How The University Works

I’ve been asked to update this piece by several folks with a link to the Chronicle discussion, and some commentary on the student’s memoir. Rather than hazard a translation myself, I am providing, warts and all, a few paragraphs from the Dictionary.com translation. (Yes, we reside part time in Quebec, but my francophone neighbors wisely prefer my spouse’s language skills.) The gist of the excerpts and brief introductory remarks by Anne Vidalie suggests that precarity–the European term for the institutionalization of precarious forms of employment, the government-sanctioned offloading of risk from corporations to citizens in employment, education, and health care–is the frame of reference for the experience of this student, and the tens of thousands like her in every European country, as well as the United States.

She is literally starving herself to pay her tuition and fees until she “chooses” sex work.

Before the translation, let me append this commentary from the always-astute Constance Lavender:

Frankly, there are teachers (not at the college-level) who I’ve known who have engaged in sex work to supplement low wages. In the case of my acquaintance he was a male sex worker.

I wonder whether all the frivolous comments on here have considered the system of academic apartheid that has created an academic underclass in the form of adjunct professors at the community college level who perform the majority of those institutions’ teaching tasks at a fraction of the salary of tenured professors.

Some county colleges are so segregated they actually have separate bathrooms for fulltime faculty.

Civilization, as represented by academe in this instance, is alive and well, and its limits based on class distinctions and sex differences are as deeply embedded as ever.

Translation of Moi, Laura D. by Anne Vidalie. Includes substantial excerpts from: Mes chères études by Laura D (pseud.) Maxmilo, 2008. Translation by Dictionary.com. Only a limited amount of the Vidalie text and book excerpts are presented below. 

Pushed by precariousness, they would be thousands to be transformed into escort girls occasional…. the prostitution coed. Each one with its manner. Laura, 19 years, in second year of foreign languages applied, knows what to sell its body wants to say. “I was obliged there to pay my studies”, says it…. France is not an exception. Within the framework of a study undertaken in 2006 to Kingston University, in the south-west of London, 10% of the questioned students affirmed to have comrades working like stripteaseuses, entraîneuses, masseuses or prostitutes. An amount in increase of 50% since 2000, on bottom of explosion of the school fees. Japan and Eastern Europe would be also touched. The Poles even invented a word to designate these coeds: “universtituées”.

[September 2006.]
My father works as workman and my mother is nurse. Both gain just Smic, with two children to be raised. […] I am not entitled to the purses, because I belong to these innumerable students who are in the fatal fork: very far from what one can describe as rich person, not enough poor to receive coeds assistances.

The professor asks us to fill out a card for better knowing us. […] The card includes a box “Community projects”. […] I note all of which I dream, I entrust all my make an attempt on this unknown, all the hopes which the university for me represents. It misses something. I chew my pencil while raising the eyes towards the ceiling. Then, after a few minutes, I register all in bottom of my inventory of dreams for the future: “To live fully”.

Manu really reached the height of its stinginess. He claims me money for the rent, the races, the invoices, which gives an amount bordering 450 euros per month. I do not have enough with my wages, then I fill with the pocket money little which my mother per month gives me. Not large-thing; the little which it can allow, it gives it to me. I have had for one month stopped paying the fixed price of my telephone, making pass the expenses of the apartment in priority in my expenditure. In addition to that, I work fifteen hours per week in this box of telemarketing, twenty hours with the FAC, plus the hours spent to revise. […]

… I wonder unceasingly how I will finish the month. […] Am I the only one with living that? All these situations are so ashamed, I cannot speak about it with my girlfriends coeds. How could they include/understand? Then I decline nicely their invitation with lunching and locks up me in the only free thing that it remains me: to study. All this would not pose really a problem if I had what to eat with my hunger. The inventory of fixtures of my wall cupboard with food is always also sad and the food of my mother lasted little. Pastes, pastes and always of the pastes. I look them at the time to prepare to eat, and I have the impression that they narguent me, like remembering that this evening, once again, I will not have better. At the beginning, I accompanied them by tomato sauce out of preserve, but a night indigestion disgusted me since, and the simple idea to see pastes bathing in cheap sauce gives me nauseas. “With butter, it is not so badly after all.” There is also a pot of Nutella, my short period of happiness. I do not eat of it more than one spoonful each time, to keep it more the possible for a long time. It comforts me when I open the wall cupboard.

[After losing over 20 pounds in two months, she goes to social services for help.]

- Here, I come to see you because I have large financial problems and I wanted to know if I could find of the assistance near your organization.

….

[…] Here, in a sentence, I am located on the French social scale, i.e. all in bottom. So low that I cannot treat to my meals, so low that one proposes food offered to the homeless persons to me….

The case is posed on the bed, opened. During one moment, I believe myself in a film in Tarantino, and, as I approach to see the contents of it…

- Hello, Laura. First of all, your punctuality satisfied me and I thank you. […] Today, we will play together. […] Initially, I want that you entirely strip yourself. …

In the bathroom, I make run water on my body during fifteen minutes, initially without moving. Then I catch a sponge and I rub, of all my forces, on my skin. It reddens suddenly, under the intense grattements that I inflict to him. I don’t care, I cannot stop any more. I would like to remove all this filth and to make as so yesterday had never existed.

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