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Paris 8 University:

The University of Paris VIII or University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis (french: Université de Vincennes à Saint-Denis) was founded in 1969 as a direct response to events of May 1968. This response was twofold: it represented a sympathetic response to student demands for more freedom, but it also represented the movement of students out of central Paris, especially the Latin Quarter, where the street-fighting of 1968 had taken place.

1 University of contestation
2 Recent reforms
3 Renowed faculty members
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] University of contestation

As soon as it opened, Vincennes became the venue for a continuation of 1968, being occupied almost immediately by student radicals, and being the scene of violent confrontations with the police.

It became particularly notorious for its radical philosophy department, assembled and then headed by Michel Foucault, who in this stage of his career was at his most militant, on one occasion participating in a student occupation and pelting the police outside the building with projectiles. The scandal of this department emerged not around this incident, however, but around one of the philosophy professors, Jacques Lacan's daughter Judith Miller, who was not only a committed communist, like most of the faculty, but indeed a Maoist as well. The department had its accreditation withdrawn after it was revealed that Miller had handed out course credit to someone she met on a bus. (Miller was subsequently fired by the Education Ministry after saying in a radio interview that the university was a capitalist institution and that she was trying to make it function as badly as possible.)

[edit] Recent reforms

Since the the turmoil in the late 1960s, the University has endorsed a far more mainstream academic life and has brought in new departments, new professors, and national rules to effect this change. In 1980, the University was relocated to Saint-Denis. The University's capacity of 24,000 students per year makes "Paris VIII" an important university with internationally recognized departments in Arts, Communication Studies, and Feminist Studies, among others.