Olivier Vial is director of CERU, the university ideas lab, and president of UNI.
"History is first played out like a drama, and repeats itself like a comedy," wrote Jacques Ellul. By dint of stuttering to tirelessly replay the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor, the story of emancipation and social struggles is nothing more than a ridiculous parody of itself. It seems far from Victor Schoelcher's fight for the abolition of slavery or that of suffragettes for the right to vote of women. Now, our resistance fighters 2.0, unions of indignant professionals, campaign for the creation of “neutral” toilets, denounce the way in which men sit in public. A supposed symbol of their desire to dominate the space. They prohibit theatrical performances accused of practicing "cultural appropriation", censor those who do not think like them in the name of a very personal vision of democracy. Mobilizing each day, against conceptual chimeras that they themselves have created in their university laboratories in gender studies and other postcolonial studies.
Being reduced to designating these personalities as symbols of the University reveals the cultural poverty of those who have established this prize list.This week, it was again in the name of the fight for Good against Evil or the Male (both spellings are accepted) that UNEF renamed the lecture halls of the University of Nanterre to give them the name of "women influential ”. The selfies having replaced the manifestos, it was by a well-photographed cliché that we discovered the names of the winners chosen by the activists of this student union: the singers Beyoncé and Aya Nakamura, as well as the activists Assa Traoré and Rokhaya Diallo . The mocking reactions immediately flooded social networks. It is true that being reduced to designating these personalities as symbols of the University reveals the cultural poverty of those who established this list of achievements. Their references seem to boil down to the current Twitter trends.
Mary Jackson, pioneer of the American aerospace program, Toni Morrisson, Nobel Prize in literature, or Joséphine Baker, who did not hesitate to join forces with the French resistance to defend her adopted country; these are some names, otherwise more remarkable, that one could have whispered to this needy jury if the exercise in itself was not as ridiculous as it was detestable.
Inculture and stupidity are, in fact, only the emerged faces of the problem embodied here by UNEF. The discomfort is deep. To make fun of it and to smile at it is to take the risk of letting the ideologies that nourish these nonsense develop and end up intoxicating a large part of our societies.
This lack of education that these activists are accused of is, as much at home as it is undergone as assumed. They are the fruit of the educational policy carried out for decades. The academic and intellectual left, in the wake of Gramsci and Bourdieu, has constantly denounced classical and "bourgeois" culture as an instrument of domination and social reproduction. From then on, the school endeavored to pass the rod of relativism and leveling all of our school programs. Everything is equal and nothing has any value. When for years "thoughtful observation of the language" replaces the teaching of French and grammar, which may be astonished that reading an assembly instruction can be considered equivalent to studying Comedy human of Balzac. The recent project to abolish the general culture tests from the high civil service tests is the sign that the plane continues to do its work ... If nothing stops it, soon no one will find anything wrong with the designation of Beyoncé and Aya Nakamura.
The aim of teaching is no longer to transmit knowledge and culture, but on the contrary to offer tools allowing pupils to free themselves from so-called stereotypes.But our culture is no longer simply accused of being an instrument of reproduction, it is also suspected of maintaining stereotypes of all kinds which should be deconstructed. The objective of teaching is no longer to transmit knowledge and a culture, but on the contrary to offer tools and concepts allowing students to emancipate themselves from it to free themselves from these so-called stereotypes. This fight, already old, for the emancipation which had been totally embodied by Vincent Peillon and Najat Vallaud-Belkacem at the Ministry of National Education, came into resonance with the offensive of the followers of decolonialism. The latter deploy, thanks to the financial benevolence of the Ministry of Higher Education, an arsenal of concepts aimed at deconstructing republican universalism, opposing "the racialized" to those who are not, to pass all effort integration for violence, to accuse France of being a regime practicing "state racism", to encourage a form of separatism, an assumed and desired apartheid, in which unmixed meetings, ie - to say, essentially, white men are banalized.
For several years, under the leadership of these post-colonial academics and indigenist and racialist activists "the dynamic of political correctness has become radicalized" as the sociologist Mathieu Bock-Côté points out, transforming "the hatred of the West into scientifically recognized knowledge . " Therefore, soon, no one will find fault with the designation of activists as virulent as Assa Traore and Rokhaya Diallo.
If we are still surprised, it is because there is still time to act. No longer just smile, because they are very serious.
