Fifteen disrupted universities, justice demands the evacuation of Montpellier-III<

Fifteen universities were disrupted, Wednesday, April 18. On some campuses, the movement seems to be taking root while others are experiencing temporary unrest. In a month of student mobilization against the law on student orientation and success, around thirty universities were affected at one time by an occupation of a room, a partial or complete blockage or even the relocation of courses or exams.

This is the first decision of its kind: the administrative court ordered Wednesday the occupants of the Montpellier-III-Paul-Valéry University, blocked since mid-February, to "release the premises without delay". The ball is now in the court of the president of the university, who had filed this appeal: it is up to him to request the intervention of the police from the prefect.

The court also, in another order, confirmed that certain exams could take place remotely, as decided by the presidency of the Paul-Valéry university, by rejecting the request of Solidaires and SUD-Education to suspend them.

Following the blocking of several buildings, the president of the University of Rouen, Joël Alexandre, decided on Wednesday to close his main campus from Thursday to Saturday included. "All courses scheduled for these days are canceled and exams postponed" on the Mont-Saint-Aignan campus, the university said in a press release.

Students at the University of Strasbourg, where several buildings have been blocked for three weeks, voted for the resumption of classes by 71.88% during an electronic consultation organized by the presidency of the establishment.

On the Aix campus, the Faculty of Letters and Law has been disrupted in recent days: access to the Egger building is completely blocked. But the university ensures that the exams were able to be held, being relocated to other buildings. In Marseille, a building on the Saint-Charles site of the Faculty of Sciences is still occupied by "about twenty students", according to the university. A next GA should be held Thursday, April 19 at 4 p.m. to decide on the continuation of the movement.

In Bordeaux, the humanities exams have been relocated to circumvent the blockage and should be held from next week.

The University of Paris-VIII-Saint-Denis remained blocked on Wednesday, no teaching or research activity could be held. The student mobilization committee also calls for "the holding of the next national coordination of students" within its walls, Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 April.

The protest also won Sciences Po, where students blocked entry overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday.

Other Parisian universities are still disrupted. At Paris-I, the Tolbiac site remains blocked.

In Paris-Nanterre, nearly 1,600 participants voted on Tuesday to renew the blockage until Thursday, the date of the next GA. The vast majority of buildings are blocked as exams were to be held this week. The administration says it is thinking “very concretely about the methods of postponing the partials which could not be held this week, as well as the organization of future exams”.

On the Clignancourt site of Sorbonne-university (Paris-IV), as well as the Censier site of Paris-III, disrupted last week, a week of vacation or revisions has begun. At Paris-III, the administration specified on April 13 that, “as provided for by the university calendar, the university [was] closed the week of April 16 to 21”.

The right-wing student union UNI castigated Wednesday before the administrative court "a cardboard authority", criticizing the decision of the police headquarters not to involve the police to lift the blockade of the university site of Tolbiac. The site, occupied since March 26 by students and activists, has become one of the emblematic places of the mobilization.

On April 11, the president of the university, Mr. Haddad, had requested the intervention of the police to lift the blockage, in particular after the discovery of Molotov cocktails in the establishment. The police had ruled out such a sensitive operation in this 22-storey tower. The UNI, which had filed a first appeal against the university, this time asked the administrative judge for interim measures to "order the prefect to release Tolbiac and allow students to be able to take their exams there in good conditions".

The intervention of the police forces, “the police prefect has been working on it every day since the referral, and since today, every hour”, replied Ahmed Slimani, deputy head of the legal department of the police prefecture.

The university also clarified that the partials scheduled for May 2 to 19 would take place, even if the terms, and in particular the places, remain to be defined, and that an additional week had been added to "allow the postponement examinations that should have taken place now”. The order will be issued Thursday morning.

The president of the University of Rennes-II, for his part, did not rule out Tuesday resorting to public force, the day after a vote which renewed the blockage until April 30. “On the political side, I have already contacted the minister on several occasions (…) but, on the security side, I am worried about the evolution of conditions in the occupied buildings, and whether the police intervention is the only one possible, I will have to resort to it,” Olivier David told AFP. The mobilized staff proposed to the students to organize a common AG on Thursday April 19th.

The students of the Nancy and Metz sites will be asked to decide electronically on Thursday April 19 on the continuation of the mobilization.

Stopped for more than two weeks, the Tertre literature campus in Nantes remained blocked on Wednesday. This was also the case at Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès University, where the exams were postponed to the beginning of June.

The World with AFP

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