Inside La Sorbonne

On my final post about Journees du Patrimoine, let me take you inside the storied halls of La Sorbonne.  It ranks up there with Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Heidelberg in historical importance and prestige, having been founded in 1150 with a stunning list of former professors and students, including Balzac, Poincare, Diderot, Voltaire, Ampere, eleven French presidents, three popes, and many Nobel Prize winners.  And, it may surprise you to learn that it no longer exists.  

During the student protests of 1968, they demanded the closing, or total reform, of what they viewed as an elitist institution.  And so La Sorbonne, as it had existed for close to a millenium, shut it doors in 1970.  A reorganization and reimagining of French higher education occurred, and a new institution called Paris-Sorbonne was born, which inherited buildings and some faculty and staff from the old institution.  More recently, it merged with Pierre and Marie Curie University and changed its name again.  Perhaps the most important change post-1970 is that these new universities--the successor to La Sorbonne as well as many others formed at the same time--do not have selective admissions.  We were told that anyone (actually, any French citizen, I assume) with a high school degree can enroll and take classes there.  Class sizes are very large, per pupil spending is quite low, and interaction with faculty is far from the sort that students at prestigious US universities would expect.  

We were very anxious to take a look inside the normally-closed campus to see whether the buildings still reflected the grandeur of a world-famous, centuries-old institution of higher learning or whether they had lost some of their luster in the years since the reorganization.  You will see that it was most definitely the former.  

Below is the stained glass window above the entry to the main building.

Here is an ornament at the base of one of the staircases, and below that are ceremonial maces, which I presume have been used for academic processions.

A fancy faculty meeting room

Details from one of the many murals depicting famous scenes from science and the humanities.

This is a room where PhD candidates defend their theses!  (I'm not sure whether I would have been excited or intimidated to defend my thesis there.  We actually don't have thesis defenses in the Economics Department at MIT, so I was neither excited not intimidated to defend in what would have surely been a characterless room circa 1960 with mismatched and broken Steelcase office furniture.)

After leaving the main building we walked across a courtyard with a statue of Victor Hugo (of course) and finally entered the chapel.  It had a completely over-the-top burial crypt for Cardinal Richelieu, who was the head of La Sorbonne at some point and was not, one would assume, a modest man.