JACQUES JULLIARD
But we have to go further and ask why this hypocritical process is
so easily accepted by its victims, that is to say, the working classes. Is
it only, as has been suggested, because of the cleverness of the camou–
fl age? Could it not also be because of the other, positive, function the
university serves, specifically its scientific work? Just as the capitalist
system, based on profit, nevertheless accomplishes the positive task of
the development of productive forces, so the university, based on selec–
tion and the maintenance of the existing order, nevertheless plays the
necessary role of the development and diffusion of knowledge.
At this point we must ask the question: can we take the risk of
"destroying the university" in the hope that the rest will be given to us
besides?
Of
course, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
On the condition that you break them in the pan and not
in
the basket.
I t is not by breaking machines that you will abolish capitalism; the
workers have known that for a long time. Nor is it by destroying the
university that you will abolish social inequalities. It is hardly probable
that this radical destruction would lead us to greater justice, but it is
certain that it would lead us to a catastrophic economic and cultural
regression. We must always keep in mind this fact:
in spite of its relative
backwardness, France has gone too far on the road of industrialization
to permit us to make underdevelopment a path to socialism.
Besides,
the masses would never accept it. Under these conditions, the destruc–
tion of the university, even with the best intentions in the world, is an
equivocal and a t the same time dangerous objective.
Then what is to be done? The Faure law is a reformist frame–
work, to which a majority of professors and a minority of students want
to give a conservative content, while a majority of students and a
minority of professors upon whom its chances for success rested ignore
it in the name of their revolutionary ideal. That is why it is running
badly.
It
is becoming clear today that, following the national inclina–
tion, attention was directed almost exclusively to the institutional re–
form of the university and its internal division of power when the
most acute problem was and remains the ultimate purpose of higher
education.
If,
as Andre Gorz correctly thinks, we have to call in ques–
tion the social division of labor, the university must not be destroyed
but turned toward that objective. Which presupposes:
1.
The Abolition of Student Status.
The existence of the uni–
versity ghetto is an alibi not only for conservative professors, but also
for protesting students. As they are now organized, in a perfectly ab–
stract, closed countersociety, they reproduce, in their sphere, the pro–
fessional clerisy, with no grip on the social reality they intend to trans-
