Re: But where is that going to leave the UK? They have a major working relationship between our NSA and their GCHQ supporting echelon.
I guess the Brits will just be left out in the cold as far as military intelligence will be concerned. However, I believe the French will welcome them in their African operations (clue: Sierra Leone)
Footnote to my previous post:
Too little Affirmative Action too late....
Affirmative Action Recruiting for Top Schools Startles French Elite
John Vinocur International Herald Tribune
Saturday, March 31, 2001
PARIS Hand-printed in marker pen, a poster-sized proclamation, half-petition, half-manifesto, hangs on a wall in the lobby of the main building of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques on Rue St. Guillaume, one of the traditional student way stations in France's formation of its ruling elite.
In the old days, a poster at the political science school, almost always called Sciences Po, might have denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or told the United States hands off Nicaragua, Cuba, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Iraq or wherever the gaze of American foreign policy had focused on for the moment.
This week, a conservative group was admonishing fellow students to stand up for "equality of opportunity and merit."
The issue was the group's displeasure with a decision by the school to create a special admission track for students at high schools in seven "zones of priority education," the administrative code phrase in Paris for poor neighborhoods whose population includes large groups of immigrants from North Africa and Africa.
In reality, the undertaking represents a kind of affirmative action, without specific reference to race, that is largely new to the system of elite French universities.
At a time when the Socialist government appears to be leaning leftward in search of new momentum after disappointing results in nationwide municipal elections, Jack Lang, the education minister, said that discussion of the decision at Sciences Po "has the virtue of focusing attention on the recruitment by caste and class of our great universities and the need for a democratic country to diversify the social origin of its elites."
Virtually no one in France disputes that its most prestigious universities and graduate schools recruit almost all their students from a limited sociological pool of the white, the wealthy and the well-connected. In the early 1980s, a few years after the election of President Francois Mitterrand's first Socialist government, a book titled "Le Pouvoir rose" ("Pink Power"), showed the new leftist establishment to have no discernible difference from its rightist predecessors in matters of class and education.
For now, the planned special admission track, approved by a wide majority of Science Po's management council, is limited to the seven districts and does not cover potential applicants, regardless of their background, from other areas in France. The students selected by the new method would come under a separate quota without eliminating places reserved for candidates entering on the basis of exam scores. About 20 students are expected to enter next autumn under the special criteria.
But the change at Sciences Po - perhaps to involve 15 percent of its student body over time - goes to a deeply felt cultural issue. It lies beyond the nonarticulated racial subtext of a decision that means admission to the school of North African or other minority students who will be exempt from competitive entrance exams taken by all other applicants.
A leading French civil servant and former Sciences Po student, who asked not to be identified, said there was genuine feeling in France supporting the fairness of the current process of universal competitive entrance examinations, which, in theory, eliminate the levers of influence or wealth. "These people believe that anything else but cold exam scores represent nonobjective elements that can't, over the long run, be fairly measured," he said. But the reality is that the present exams do not bring to the elite universities the students of black, Arab and working-class origin who now reflect the multiracial character of French life.
Rather, a government-sponsored study in 1995 showed a decline to 9 percent from 29 percent since 1950 of students from working-class backgrounds in the overall makeup of three schools among those with the highest elite status, l'Ecole Nationale d'Administration (civil service), l'Ecole Normale Superieure (humanities) and Centrale (engineering).
At l'ENA, which Sciences Po serves as a kind of feeder school, the newspaper Le Monde reported, 80 percent of the students are children of executives, professionals or intellectuals. Another report said that only 0.5 percent of the parents of students entering Sciences Po were workers. When the newspaper interviewed high school students preparing for places in the special stream, many had names indicating Arab or African origin.
Historically, minority students at the most prestigious university branches in Paris have often come as foreign students from areas of Africa and the Middle East that had been regions of French colonization.
For Mr. Lang, the Sciences Po initiative is a "clear political engagement" meant to favor "higher education based on equality and intellectual demands." But canvassing the heads of a number of elite schools, Le Monde found wide skepticism and resistance, reporting that one said that the problem in disadvantaged areas was motivation, and not "permitting students to enter an elite school without a competitive examination."
Another insisted that the proper approach was showing that the elite schools were "accessible to everyone" rather than saying, "You're in a difficult situation, and things are going to be made easier for you."
UNI, the student organization whose statement was posted in the lobby at Sciences Po, has announced it will take the matter to court, arguing that the decision meant the "breakdown of equal treatment."
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iht.com
Regards,
Gus |
