This article is a response to an earlier piece about the situation at Sciences Po Paris.
By the student group “CorDialemenT”
Yesterday our friends in Paris awoke, after a series of general Assemblies, to voice their concerns about the vandalic laws of Macron’s government aimed at destroying the fundamental republican principle of equality and its corollary: access to education for all.
The students occupying the 27 rue Saint Guillaume assemble in defense of rights, in defense of a more inclusive university system and in defense of a curriculum that reflects these values.
As our fellow on the right stated in an article today, “they want a change to Sciences Po’s curriculum, which perpetuates a “liberal authoritarian” regime through courses that are neoliberal, neocolonial, and punishing of workers in a master’s program.”
They want an exemption from the university’s absence policy for the duration of their absence from these classes in order to allow the scholarship holders of the school to be able to raise their voice without having to fear losing the scholarships on which they depend to live.
Some consider our curriculum inclusive or “marxist”. Yet, I have a hard time finding an inclusive bias in the fact that close to 90% of the authors we read are white and western, and a majority are men.
The ones that those who lack imagination and arguments (and have a touch of sexism) call “the bearded intellectuals” are standing up to these dehumanizing and elitist reforms on the symbolic date of the 50th anniversary of the 1968 student protests.
The Facebook page of the movement’s organizers made use of a Sciences Po Instagram post commemorating the university’s role in the May 68 movement, coining the hashtag “May 68, they commemorate, we restart”. The 2018 descendant of the student protests, so far, is a copy of the original—one that has a clear purpose: protest against France’s neoliberal reemergence under Macron.
Meanwhile, “hard left” has become a bogeyman of a concept, deployed by the neoliberals as an epithet rather than a descriptor.
Indeed, some demagogues fight for their ideology at the expense of the people, who after graduating, in contrast to an average Sciences Po student, will not earn a wage of the 10% richest people in France. And these demagogues think they’re struggling. While struggling masses of French students who do not obtain Bac général are left out of the universities which is reserved for a chosen few.
Some accuse the protester of “social vandalism” and “degradation of the quality of our community spaces”. But social vandalism is to spend 76 mln on the renovation of the private university – Sciences Po campus de Reims – to become member of the administrative board of the elite school. But it’s politics, no need to bring up real facts in the arguments.
