0:06
With their vast yet self contained campuses dotted with ivy covered
brick buildings, complete with modern equipped classrooms,
laboratories and sleeping and dining quarters for students.
American college campuses stand in stark contrast to French institutions of
higher learning, which are intricately integrated into the urban landscapes
of France's cities, and pay scant heed to any extracurricular activities that
require student centers, sporting fields, gymnasiums, or Olympic-sized pools.
1:29
In 1947 Beauvoir visited the United States for
the first time on an organized tour by the French government.
She delivered lectures on French literature and
philosophy to French Departments in several American universities.
Vassar, Oberlin, University of Pennsylvania.
Mills, Berkeley, UCLA, Smith,
Yale, Wellesley, Princeton, Harvard, and Rice.
In the book she published after her visit, America Day by Day,
Beauvoir made many compelling observations about the US, about American women,
and relations between the sexes, about conformism and about race.
But because she was an intellectual,
her most interesting commentaries concern American academic and intellectual life.
Beauvoir was struck most by the intellectual isolation and
political apathy of American professors and college students.
To understand her point of view, let's look at the concept of the Ivory Tower,
which has come to describe the modern American university
with it's campus culture that is unknown almost anywhere else in the world.
Though now being replicated in unlikely places such as Georgetown in Qatar and
NYU in Abu Dhabi, two of my alma maters.
The Ivory Tower has become a metaphor for a highly specialized and
insulated approach to learning and
research that is disconnected from world affairs and daily life.
In the US, for example, many professors and students do work and
live apart from the hustle-bustle of their cities and towns.
They spend most of their time in ivy-draped campuses, where they
are segregated into disciplinary silos, and closeted in front of their computers.
Grade-conscious students are focused on their 15 credits per semester.
No one has the time or the will to initiate or even attend political
debates, rallies, or street demonstrations about important issues of the day.
Often, in fact, many of those populating campuses
are completely uninformed of world or even local affairs, because they are too
preoccupied with their research to even read the newspaper or consult other media.
Simone de Beauvoir saw such ignorance and apathy on the college campuses she
visited in 1947 and she thought it was deplorable.
Why?
Because she came from a place where students, academics, and writers and
even average French persons discussed political events amongst themselves
regularly, engaged in the political debates of their era and
wrestled with many of the great philosophical questions.
4:19
The notion of the intellectuel engagé or engaged intellectual is a French idea.
Its the opposite of the Ivory Tower.
Intellectual Engagement is the belief that if you are an intellectual or an academic,
if your purpose in life is to work with ideas, then you have a responsibility to
be engaged in what's happening around you and in world affairs.
Beauvoir was an engaged intellectual and
so was her cohort of friends and colleagues.
4:50
During her lecture circuit of French departments in the United States,
Beauvoir, like many other French intellectuals, surmised
that American society valued intellectuals much less than French society.
She wrote, in my brief experience, I sense that America is hard on intellectuals.
Publishers and editors size up your mind in a critical and
distasteful way, like an impresario asking a dancer to show her legs.
6:00
Another common French view of American university life
is its seeming contradiction between elitism and egalitarianism.
Let's start with elitism.
Sticker shock cannot even begin to describe the effect on French people
when they learn the price of tuition at a four year American college or university.
Of course, many Americans are dismayed at the cost of higher education
in their own country.
But let's look at it from a French perspective so
as to benefit from the distance.
There are no private French universities to speak of.
Yes, there are hierarchies of good French universities that are highly
competitive in their admissions, and less well-reputed ones.
But they all cost about the same amount of money, that is 200 Euros a year in fees.
6:52
Such affordable, indeed practically free, education up to the highest levels
of masters and doctorate is considered a universal right by all French citizens.
So when they learn how American higher education
is only available to the small minority who can afford it, or
to those lucky few who win scholarships, or most commonly
to those who indebt themselves heavily to obtain a degree, they can rightfully
conclude that American universities are socioeconomically elitist.
7:36
At the same time,
many French people notice a surprising paradox about American university life.
They're amazed at the casual and
egalitarian relationships between American students and professors.
Open-door policies for office hours,
classroom discussions that value student opinion as much as the professor's
expertise, and extracurricular social interactions between faculty and
students are simply not the norm in the more culturally,
hierarchical French structures of higher learning.
Dr. Anne S. ChaoLecturer
Dr. Julie FetteAssociate Professor
Dr. Jeffrey FleisherAssociate Professor
Dr. Moramay López-AlonsoAssociate Professor
