By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 8, 2009

MONTPELLIER, France -- During months of campus protests here, the only serious violence erupted one evening when student activists got in a fight over which movie to show during the all-night occupation of a large classroom.

Police rushed in after one side started shattering windows, student strikers recalled, but the officers were quickly ordered to back off, and the strike went on. And on. For more than three months, Paul-Valery University, the University of Montpellier's liberal arts campus, was paralyzed by an ill-defined movement set off by changes that President Nicolas Sarkozy's government tried to impose on France's long-ailing public university system.

"Block everything," a slogan spray-painted on a classroom wall, became the university fight song. Student protesters, allied with some professors, prevented anyone from entering offices or classrooms, caused classes to be canceled and grades to be withheld, and threatened to stop final exams.

Paul-Valery, with its leafy campus in a suburb of this southern French city, was one of more than 20 universities -- a quarter of the country's university network -- that ground to a halt when the "blockages" began in February, affecting more than 350,000 French students.

The strikes have launched a new round of hand-wringing over France's ancient and tradition-heavy university system. Once a source of national pride, drawing scholars from around the world and making Paris's Latin Quarter a center of intellectual ferment, it has suffered in recent years from inadequate funding, overcrowding and bureaucratic sclerosis.

As a result, French youths in increasing numbers have turned away from public universities, seeking instead to enter private business schools or the government's ultra-select "grandes ecoles" that function as an A-list of higher education in France. Only a third of secondary school students queried in a recent poll said their first choice was to attend a public university.

In the view of many professors and students, the goal of Sarkozy's restructuring was to foster competition among the country's 83 universities, leading to differences in prestige, tuition and financial backing. That challenged the French university tradition, in which fees are uniformly low and diplomas from all public institutions are equally regarded.

Sabrina Reliere, 23, a third-year social studies student at Paul-Valery, predicted that the inevitable consequence of Sarkozy's plans would be a rise in tuition at well-regarded universities and perhaps a tiered system of good and less-good institutions. That would threaten the universities' traditional role as a "social elevator," ushering workers' children into the middle class, pointed out a classmate, Pierre Arnaud.

"They are trying to make the university into a place for the elite, the American way," said Arnaud, 22, the son of a worker from Le Mans.

Reaching into her bag, Reliere pulled out a student card showing that she paid the equivalent of $650 for this year's studies, including comprehensive health insurance. Fearing that competition among universities would bring an end to such a bargain, she said, a majority of Paul-Valery's 15,000 students backed the strike when it began right after winter holidays.

But before long, in the course of endless student assemblies, the strikers slipped toward broader political goals, she said. Non-students and other activists joined, steering student anger toward Sarkozy's business-friendly government, the world financial crisis, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and, one student said, even a debate over the qualifications of Vladimir Putin to be Russia's leader.

"You start with a clear goal," Reliere said, sucking on a cigarette during a break from researching her thesis. "But you end up talking about the war in Israel, swine flu and all the rest. And pretty soon, outsiders come and things harden."

Worried about impending exams and no longer entirely sure what the protests were about, students voted in recent days to lift the strike at several universities, including here. Sarkozy's minister of higher education, Valérie Pécresse, has set aside the restructuring plans for the time being, turning to the task of organizing makeup classes and rescheduling final exams. Results vary from campus to campus, leaving thousands of students in limbo, wondering whether they will lose credit for an entire academic year.

At Paul-Valery this week, campus life seemed at first glance to be ordinary, even idyllic, despite the long strike. Some students pored over books, sitting on benches under shade trees. Others sprawled on lawns to gossip and enjoy the warm sun of southern France. Professors passed along the walkways discussing exam schedules. In a few buildings, classes were underway.

But Arnaud, a geography major who said he was an active participant in the blockage, complained that he and his classmates still had not received grades from the first semester, much less schedules for makeup classes. Students seeking to enroll in summer internships or exchange programs were stymied by the lack of official documents, he noted.

Some foreign students who have summer obligations at home were worried by the possibility of delayed exams. But Jenna Lubicich, a 21-year-old from the State University of New York at Oneonta who is studying in Montpellier University's program for foreigners, said her classes were uninterrupted throughout the uproar.

"I didn't understand it anyway," she said. "It's their country, their culture."

Sarkozy's original restructuring, imposed soon after he came to power in 2007, granted university presidents more autonomy from the Higher Education Ministry. Building on that, Pécresse sought this year to allow the presidents to trim the number of professorships, redefine faculty members' qualifications and exercise more control over research grants.

Professors, feeling threatened by the proposals, started withholding grades. They were joined by the student movement, which soon eclipsed what the professors had started and embraced the political and social themes of the French left.

"A typhoon has once again hit French universities in 2009," Jean-Robert Pitte, former president of the Sorbonne, or University of Paris IV, wrote Thursday in Le Figaro newspaper. "After three months of strikes, the stock of confidence that people have in them has been lastingly damaged."

Although a student assembly at Paul-Valery voted Monday to resume classes, another assembly has been called for this Monday and could reverse the decision, said Arnaud, who sported a plastic crescent in his left earlobe and a yellow chip embedded in the skin above his right eye.

Looking back, Arnaud said the strike succeeded in bringing attention to students' and professors' concerns about the restructuring plan. But he said its broader goals -- taking "the struggle" off campus and "assembling the masses" against Sarkozy's government -- failed to materialize.