Université Paris VIII

The University of Paris VIII or University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis (French: Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis or Université de Vincennes à Saint-Denis) is a public university in Paris. Once part of the federal University of Paris system, it is now an autonomous public institution and is part of the Université Paris Lumières. Most undergraduate degrees (except modern languages) are taught in French.

It is one of the thirteen successors of the world's second oldest academic institution, the University of Paris, and was established shortly before the latter officially ceased to exist on 31 December 1970. It was founded as a direct response to events of May 1968. This response was twofold: it was sympathetic to students' demands for more freedom, but also represented the movement of students out of central Paris, especially the Latin Quarter, where the street fighting of 1968 had taken place.

Founded in 1969, the new experimental institution was named Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes (CUEV) in Vincennes. In 1971, it gained full university status, thus allowing it to award its own degrees, and renamed "Université Paris VIII". Since moving to Saint-Denis in 1980, the university has become a major teaching and research centre for humanities in the Île-de-France region.

As soon as it opened, Vincennes became the venue for a continuation of 1968, being occupied almost immediately by student radicals, and being the scene of violent confrontations with the police.

It became particularly notorious for its radical philosophy department, assembled and then headed by Michel Foucault, who in this stage of his career was at his most militant, on one occasion participating in a student occupation and pelting the police outside the building with projectiles. The scandal of this department emerged not around this incident, however, but around one of the philosophy professors, Jacques Lacan's daughter Judith Miller, who was not only a committed communist, like most of the faculty, but indeed a Maoist as well. The department had its accreditation withdrawn after it was revealed that Miller had handed out course credit to someone she met on a bus. (Miller was subsequently fired by the French education ministry after saying in a radio interview that the university was a capitalist institution and that she was trying to make it function as badly as possible.)