FRENCH STUDENTS: FAR FROM COLUMBIA

It was the students who started France's near revolution. And even after most of the workers, who they had hoped would prove to be more durable allies, had returned to their jobs, the students still held out in the Sorbonne. Now that stronghold, too, has fallen to the cops, elections have been held, and France is at least temporarily back to normal. But the students' rebellion will long be remembered in France and elsewhere. Their grievances, with which the Gaullist Government will have to deal, are of special interest to American students. On the surface, their complaints are similar. At both Columbia and the Sorbonne, demonstrators demanded curriculums more consonant with the times, a larger role in university affairs, and the demolition of those invisible walls that convert a university into an academic hermitage. But more than an ocean and a language separate the French university student and his counterpart in the U.S. The two can hardly be measured on the same scale. French higher education, reports TIME Correspondent Judson Gooding, is an ordeal of body and spirit that has changed little over the centuries. It is still almost as harshly competitive an environment as it was in the 13th century, when Robert de Sorbon, founder of the Sorbonne, compared examinations in his college to the Last Judgment, and contended that the men who graded them were "much more severe than the judges in heaven." Today the long drawn-out trial is compounded of inadequate facilities, rigid rules, distant administrators, dogmatic and unapproachable professors. Trapped in an archaic system, French students live a one-dimensional life that is virtually restricted to matters of the mind. There are few diversions from duty, no athletic teams or fun-centered weekends, almost no extracurricular activities. Days and nights are occupied with grinding, hard, solitary work. Left largely on their own, given little direction by haughty teachers who are forever talking down to them, French students have become --in the classroom, at least--a sullen, silent and smoldering lot.

Keeping a Distance. Otto Klineberg, a social psychologist from Columbia who is now a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, was struck by the contrast with his students at home. "In my seminars at Columbia, I could hardly talk for three minutes before I was interrupted. Here, it is hard to get the students to talk at all. One has to draw them out. This is the culmination of a long effort to keep a distance between the teachers and the students."

When the students finally decided to speak out, it was university reform they wanted to discuss, but France sent its police, not its thinkers, to deal with them. The student catalogue of complaints is larger and more depressing than any list of grievances that U.S. students can compile. The Paris student seeking an advanced degree, such as the doctoral d'etat (comparable to the American Ph.D.), faces six years of relentless scholastic competition as he fights his way, first to the diplome universitaire d'etudes litteraires (roughly equivalent to a B.A.), then through a second cycle leading to a teaching degree, and finally through a third phase involving research and the preparation of two theses. The doctorat is mandatory for any student aiming to be a maltre de conferences, or lecturer in a university faculty of letters.

No Heat, No Water. During these six years, if he does not live with his parents, as many do, the student probably boards at a pension or rents a tiny room, paying anywhere from $24 a month for a chambre de bonne (maid's room) to $50 for a hall bedroom. The walk-up room is likely to have no heat or running water--the toilet is down the hall--one light bulb, no furniture except a bed. If the student is lucky enough to be at the head of the line when cards are issued for the government-subsidized student restaurants, he can get adequate and simple meals for 30-c- each. But cards are available to only 72% of the 182,000 university students in Paris. The others eat where they can; some cook in their rooms. Thus French students often project an image of despair. They constitute a hard-pressed band of impecunious, hungry scholars restlessly roving the Latin Quarter, looking for a warm place in the winter or even a cafe with enough light to study by. There are, of course, exceptions. Some students are from affluent families and, especially if they commute from their homes, may live comfortably. But most parents cannot easily afford to support their children in separate quarters.

"Nobody cares about the students here," says Mary Jane Overall, 20, an American University coed who is studying international relations at Paris' Institut d'Etudes Politiques. "The French live in the past, and the kids are expected to respect the old traditions. A boy I know rents a room so small that it just has a bed, a window, a door and a faucet. When he needs a desk, he sits on the bed and holds a board on his knee. There is none of the 'Yay, yay, let's go to the frat house' stuff. You walk and you talk, and you look at things, and you talk."

Fixed Policy. Academic life is controlled in ways that an American at even the most impersonal multiversity would neither appreciate nor understand. France's 23 universities are all run from Paris; policy is fixed by the Minister of Education. It is as if the 2,200 U.S. colleges and universities were administered from Washington. Students resent a system under which they are told what to study and, in examinations, exactly what to regurgitate. "They walk in and talk from behind their desks, and when they have finished they walk out," says a Sorbonne student. "We are told what to think; there is no discussion possible."

"Everything is linked to the concours [exam]," says a medical student in Paris. "From kindergarten on, always, one must be first. Until he is 80, a man in France thinks only of beating the others. And once you become a professor, you have no more spirit of initiative. You think only of imposing your views on the students--of being first again." What the students want, he adds, is "a continuing dialogue. We don't want things to be imposed on us. We want flexibility, which will allow the system to accommodate changes."

The geographical diffusion of French students, who lack the common assembly point of the American campus, undoubtedly retarded their revolt. It takes only moments to organize a rally at Berkeley or Columbia. But the Sorbonne is confined to a great rectangle of brick and stone in crowded Paris.

There is simply no campus, no microphones and loudspeakers furnished by an acquiescent administration.

Apprentice Intellectuals. Thus it was no surprise that this spring's revolt first erupted on the new suburban University campus of Nanterre, seven miles northwest of Paris. There, 12,000 students were able to develop the spirit of solidarity that is vital to revolution. Nor was it surprising that Nanterre's enrages (furious ones), as they soon came to be called, were bothered less by their physical than by their academic hardships. As apprentice intellectuals in a country dominated by intellectual tradition, they were deeply dismayed by the content and direction of their stud ies. And by extension of that worry, they are now preoccupied with the place they will take in the world and what shape that world will have. The similarity between their concern and that which has grown up in the U.S. and the rest of Europe reflects a world community of youth that seems certain to play a major part in rebuilding society.

"We resent this society because we are forced to be consumers," says one Sorbonne revolutionary. "The pressure is on us from the time we are young to buy, to go into debt, to get the Frigidaire, the car. Life for a Frigidaire? This is the life our parents want us to live. For us, the only value is man, the only thing that matters is man." Sociologist Alain Touraine, 42, agrees that France "has become a society of things, not of ideas. The students reject not only the things but the authorities who direct that society--they do not believe in institutions like the university."

The anxieties of the French students are fed by the fact that, unlike their counterparts in the U.S., they face a vocational future that is highly uncertain. French business tends to shun the liberal-arts graduate as a source of executive talent, much prefers youths with technical training. Thus some of the nation's brightest, most thoughtful youths are most affected by the unpredictability of the forces for change. "France is in the midst of a transition from old ways to new," notes Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, "and many of the young people don't know where they are going. This creates tension."

Elite Institutions. In their rallies, students often argue the necessity of increasing the percentage of university enrollment drawn from the lower economic and social levels. Today barely one student in ten comes from the working class, and the students believe that as long as the university is primarily peopled by an elite, neither it nor the society that supports it can be significantly transformed. At present only 16% of the students who finish secondary school go on to higher education (compared with 40% in the U.S.) and of those who do enter the university, 43% fail to graduate.

The government is apparently in a mood to meet many of the students' demands, and it now recognizes, though not yet completely, that the problems of the universities cannot be isolated from the general malaise of France. "First, it is necessary to re-establish order in the universities," said Premier Georges Pompidou recently, as if that step would lead to the reinstatement of reason--along the old familiar lines. "Beyond this school year, procedures and methods must be adopted to bring about the profound reform that everyone has wanted. The students will not be the victims of these events. We are ready to hear them."

Damn the Elections. But far more urgent than France's willingness to listen to them is the students' insistence on being heard on their own terms. They are not likely to settle for half measures, and the more radical among them --much like the revolutionaries of the American S.D.S.--have already rejected the new French elections as no more than a half measure. "The Communist Party is more conservative than we are," says Pierre Rouze, 22, a fiery young leader ofjhe U.N.E.F. (Union Nationale des Etudiants Franc,ais). "We don't believe it is possible to bring about a socialist society by evolution, by gradual steps. We don't give a damn about the elections. We think there must be a degree of violence. Otherwise, despite elections, everything will be the same."

What De Gaulle may not yet understand is that France's new mood can not be defined or contained as a mere tantrum of the young. It was possible to clear the Sorbonne of its student squatters, and the torn-up streets can be recobbled. But France's ills run deeper than that, and its university students are aware that they have not yet explored the possibilities of their power. "We are going to get a lot," predicts one Sorbonne revolutionary, "because we are asking for a great deal."

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