Strikes cripple French universities

Staff and students at almost a quarter of France's state-run universities remain on strike over government plans to overhaul the higher education system.

The protests are now in their 14th week and may mean that some pupils, who have missed out on months of teaching, will have to miss their exams and repeat an entire academic year, the BBC's Emma Jane Kirby in Paris says.

In 1968, the then French education minister, Alain Peyrefitte, said the French university system was "like organising a shipwreck to find out who could swim".

Forty years on and you get the feeling that an awful lot of people in higher education here are not swimming but drowning.

Despite concessions by the education ministry, students and lecturers at around 20 of France's 83 state-run universities are still on strike this week, barricading classrooms and paralysing faculties.

Last month, statistics students from the technical college in the southern town of Avignon took their final exam in a local branch of McDonald's because their faculty had been shut by protesters.

The government has warned that if lectures do not resume quickly, students across the country will have to miss their exams and may have to forfeit an entire undergraduate year, damaging France's academic reputation abroad.

But students like Loan, who is studying English at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, says that will not put them off.

"I've been on strike for three months now," she told me as she sat on the steps of the Sorbonne attending an "outdoor" lecture as part of a publicity stunt for the protest.

"And missing some exams is nothing compared to this attack on our public services."