Sexology, Squalor and No "Bac"

The perils of "openness " at France's Vincennes campus

The weekly Paris Match calls it "that big pimple." Minister for the Universities Alice Saunier-Seite claims that a "horse registered and was accepted." The place, she has declared, "has become a forbidden city where drugs are sold openly for the Paris region." In fact she once sputtered to a Communist senator, "It is what will become of all France if you ever come to power. Vincennes is Italy!"

The subject of these remarks is France's first great experiment in open admissions education, the "University of Paris VIII," better known as Vincennes because it is housed in the former royal hunting forest at the eastern end of the Paris Metro line. Even when Vincennes opened in 1970, the campus was Sixties Squalid. Today the school is an ill-repaired set of buildings and classrooms with barely a wall not defaced by leftist posters or spray-painted slogans: SHAH ASSASSIN! I HATE COPS. SOLIDARITY WITH NICARAGUA.

Last week something new had been added. Fresh spray-painted signs on the walls declared: KEEP VINCENNES IN VINCENNES and NO TO DISMANTLING OUR ZOO. The latest watchwords were responses to the sudden resignation of Vincennes' beleaguered president, Pierre Merlin, 42, and the renewed determination of the French government to cut down the university's size by moving it to the working-class Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.

Vincennes was a stepchild of the university reforms that followed the French student rebellion of 1968. Its original purpose was to help break the French university system of its traditional and often rigid emphasis on formal, elitist-oriented training. Accordingly the new school offered such courses as History of Cinema, Sexology, and Third World Economics and Politics, shocking to conservative French educators. Most revolutionary of all, Vincennes, alone among French universities, dispensed with the usual entrance requirement, the dread "bac" (baccalaureat degree), more or less the equivalent of two years of U.S. college. By admitting non-bacs and having a fluid schedule, Vincennes intended to allow workers with full-time jobs to attend the university.

To some extent the experiment fulfilled its promise. Over the years enrollment grew from 8,000 to 32,000. Today more than 40% of the students hold full-time jobs outside class. But the school's open admissions policy and popular courses proved its undoing, for it attracted not just serious worker-students, but dropouts, misfits and foreigners (mostly Africans) who could not meet the regular standards in other French universities.

France's educational system is one of the nation's proudest possessions. According to 1977 studies, only 21.5% of all students aged 18 to 23 in France go on to higher education (as against 45.5% in the U.S.), but so far, except at Vincennes, France has had little diploma devaluation. The doings at Vincennes stirred conservative ire, and the French government made political capital by announcing that it would move the Vincennes campus this June. Resistance came from students and Vincennes President Merlin, who has struggled long and manfully against the school's drug problems and the politicization of the campus.

Last week, the day after students held him prisoner in his office for 13 hours for charging six foreign students with using false identity papers, President Merlin abruptly resigned. It was not the indignity, he explained. It was the fact that "a majority of the students had failed to react against ultraleftists who are destroying Vincennes." With his departure, the move to Saint-Denis seems inevitable.

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