Motto in English World University Established 1969 Undergraduates 14,070 Phone +33 1 49 40 67 89 Founder Hélène Cixous Endowment 113 million EUR (2013) | Type Public Chancellor Annick Allaigre Postgraduates 6,259 Total enrollment 21,974 (2014) Founded 1 January 1969 | |
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Address 2 Rue de la Liberté, 93526 Saint-Denis, France Motto Université Monde (World University) Notable alumni Félix Guattari, Slavoj Žižek, Faïza Guène, Clémentine Autain, Frédéric Encel Similar University of Paris, Paris 13 University, Paris Diderot University, Paris‑Sorbonne University, Pantheon‑Sorbonne University Profiles | ||
The University of Paris VIII or University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis (French: Université de Vincennes à Saint-Denis) is a public university in Paris. Once part of the federal University of Paris system, it is now an autonomous public institution and is part of the Université Paris Lumières. Most undergraduate degrees (except modern languages) are taught in French.
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It is one of the thirteen inheritors of the world's second oldest academic institution, the University of Paris, shortly before the latter officially ceased to exist on December 31, 1970. It was founded as a direct response to events of May 1968. This response was twofold: it was sympathetic to students' demands for more freedom, but also represented the movement of students out of central Paris, especially the Latin Quarter, where the street fighting of 1968 had taken place.
History
Founded in 1969, the new experimental institution was named "Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes" (CUEV) in Vincennes. In 1971, it gained full university status, thus allowing it to award its own degrees, and renamed "Université Paris VIII". Since moving to Saint-Denis in 1980, the university has become a major teaching and research centre for humanities in the Île-de-France region.
Tumultuous years
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 French 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.)
Recent reforms
Since 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 the suburb of Saint-Denis. The University's capacity of 24,000 students per year makes "Paris VIII" an important university with internationally recognized departments in Political Sciences, Cinema Arts, Communication Studies, and Feminist Studies.
Academics
The university offers over a hundred undergraduate, graduate and diploma courses.
Affiliations
Paris-VIII has partnerships with several universities around the world. They include the UC Berkeley, the Beijing Film Academy, Boston University and the University of Berlin as well as since 2016 the University of Rojava.
Renowned faculty members
Philosophy
Psychoanalysis
Politics and international relations
Economics
Communication sciences
Psychology
Hypermedia, new media and cyberculture
Anthropology
Sociology
Semiotics
Arts
Ethnomusicology