University Life in France

If this article on the French university system is correct, those French students were rioting over the wrong issue. Some excerpts:

There are 32,000 students at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, but no student center, no bookstore, no yearbook, no student-run newspaper, no sports stadium, no freshman orientation, no corporate recruiting system.

The 480,000-volume central library is open only 10 hours a day, closed on Sundays and holidays. Only thirty of the library's 100 computers have Internet access.

The campus cafeterias close after lunch. Professors often do not have office hours; many do not have offices. Some classrooms are so overcrowded that at exam time, many students have to find seats elsewhere. By late afternoon every day, the campus is largely empty.

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"We are caught in a world of limits where there's no such thing as the self- made man," said Claire de la Vigne, a graduate of Nanterre who is now doing graduate work at the much more prestigious Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. "We are never taught the idea of the American dream, where everything is possible. Our guide is fear."

Read it all here.