About this article, you are totally right. In France, faculty administration and medias always tried to show occupying students as irresponsible, and photos of occupation mess is a very good way to lose public support ! Also, because cleaning the university after an occupation is a very hard job, it is not responsible for a social student movement to leave it the faculty employees.

That’s why in the last few years, cleaning the university and even organizing media and public “open doors” during long student movements has been developed as a communication strategy in various French universities. Because of that, some local universities where the students don’t have a “tradition” for student movement, started to be involved in it, because of this will to preserve faculty equipment. It was very important for us, in my university, to show that we defend our right to study, and so we took care of our university as well !

Unfortunately, I think there are still some improvements to make with this strategy, as with my own experience, most of the “cleaning staff” from the students were girls … with only a few guys ! I think this cleaning problem also tells us that we have other things to strive for a change in our society …