Overseas Study

Strikes in France

Press Release: March 17, 2009

The Office of Overseas Study has been in close touch with its Academic Program in Aix en Provence (APA) at the Université de Provence, a consortium program shared with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Michigan.

The Aix program administrators are keeping us apprised of this strike which was initiated by faculty members in France, not disconcerted students as is usually the case.

At this point, with no resolution in sight, the consortium is faced with the unusual prospect of the cancellation of the academic semester at the Université de Provence. Since the beginning of the strike, the APA program has ensured that students have continued with their course work whether or not the course was meeting. Many of the faculty members continued to teach their courses, despite the strike, and many stayed in touch with students via e-mail. The program also organized special lectures and independent study, and privately hired faculty to teach tutorials during the strike.

The APA program has also created an array of courses for program participants taught by local French faculty to replace the courses at the Université de Provence. Due to the uncertainty of the strike situation, the APA consortium has concluded that offering APA courses is the only way to assure full academic credit for the semester whether or not the strike is resolved.

We will continue to monitor the situation on a daily basis and will update this statement accordingly.

For more information on Indiana University’s response to the strikes in France as it pertains to the program in Aix-en-Provence, please review the statement jointly issued by the universities in the APA consortium.

Students taking courses at the Institut d'Études Politiques are not affected by the strike and will continue to take their regularly scheduled courses at the IEP.