The Slipping Sorbonne

In Paris last week, hundreds of students were clubbed, punched and sprayed with fire hoses as they fought police in the streets of the Latin Quarter. Scores of others were dragged away in paddy wagons as the dingy Sorbonne blazed with bright banners: NATIONAL STRIKE. WARNING TO THE GOVERNMENT. THE SORBONNE FOR THE STUDENTS. It was a major crisis. Virtually all of France's 300,000 university students--and half their teachers--closed all of France's 23 universities. The complaint: overcrowding caused by years of government footdragging. Never before has French higher education been in deeper trouble.

In 1946 liberated France produced 200,000 more babies than in wartime 1945. To school them, two French republics have followed the same schizophrenic policy. While calling for ever more educated youth, the government has consistently failed to expand educational facilities. Nothing was done about elementary schools until the babies were six; nothing was done about secondary schools until they were eleven. Next year 100,000 youths of 18 will deluge French universities with one-third more students than are enrolled now.

Cafe Students. The Gaullist government is frantically building 42,000 more university places. That is less than half the need, and not a single new place is being added at the University of Paris, which has 100,000 students in its five colleges in the Latin Quarter. Hardest-hit is the age-blackened Sorbonne,* the Paris college of letters, which was built for 10,000 students and now has 32,000. The Sorbonne has only 100 professors to do all the lecturing. It has only half a dozen seminar rooms; the 600 sociology students hold their seminars in a room with only one chair and two desks. The Sorbonne's one library can barely seat 500 students--and serves also as the only library for the nearby science college's 15,000 students.

When Sorbonne students spot an empty lecture hall, they rush in like beggars after a tycoon's cigar butt. Lucky ones perch on worn wooden benches, using their laps for desks; others stand or squat in the aisles. The rooms smell; the lighting is dim. The typical Sorbonne lecture hall holds only half the students enrolled in a course. Sitting in a remote stairwell just within earshot of the podium, one girl recently sighed: "The other day I raised my head and actually saw the professor."

Those who get to class take copious notes, mimeograph entire courses for the shutouts. Thousands of students have given up even trying to attend lectures. They merely register in the fall, study canned notes in nearby cafes, tackle final exams in May--turning Sorbonne students into what the alarmed French press calls "test monsters."

The monsters are mad at stick-in-the-mud professors who lecture only three hours a week and repeat themselves year after year, at booksellers who continually raise prices, at the bureaucracy that red-tapes university expansion.

Anxious to decompress Paris with four new suburban universities, the government has bogged down with local officials, who fear an influx of students in areas that lack housing. Meanwhile, builders keep upping their prices.

Scared Scholars. France spends only 3.6% of its national income (compared with 7% in the U.S.) on education. The government claims to be carrying out a plan to spend more than $1 billion on universities by 1965, but the skimpy results are visible mainly as some additions to provincial universities. Critics call broad-beamed Christian Fouchet, the 15th Education Minister in ten years, "the aircraft carrier with the outboard motor"--meaning that he has insufficient authority. Socialist Deputy Charles Privat recently protested that France is preparing "an embittered youth, 50% of which will have no choice but that of unskilled labor or of being unemployed."

France can still provide top-quality higher education: the grandes ecoles (TIME, Feb. 1), which are not part of the university system, still train 25,000 students as well as any schools in the world do. The Sorbonne provides some brilliant lecturers, and determined stu dents can get a mind-opening education. But the impression is now general in France that a better schooling can be had at provincial universities: Grenoble, Lille, Strasbourg, Dijon, Bordeaux and others.

"I am scared for the future," says 32-year-old Jean Charles Payen, a Sorbonne assistant professor of French literature. "Our last Nobel Prize for science was in 1937. That's alarming. French education is still good, but tomorrow is unsure." Jean Roche, the Sorbonne's rector, says: "We are at the brink."

* From the name of its 13th century founder, Robert de Sorbon.

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