University of Paris VIII: Vincennes - Saint-Denis

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The University of Paris VIII 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.

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 The department had its accreditation withdrawn after it was revealed that Miller had handed out course credit to someone she met on a bus.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.)