La Princesse de Cleves fait greve

I really understand nothing about the current strike at one of my work places. In all fairness, some of the proposed reforms sound bad, like budget cuts (the public French university is already essentially bankrupt) and suppression of teaching positions. The main reason behind the current strike according to the professors is that the French governement wants to change teachers' status so that they're no longer state employees with lifetime job security. As a non-French person and non-functionnaire from a land where few human beings ever attain lifetime job security, I was never really convinced that all teachers should be state employees with lifetime job security no matter how mediocore a job they did (French job promotions are based more on national exam results than actual job performance), but if this is something you are currently lucky enough to have, you will obviously fight to protect it.

As one teacher pointed out, the strike is a "French cultural experience." I feel that the cultural experience of the education strike is similar to some other equally horizon-broadening cultural experiences, like waiting in line, being constantly required to give the French bureaucracy some new type of attestation, a RIB, ID photos and a birth certificate (French translation, of course-- how else would they know that you were indeed born somewhere on a specific date?) and being pushed on the metro. Here is what I've observed so far about the nature of education strikes.

If you are a professor organising a university strike at a certain university in the valley of Disneyland, you apparently do the following:

-Receive the entirety of your monthly salary despite not working for political reasons. Wish they'd mentioned that we'd be paid for doing nothing-- maybe then the foreigners would have signed up for caring about the future of French fonctionnaires...

-Hold a general assembly every day.

-Have a demonstration every Thursday.

-Grow tired of actually being on strike and start coming in to see your students during classtime to talk to them about your reasons for being on strike and do "alternative activites" which seem to comprise communication games and strike propaganda.

-Not worry that your dramatic stance to Save French Public Education is causing students to stop attending class and drop out of school. You're striking for their future, too.

-Send email to the students directly inciting them to revolution.

-Except that when they do revolt, the president closes the uni upon hearing of student threats to occupy university buildings and break things.

-Email homework to your students and tell them how concerned you are about how they will pass their final exams with good results and be sufficiently prepared for next year's classes.

-Have a 3-hour meeting every Monday morning that always comes to the same conclusion: continue the strike. It's also always unanimous. Like Tom Petty, the professors won't back down, gonna stand my ground.

-Organise a public reading of La princesse de Cleves in multiple languages. Naturally, this is the only next logical step. But where do we go from here? On to Flaubert?