May 20, 2008Posted by Jay Livingston
From an article on Sarkozy in the Economist
Last summer Mr Sarkozy granted the universities autonomy from central state control. This has freed them to recruit the lecturers they want, at salaries they negotiate, and to set up private foundations—with tax breaks for donors—to complement public finance. The idea, says one government adviser, is to encourage a dozen of the most go-ahead universities, such as Toulouse l, to transform themselves into centres of excellence, even if the rest carry on churning out unemployable sociology graduates as before.
This from the issue of May 1. Forty years earlier in France, an unemployable sociology student, Daniel Cohn-Bendit was one of the leaders of a movement that nearly brought down the DeGaulle government.
In the US, the workers (“hard hats”) were beating up student demonstrators, and even today, despite an extraordinarily unpopular administration and an unpopular war, there is still resentment of “elitist” educated types. We find it hard to imagine students and workers uniting against the government, especially against an administration headed by a military hero. But that’s what happened in France in May of 1968.
You can find photos
here and
here .
I wonder how long this Paris driver could keep on truckin' in the US before he got arrested (though not on kiddie porn charges, despite yesterday's efforts by Scalia, et. al. ; the ad guarantees that the model is 25 years old.)
If you look closely through the window, you can see Horace Miner in the driver’s seat.
