Any mention of the names of students have been censored due to privacy concerns. We are here today speaking not as individuals, but to voice the collective concerns of a sizeable portion of our student community. The letter we will read aloud to you today was drafted integrating the comments and views of a diverse cross section of our community. It is with urgent notice that we called both a student meeting and a general forum with the administration to voice certain concerns with regards to structural problems in the administration of the campus.
Earlier this week, our student body was made aware of the mishandling of an attack on a first year student that has served as a last straw for many members of the student body. The points detailed in this letter came out of a discussion with more than students on campus, right after the news of the aggression was made public. We do not intend for this to serve as a personal attack on any individual mentioned in these discussions, but as a way to highlight the shortcomings of their actions.
We are sympathetic to the fact that the administrative team is itself overstretched and faces limitations due to structural issues and actions of the Paris campus. We do not wish to impugn them personally.
Less than a week has passed since one of our peers β one of your students β was physically assaulted on the doorsteps of [their] student residence, the A Docks CROUS residence, on December 5. The event transpired in the early hours of the morning and was provoked by a number of masked strangers. It was particularly the behaviour of the Campus Director Catherine Droszewski towards this student that was far below what would be expected of any administrator at Sciences Po or any other educational institution.
This series of events constitutes the tipping point making once and for all visible the systematic inefficiency of the administration in addressing the needs of the student body, both as academic members of this campus and as citizens of Le Havre. However, making a campus international does not just mean offering lessons in English. It means recognising that the international student community needs assistance because it faces a language barrier and a hostile bureaucratised administrative apparatus both inside and outside the campus microcosm.
