By V4 Agency
First-year students at a university were dumbfounded by the decision of the management of the school’s political institute, who barred them from naming their class after a professor who was brutally decapitated a few months ago. However, the university’s director went even further and signed a petition calling for the resignation of a minister, who has plans to suppress Islamo-leftism at universities.
In France, education and politics are now fully intertwined in higher education institutions, something that is especially true for universities offering courses in political studies.
A sad example to illustrate the situation is the Sciences Po University in Strasbourg, where first-graders thought it was a good idea to name their class after Samuel Paty, the French history teacher who was brutally beheaded in broad daylight last October. The university’s management, however, vetoed the students’ initiative, despite the fact that Samuel Paty’s name was among the top candidates in the first round of voting and easily made it to the second round. In a move that baffled many, the university board simply deleted Samuel Paty’s name from the list without providing any explanation, as reported by the French weekly Marianne.
Right-wing university association UNI protested against the incident, saying the decision was another example of how far-left ideology was spreading and penetrating universities.
In protest, members of the organisation decided to name the university’s main lecture hall after Samuel Paty. They sellotaped a poster with the decapitated teacher’s name to the entrance of the hall, stressing that Samuel Paty stood for freedom of speech and that UNI members would continue to fight against Islamo-leftism at the university.
The weekly appears to be covering the events in a much more cautious tone. In writes that it cannot be unequivocally stated that the case involved censorship, because the university management had not specified the terms of the vote. All that is known is that when the application was announced, the institute’s website identified two basic criteria: the students had to choose a person who had passed away and whose figure was not divisive.
Responding to questions by the press, the IEP student union denied any accusation of censorship, arguing that the management wanted to establish an alternating pattern between men and women for the various years, an explanation that failed to convince many students. A lot of them thought it was a disgrace having to attend a university where they are supposed to learn about democracy, yet the management does not respect a democratic decision by the students. Others believed that the decision was based on fear or even myopia. Several students believe that the board is promoting equality, while sweeping the real problems under the rug.
In an interview with the new French right-wing newspaper L’Incorrect, Uni Strasbourg head Francois Blumenroeder said among the nine people originally chosen by the first-year students were seven female and two male ccharacters, namely Samuel Paty and Alan Turing, the renowned mathematician. According to the student union, the university management would have preferred a female candidate, but this was not a specifically determined criterion. The circumstances of announcing the vote’s winner are also unclear. The names selected in the first round were originally supposed to be disclosed on Friday after approval by the board, but no announcement was made. The students were not notified over the weekend either. The results were eventually published on Tuesday, when it turned out that the board had decided to remove Samuel Paty’s name from the list.
The student union then explained that the board eventually decided to remove evrey male names from the list under the auspices of equality. This is how the choice fell on the late Gisele Halimi, a lawyer and activist of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FNL), who died last summer. It must be of little consolation to those who voted for Samual Paty that Tunisian-born Gisele Halimi had an extremely negative view of Islamists, the weekly Marianne commented.
Meanwhile, it also came to light that the head of the university in question, Jean-Philippe Heurtin, had signed a petition calling for the resignation of Higher Education Minister Frederique Vidal, who wants to crack down on Islamo-leftism at French universities.
The petition was launched in February by more than six hundred university professors, including economist Thomas Piketty and sociologist Dominique Meda, demanding that France’s higher education minister should resign over the witch-hunt launched against members of the academia. , The petition – already signed by over 22 people, according to universiteouverte.org -claims that the minister, instead of defending the profession, continues to slander its representatives, who do nothing to hinder or prevent professors from doing their research, contrary to what Frederique Vidal hasa said. The petition also states that the employees of higher education institutions find the minister unworthy to represent their interests and therefore demand her departure.