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PARTISAN REVIEW
French written in the twenties:
La barriere et Ie niueau,
translated as,
"To be a bourgeois is to pass the baccalaureate." The baccalaureate
was the only rite of passage into the bourgeois class. One result of'68
was people smoking in seminars, except in mine; another result was
that professors now have to have some kind of personal charisma if
they want to be listened to. Before they were listened to just because
they were professors. The year 1968 did not create these things, but
it symbolized the fact that we had very highbrow, elite-oriented
universities . I remember that when I was a student taking history,
there were only forty people in all of Paris who took the second year
in history . The number of people who thought they could go to a
university was much smaller, but the increase began with the baby
boom in the sixties. The '68 movement was both a consequence and
a cause of the change. Suddenly there was no room; there were no
teachers; there was no money. Suddenly there was a situation no–
body had anticipated, and nobody knew how to cope with.
Bernard Grossman:
Someone once remarked that the French educa–
tional system was designed to create intelligent leadership, and it ac–
tually produced intellectuals, which is not quite the same thing.
Dominique Schnapper:
Second-rate intellectuals.
Bernard Grossman:
I'm wondering if that has changed.
Dominique Schnapper:
They're producing people who don't want to
be
workers and are not able to be bona fide intellectuals. As I told you,
there are really two systems inside this academic system. There is
the first system, the selective one, which is very high-level, and I
think very good. And there is the rest, which is not very good. But
not
all
American universities are very good either. There is a big dif–
ference between great universities and the rest of the university
world. We are coming by very different ways to the same kind of
situation, but we're not as rich . That's the trouble; it costs us too
much money.
Sh£rley
Lans:
People say that to be acceptable as a middle-class person
you have to go to college. Hence you have a great proliferation of
those schools. Is there the same tendency in France to create new
openings? Are the universities expanding so that everyone can go?
Dominique Schnapper:
Yes, they have been expanding but under very
bad conditions. This year, for the first time since 1960 there have
been fewer first-year students. We are embarrassed to invite foreign
colleagues to our universities, because of the conditions under which
university professors are teaching, not to mention their salaries. The
way they must work is indecent, even in Paris.
