“The presence of employees is not specific to Vincennes (although there are more of them than in other universities). What is specific, it seems to me, is that employees do not give up their employee status when they enter the university, that they participate in the course by contributing their personal and professional experience, and that this experience often becomes a dynamic element in the work that is done and in the communication that takes place between the different groups. Many examples could be given of the active role played by student employees in the constitution and communication of knowledge, in exchanges between students and in challenging the traditional teacher/teacher relationship. Thus, a value unit on the history of urban work will use material contributed by a postal worker or bank employee student, a course on the psychiatric institution will include nurses, a course on public finance will benefit from the contribution of a student civil servant from the Ministry of Finance, a course on the press will capitalise on the experience of computer science students, etc. (...) There is perhaps another element at play: studying at Vincennes does not appear to divide people's lives, but rather unites and reunites them. (...)
Foreign students bring other dimensions. Their presence is one of the components of the extraordinary mix that takes place in Vincennes. In many cases, it has enabled French students to become much more directly aware of the problems of the Third World and has helped to shake them out of their Eurocentrism.” (Debouzy 1978, 87-8).
