Showdown of evasive v. abrasive

The student demonstrations and the French government's capitulation over higher education reform have already been forgotten by politicians in a new storm over illegal phone-tapping. But the problems continue to fester and the students will not forget.

The showdown over a government circular on technology courses and a report on university reform followed such a well-established pattern, there is little reason to believe it will not be repeated. The element of deja vu in the latest sequence of student discontent and government retreat was enormous.

The very same technical students who led the protest movement against a minimum youth wage last year were not going to swallow what could only appear as an attempt to limit their access to degree courses.

The combination of mass entry to first-level higher education and high youth unemployment makes a tinder box of that entire segment of the student population whose personal survival strategy centres on struggling on and up, beyond the two-year diploma. Struggle has to be the word for it: the average age of the students who finally make it on to third-year courses is 24 years.

Just like last year, lycee students did more than a little to help swell the demonstrations. No one could have expected them not to flare up when the technical circular restricted school-leavers' access to technology institutes and the report on university reform suggested less-than-university colleges for technical and professional courses.

The young inmates of France's overcrowded lycees take the formal status of the baccalaureate - any baccalaureate, general, technical, vocational - absolutely literally as the passport to university. Their readiness to leap to the defence of their rights stands proven and what they are defending is the right to pile into a higher education system which generated 124,400 unqualified drop-outs in 1992.

Academics, too, were bound to bristle at the idea of local, not national, degrees and what were seen as plans to split research universities from undergraduate teaching centres. They could hardly be expected to drop their demands for urgently-needed resources and embrace instead the idea of a shake-up, if not a break-up, of the entire system.

So the familiar pattern of proposal, protest and withdrawal was played out once again. Yet Francois Fillon, the minister for higher education and research, who may have got it all wrong when it came to strategy was absolutely right on the need to look closely at the failings of the system.

When the first stirrings of discontent were heard, he tried to hold fast, warning that to refuse to tackle the problems was to be left with only two options: brutal change or permanent crisis.

The habitual rapidity of climbdown which is a hallmark of the present government has much to do with Edouard Balladur's style of leadership - he attaches great importance to la paix sociale - peace with students, fishermen or farmers.

But in the case of higher education, it has also much to do with the memory of a much more painful climbdown in 1986 when Jacques Chirac was prime minister. Then, similar plans to introduce entry selection and increase enrolment fees led to massive demonstrations.

The government refused to retreat, the protest movement grew, in heavy policing one student died, two others were maimed for life, the secretary of state for higher education resigned and the final climb-down was total.

So why is it that when next a rightwing government came to power, it began going about things in such a similar way, save for the speed of the retreat? The aims are the same, the lack of prior consultation is the same and the result, it would seem, inevitable.

University policy in France suffers from a deep ideological split which bears less and less relation to the actual nature of the problems. For decades, university teachers have been a Socialist Party powerhouse and students a natural constituency. Mass higher education was fostered and funded by socialist governments for whom selection is taboo. This meant the same system was scaled up massively without introducing enough diversity for its increasingly varied clientele. The government which could have engaged in a non-antagonistic debate as it poured in unprecedented funding, was the one that would not.

The second ideological split is institutional. The left tends to defend a single model for state universities governed by broadly representative councils under central government control while the right would like to break the mould and give more autonomy to individual institutions and departments.

This rift bedevils the much-needed debate on institutional change. The author of the recent report on university reform, Daniel Laurent, was chief advisor to Alice Saunier-Seite, the university minister who ended up barely speaking to much of the academic community.

As long as the left remains evasive and the right remains abrasive, there is little chance of defusing the growing crisis in France's higher education system. As long as the debate remains empty of any constructive content, no one can blame the students for formulating no better demand than the right to pile in.