Third-year student Sara Jose is no slacker, but the Sorbonne University semester is almost over, final exams are bearing down and she has yet to attend some of her classes.
Like tens of thousands of students across France, Jose has been locked out of courses by the longest university protest in recent memory. The action, which started in February over government plans to cut costs and modernize the university system, has sown chaos in the classroom, humbled the French university system and risks costing it international prestige.
“At the beginning, I was for it,” Jose, a student in modern letters, said of the protest launched on Feb. 2. “I didn’t think the strike would last so long and the government would be so deaf. I think it went too far ... It’s a lost semester.”
At the height of the protests, which unusually brought together professors and students, classes at scores of France’s 83 universities were blocked or disrupted. The strikes are winding down, but about 10 still have shuttered classrooms.
It has been a semester of street protests and police raids to unblock campuses. Many professors resorted to supplying courses via the Internet or holding class in hallways or cafeterias, if at all.
The strike began to protest complex reforms planned by the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy and aimed at cutting costs and modernizing the university system. Up to 900 posts are being eliminated this year.
Reforms range from redefining the status of researchers to making universities more competitive internationally, in part by seeking some private funding. That reform was enacted in 2007, but student demands that it be withdrawn became central to the strike’s momentum.
University presidents are now scrambling to organize year-end exams. Higher Education Minister Valerie Pecresse, meeting with student groups on Monday, said examinations would be based on teaching done so far and that a catch-up exam session would be scheduled. She guaranteed that students receiving state aid would get stipends for an extra month. Most exams will likely be held in July and September instead of in June.
“We’re completely lost,” said Ilyes Ouertani, a student at the Sorbonne who has had only 20 hours of class since early February. “I don’t want to take an exam that will give me a grade based on three weeks of class.”
There are no winners in this protracted dispute. The contested reforms, with some adjustments, remain in place and the largest student union, UNEF, vowed to continue the fight in a different form.
“It is a real tragedy for the French university system,” University of Oslo history professor John Peter Collett said while visiting a Sorbonne colleague. Like others, he says the government had been “unwise” in introducing so many reforms in a short period.
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