He’s crashingly undiplomatic.
He is also about to invest massively in French universities. He knows that they’re terrible, and is trying to make them better. Let’s see if he can do it. Certainly he’s right to give up on the sordid soixante-huitard campuses. They will never change. He seems to be concentrating on several not-yet-dead universities.
As always, though, Sarkozy accompanies his announcement of this good news with hilarious put-downs.
The roundtable [where he made the announcement] had a highly scripted feel, but as usual, Sarkozy improvised his own, somewhat rambling contribution — and he wouldn’t be Sarkozy if he didn’t manage to fling an insult at the research community as well. Putting sloths on notice that they would not benefit from the bond plan, he said: “There’s something everybody has to understand well. There are scientists who search and who find. There are others who search but don’t find — those we have to help. And then there are those who don’t search at all.”
December 28th, 2009 at 11:42AM
To not seek, and not to find, and to yield like a Frenchman.
December 28th, 2009 at 2:41PM
“an 18-member panel to come up with a new National Research and Innovation Strategy”…doubt if this approach is likely to generate much in the way of genuine innovation. See my post leaving a trillion on the table.
April 16th, 2010 at 7:00AM
The plan seems to be:
* Merge several good, but small colleges and universities into joint campuses (e.g. in Orsay/Saclay etc.).
* Fund their research.
* Turn the rest of the universities into glorified community colleges.
Needless to say, the priority will be on hard science and economics, not humanities or sociology.
Possible problems:
* Wasting money on ill-designed buildings.
* Wasting money on whatever current topics are in vogue.