American universities have long been an object of fascination for the French. 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. Even more than the differences in the physical environment of French and American systems of higher education, intellectual life and academic customs are distinctly different in these two cultures. Two typical French views about American universities are that they are intellectually isolated and politically apathetic. And also that they are socially elitist, while at the same time culturally egalitarian. To explain the French characterization of American academia as isolated and apathetic, I turn to Simone de Beauvoir, an iconic French novelist, academic, and writer, best known for her groundbreaking text, The Second Sex. 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. 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. 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. American society's devaluation of the life of the mind and in particular its subordination of the humanities, was already seen in 1947 as one of the reasons why academics may take refuge in their ivory towers. By contrast, The 2002 death of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was a national event in France. And in 2006, a new Parisian bridge crossing the Seine River was named after Simone de Beauvoir. How many American bridges are named after intellectuals? 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. 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. By the way, nearly all European systems of higher education offer the same model of free access as France. 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. To conclude, let's return to how different societies determine the role that intellectuals should play in society. Please remember that both models of the Ivory Tower and the “intellectuel engagé” exist in both France and the US. We shouldn't go too far in distinguishing them by country. Many American intellectuals are and believe they should be engaged in the world around them. And many French academics work in narrow research fields, without bringing their expertise to larger questions beyond their professional interests. We don't want to stereotype these two academic cultures, but there are historical roots behind their differences. And what about all of you students taking this course? By the very fact that you are enrolled, you are intellectually engaged. You may not have known that you are a member of a longstanding French tradition. In the next and final chapter of America Through French Eyes, we will look at the strange and spellbinding concept of America as hyper reality.
