My cousin, humanities professor in the U.S., recently read the following on a mailing list, full text of which can be found here, and asked for my opinion. Propaganda needs to be in black or white, and allows for no gray. I colored what I considered propaganda terms in black.

France has a public university system with teaching and research of high quality. French universities have always enjoyed independence, freedom and recognition. However, within the last few months, the French government, without any discussion or consultation, has decided to brutally destroy this system and replace it with a market-based model in which arbitrary decisions and instability would prevail.

• The previous laws controlling the maximum number of teaching hours for academic staff will be replaced by a system allowing individual staff to be arbitrarily targeted and overloaded with teaching hours.

• Tenured positions are being cut dramatically and replaced by temporary insecure appointments.

• PhD students can now be dismissed without any justification (or right of appeal) during the first six months of their programme. They can also be made available to private industry without any protection by legislation normally concerning workers’ rights.

• Teacher training is being heavily modified without any discussion.

• Although Universities will become nominally autonomous, in fact they will be obliged to compete with each other under reinforced government control. With insufficient funding, they will soon be obliged to increase tuition fees. Financial dependence will place them under the influence of local funding sources.

• The function of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique [CNRS] will be reduced from an internationally recognized institution for fundamental research to a funding agency managed by technocrats.

• Academic researchers will be [only] evaluated by an inadequate and inept “quantitative” methodology that has been rejected by all academic societies.

I am a little frustrated with both sides (not to mention with formatting this post) – there is a huge need for university reform, but letting the perception gain ground that the government was riding roughshod over the entire system was arrogant. It goes over very badly. Valérie Pécresse, Minister for Higher Education and Research, could have brought in a recognized mediator from the beginning. Now, even the mediator has been rejected as a tool of the government. (The English translation is automatic so sometimes is a little funny.)

Sarkozy made a bad gaffe in a recent speech where he listened to I don’t know which idiot advisor and equated the assessment of research quality with a simple bibliometric quantity – this is a very sore point across all research disciplines and antedates Sarkozy by quite a bit. As we all know here. But the proposition to have accountability for university lecturer-researchers just brings their career evaluation in line with what we have to do at the INSERM and the (possibly moribund?) CNRS. Nature ran a welcome editorial lambasting Sarkozy’s rhetoric and the poor strategy in employing it. (“The speech was a typically melodramatic example of la méthode Sarkozy and, if it contained some home truths, it was largely a caricature.”). But in Declan Butler’s factual report about the current strikes, he wrote that “university researchers are used to being assessed nationally. The new policy, which is in line with the government’s overall goal of giving universities greater autonomy, transfers that responsibility to the university president and board.” However, they were not assessed in any real way, nationally. That should change in the same way it did for the other research organizations – assessments of research groups should be made by the new national AERES, so there is not a multiple-standard system, and assessments of individual careers along a standard set of guidelines that all employers of researchers should follow, be they the Universities of Toulouse or Paris, INRA, INSERM, CNRS, CEA or you name it.

An earlier editorial was also spot on:

But this is France, where a naive interpretation of égalité has made taboo the competitive universities of Anglo-Saxon countries, and where most researchers are civil servants on identical pay scales. […] The [INSERM] agency has been transformed into eight thematic institutes, which will regroup and concentrate research now spread across the CNRS and other agencies. A similar modernization of the CNRS, expected in June, is likely to transform it into a set of distinct institutes, each managing its own labs and long-term strategy. […] The root problem [of French research] is that fixed pay scales and slow recruitment procedures make it almost impossible for France to compete in the highly competitive international job market.

Goodness knows things are inefficient as they are currently, and I am not sure they would be worse under the new proposal, just different. Some people are simply terrified of change, but as I have already written recently somewhere here on NN, Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis (All things change, and we change with them).