National education is regularly the subject of reports, higher education and its emblematic university, much less. Also the idea of ??the filmmaker Thomas Loubière to follow for a year the daily life of a doctoral student in the last year of the thesis and two directors of department is it attractive.
In Profs de fac, la vocation à l’essai, he chose the Rennes-II campus, with its successful architecture and welcoming lawn, without specifying that it is the most important center for research and higher education in arts, letters, languages, humanities and social sciences in western France, with 21,000 students – nor that this university is nicknamed “Rennes-II the red”, for its “militant commitment [which] does not date no yesterday”, as Ouest-France reminds us, on March 29, or Les Inrocks, in May 2018 already.
The brief preamble is not encouraging: teacher-researchers train two-thirds of students, but the means have not increased, while the number of entries has “exploded” for a decade. Result: “To continue to function, the universities hire under precarious contracts [des CDD] young people who provide more than a quarter of the courses. It is their exploitation that the director wishes to denounce in particular. This is therefore not an inventory of higher education in France, but a concrete, human case.
The camera thus follows Clémence Moullé Prévost during her last year of art history and archaeology, which includes her thesis defense. After seven and a half years of research, the young woman wants to become a teacher-researcher, like Colin Debuiche and Baptiste Brun, lecturers and co-directors of her department. “But the university doesn’t have a lot of vacancies,” the voiceover warns.
Too much work
We discover Clémence in class, in front of her students who are a little worried when she explains to them that she is contractual and that she has not yet signed her contract. But also at home, glued to her computer; with her friends, depressing about their future, and at the museum, where she works to finance her travels, essential for writing her thesis on the management of Cypriot heritage. With 20,000 photos collected, the student seems sincerely passionate.
We will only see the professional part of the year of Colin Debuiche and Baptiste Brun: excerpts from lessons, discussions between colleagues or meetings. Each time, they complain about the cumbersome administrative tasks, the “massification” of courses or emails from certain students who, too, feel they have too much work. “Well yeah, it’s a university education,” retorts Baptiste Brun.
Behind these “leading roles” other profiles emerge: a teacher who, on a voluntary basis, proofreads and amends the theses of students, like Clémence, to help them; Joseph Delaplace, university professor, who is trying, with Colin and Baptiste, to find them a successor to lead the department, an arduous task, the compensation being meager in the face of the investment in time and the weight of the responsibilities.
Fortunately, some reflections give rise to a smile. For example, when Clemence asks during a lesson on the Venus de Milo, “What is this sculpture missing?” “The end of the year will open up horizons for many, to the point that a teacher, a glass in hand, assures “dream of coming back to Rennes-II”.
