Welcome to the Paris university system.
Forget the Sorbonne. I'm at its downtown cousin, Paris 7, a.k.a. Jussieu. It's not exactly in the ghetto, but it has that same grimy feel to it. The corridors are painted the depressing blue of an inner-city high school and the classrooms smell of stale cigarette smoke. Every evening an iron grille is pulled across the main entrance to the university, leaving just two narrow openings for hundreds of people to squeeze through on their way in and out. Nowhere are there rolling hills, trees vibrantly changing the color of their leaves or even a single spot of green grass to relieve the eye from the monotony of man-made surface.
As it has already done so a number of times, a twinge of nostalgia makes me yearn for the Amherst campus. Amherst is summer camp, a refuge carved out of the middle of the woods. Jussieu, in the heart of civilization, is a fortress-an Institution. Too large and rigidly structured to accommodate individual needs, here the students must conform to the system, instead of the system adapting to the students. For example: since there are no schedules or catalogues that go out in the mail, it is the responsibility of the student to go to the university and find the bulletin boards where these are posted, according to the whim of the departments, often in obscure places and often not until the first day of classes.
This seeming absence of organization isn't really important, though, because unlike their American counterparts, French students do not enjoy the luxury of a "shopping" period. They sign up for the specific courses required for their dominante (major), then hunker down to do the work without worrying whether or not it's fun.
The goal of French education is not the enrichment of knowledge or the formation of character. It's more of a continued demand to do, to demonstrate the competence and organization that will qualify you for a job someday after you get out. In this spirit (and since the members of the massive bureaucracy aren't paid nearly enough to go out of their way for anyone), students in the university system are left pretty much to fend for themselves. You have to wander around on your own until you figure out what's what; I spent the majority of last week doing just that. A few highlights:
Monday. I finally find the lecture section of my medieval history course and settle in. Every visible inch of the hard wooden benches and desks is covered in graffiti. The professor begins speaking, but many of the students continue talking among themselves in a constant, low undertone that makes the lesson in a foreign language particularly difficult for me to understand. Whenever the murmur threatens to become a roar, the professor turns on the microphone, using its screeching feedback more as a disciplinary tool than as a learning aid. This doesn't stop the girl next to me from ducking her head behind a seat to answer her cell phone or hold back the kids who start to leave en masse just as soon as the needle on the wall clock stands at five till. I miss Amherst seminars.
Tuesday. Now this is more like it, I think, settling into a linguistics course of less than 25. The class is so small that the professor has us introduce ourselves individually, but when he comes to my halting presentation he only looks at me sympathetically, as if I were a not-very-bright five-year-old struggling to get the words out. As he begins his lecture, I discover why: I cannot understand a thing he says. For a time, I strain to comprehend him, then give up and spend the rest of the class mindlessly copying down phonetics charts, wondering if my French is really that bad. Later that day, I find out the course is only for students in troisième cycle-the equivalent of grad school.
Wednesday. I oversleep and arrive at my psych lecture two minutes late. The auditorium is so full, I wind up perched on the top step, with my notebook balanced precariously on my knees. This audience is more attentive than the one at my history lecture, but even hearing the professor speak clearly leaves me with questions. Does anyone really take the Oedipus complex seriously these days? Is this whole course going to be devoted to Freud? Am I neurotic? At the end of the lesson, I am swept out the door and down the stairwell by hundreds of students herding together to go eat lunch. Next to the sign pointing to the third floor landing, some wit has scribbled Moutons! Suivre les flèches! (Sheep, follow the arrows!) My sentiments exactly.
Thursday. I introduce myself to the teacher of my huge medieval history study section. She welcomes me to France, then says, "Things are different here. Very different. You'll find out soon." Her tone is sweet but sadistic, as if issuing a challenge. I sign up later that day and receive an intimidatingly long list of "suggested" readings (i.e., just about anything in them is fair game for the final exam, which will determine 50 percent of my grade). I am also given a handful of terminally boring medieval texts to analyze. At least someone was thoughtful enough to translate them out of Latin.
Friday. I'm late for an off-campus course whose first meeting I already missed last week, after copying down the wrong room number, so I run down the streets of Paris' Chinatown, dodging parked motorcycles and fruit stands like an action hero. When I finally reach the room, out of breath, no one is there but a few kids smoking and standing outside the door. The class has been canceled for the day. With my windfall of free time, I decide to go back across town and scope out a course on the main campus. I sprint through the subway, knowing I'll just make it in time if I hurry. But when I get back, there is no mention of the course posted anywhere, and the mystery is not solved until I hunt out the main department and find out the class starts next week.
Getting started in school here has been frustrating, wearisome and yet oddly exhilarating. I have the sensation I am passing a test, and not an academic one, that I am becoming oriented to the lay of the land around me.
Though Parisian universities are not as serene or orderly as Amherst, the seeming challenge of that chaos is perhaps what drew me to France after two years in tranquil Massachusetts. As a public school autodidact, I was prepared for the independence of a larger system, though its terrible anonymity still makes me yearn for the friends I've left behind. But, in academic terms, at 20 years old I have my own knowledge base, my own methods of study, and I don't need to be coddled, counseled or cushioned to put them into practice. Amherst makes it easy to learn, yet high entrance standards aside, it's odd in a way that an Amherst degree is so prestigious, when it's probably harder to make it through four years at a place like Jussieu.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not proposing to turn Amherst into boot camp. On the contrary, just a few days in a huge foreign university has made me appreciate the advantages that Amherst students enjoy compared to their counterparts elsewhere. But this is, as my mother would put it, "how the other half lives." It's not even the other half, but the remainder of a fortunate one percent, in a world where less than one in a hundred people holds the equivalent of a bachelor's degree. Looking at it that way is an education in itself, when we realize just how lucky we are.