A BBC reporter in Paris describes the paralyzed French university system.

… The French leader wants to give individual universities more autonomy to run their faculties along the lines of successful commercial businesses and to make them more competitive.

Students and lecturers, however, have interpreted his proposal as an ultra-capitalist attempt to privatise the education system which will simply force up fees.

“Competition is just a right-wing ideology – in the case of humanities, competitiveness doesn’t even make any sense,” says Sorbonne English Professor Barbara le Lan.

“French universities are the least demanding universities as far as results go.”

Everyone in France who passes the Baccalaureat or “Bac” has the right to take up a state university place.

The result is that the France’s public universities are overcrowded, under-funded, have high drop-out rates and fail to make any international league tables. So would a little competition really hurt?

… One of President Sarkozy’s demands is that lecturers at the state universities, who are paid to research as well as teach, should be monitored a little more closely to make sure that they are indeed researching and are not simply doing nothing or spending their spare time giving private lessons.

He wants to set targets for the number of academic papers they publish. Professors like Ms Le Lan are simply horrified at the idea that academics should be subjected to quotas.

The government is determined to shake up the terms of employment for lecturers.

France is the only European country, and in fact one of the last countries in the entire developed world, where teachers are civil servants.

Those that support the government’s reforms feel that the current higher education system is geared very much towards the teachers’ needs and very little to the students’.

Last year, I attended a psychology class at Montpellier University, where students were crammed into a grubby lecture hall and where the acoustics were so bad that the pupils on the back three rows had given up trying to catch the wise mumblings from the distant podium and had either nodded off altogether under a copy of Liberation or were simply listening to their iPods…

… going cosmic?

During months of campus protests here, the only serious violence erupted one evening when student activists got in a fight over which movie to show during the all-night occupation of a large classroom.

Police rushed in after one side started shattering windows, student strikers recalled, but the officers were quickly ordered to back off, and the strike went on. And on. For more than three months, Paul-Valery University, the University of Montpellier’s liberal arts campus, was paralyzed by an ill-defined movement set off by changes that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government tried to impose on France’s long-ailing public university system.

“Block everything,” a slogan spray-painted on a classroom wall, became the university fight song. Student protesters, allied with some professors, prevented anyone from entering offices or classrooms, caused classes to be canceled and grades to be withheld, and threatened to stop final exams.

Paul-Valery, with its leafy campus in a suburb of this southern French city, was one of more than 20 universities — a quarter of the country’s university network — that ground to a halt when the “blockages” began in February, affecting more than 350,000 French students.

… [B]efore long, in the course of endless student assemblies, the strikers slipped toward broader political goas… Non-students and other activists joined, steering student anger toward Sarkozy’s business-friendly government, the world financial crisis, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and, one student said, even a debate over the qualifications of Vladimir Putin to be Russia’s leader.

“You start with a clear goal,” [one student] said, sucking on a cigarette during a break from researching her thesis. “But you end up talking about the war in Israel, swine flu and all the rest. And pretty soon, outsiders come and things harden.”

Worried about impending exams and no longer entirely sure what the protests were about, students voted in recent days to lift the strike at several universities, including here…

Une trentaine d’étudiants ont séquestré pendant quelques heures mardi le président de l’université d’Orléans, Gérald Guillaumet, dans son bureau. Réunis en assemblée générale, étudiants et professeurs ont décidé par vote de mettre fin à cette action. Il s’agissait du second cas de séquestration d’un président d’université en deux jours, après celui lundi de Marc Gontard, président de Rennes-II. Mardi, le directeur du Crous (centre régional des œuvres universitaires et scolaires) de Paris a également été brièvement retenu par un groupe de cinquante personnes.

They’re taking university presidents hostage in France.

… are a mess. Corrupt, cynical, and indifferent to the law. Here’s an update from Ha’aretz:

A scathing report issued last week by State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss details how Israel’s universities got into an ongoing budgetary crisis that threatens their academic quality and their very existence. The report lists widespread wage irregularities, generous pension plans, inflated bonuses and the improper use of a university academic fund as a personal savings plan for senior faculty rather than its stated purpose: scientific knowledge.

It appears that the universities are using state funds as they see fit. They handed out hundreds of millions of shekels in wage benefits without receiving authorization from the Finance Ministry’s wages director. Since 1999, the universities have refused to allow the wages director to monitor their activities. This enabled Tel Aviv University to pay raises of 55 percent as compensation for reorganization, even though the treasury had authorized an increase of just 21 percent. Bar-Ilan University paid administrative workers the same salary as professors with the longest tenures.

As for pension plans, the comptroller found that the deficits accrued by the universities reached NIS 17.9 billion – not NIS 1.6 billion, as the universities say. This occurred because the universities had overly generous pension policies, in some instances providing pensions that accrued at twice the accepted rate or pensions that reached 92 percent of wages.

The Council of University Presidents does not seem to like being criticized. The report describes how the comptroller’s office repeatedly asked the university heads to provide information – only to have them dodge and evade the requests, and even attempt to undermine the comptroller’s work.

“The responsibility for the large wage irregularities falls first and foremost on the shoulders of their administrations, which have been giving their workers preferential wage and retirement benefits over the course of years, without authorization, while foiling every attempt to supervise the universities,” Lindenstrauss wrote..

And here’s a delicious detail from the Jerusalem Post:

“[R]esearch funding went to business class plane tickets for senior professors.”

Undergraduates from Exeter College and Jesus College fought each other after the annual event, known as the Turl Street Dash, got out of control.

Some of the students had drunk between 12 and 15 pints according to those present.

The violence erupted when Jesus students, who outnumbered their Exeter counterparts, broke into their rivals’ college.

Exeter students launched a counter-attack and broke into Jesus as well.

In the fight that followed, students ended up being punched and with bloodied noses.

The Exeter College bar manager, who with the porter and junior dean tried to break up the fight, was kicked in the groin. …

… but he can’t help noticing that French universities are more néant than être.

I don’t see at all how a system of weak universities, led by a finicky central government, could be an efficient weapon in the battle for intelligence. On the contrary, it’s a system that infantilizes and paralyzes creativity and innovation. That’s why we gave the universities autonomy …

No other country has produced so many institutes, agencies, groups and other microscopic organizations that dilute means and responsibilities, pull every which way, and waste time and money …

Is science just a question of financial means and jobs? How then do we explain that with science spending higher than in Great Britain, and about 15% more researchers than our English friends, France is well behind in its scientific production? Somebody better explain that to me! More researchers, fewer publications, and excuse me, I don’t want to be unpleasant, with a comparable budget, a French researcher publishes 30% to 50% less than a British one in some sectors …

Excerpts from a recent speech.

In line with tradition, the researchers will stop working and torch the streets of Paris until he shuts up.

Update on Italian universities:

…Universities keep asking for increased public funding while they are unable to make any sensible use of it due to high red tape, structural deficiencies within the education system and a complete lack of evaluation.

During a public conference held last December in Turin on the potential of so-called “cloud computing” — the use of internet as a technology development platform — one participant sarcastically asked ‘how would user-generated Internet 2.0 work in an Italy 0.0, where broadband penetration is just above 10 per cent?’…

Huffington Post

An essay about Greece in Harvard International Review.

[T]here is a certain cult of student unrest in Greece which goes back to 1973, when the occupation of the Polytechnic school by students contributed to the overthrow of a military dictatorship which had ruled Greece since 1967. The cult of this occupation persisted well after the reestablishment of democracy in 1974. It is celebrated every year and taught at schools as one of the most glorious events of Greek history. Those who lived it have often kept a belief that the politicization and mobilization of the youth is essentially good for democracy, even when it takes violent forms.

… only slightly better than that of Greece, will reform itself a little bit.

The Italian Parliament on Thursday gave a definitive green light to a government decree designed to promote meritocracy in Italy’s higher education system and overhaul the hiring of university staff.

“Today the university system changes,” Italian Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini said after the Chamber of Deputies okayed the decree with 281 in favor, 196 against and 28 abstentions.

Among measures introduced in the decree, which forms part of a wider program of cost-cutting reforms for the sector yet to be finalized, 7 percent of government funds allocated to universities will be shared out on a performance basis from 2009, rewarding universities which demonstrate excellence in teaching and research.

In a bid to help out people at the start of their careers, 60 percent of funds must be spent on the employment of young researchers.

The decree also increases funding for research studentships by 135 million euros from this year.

The decree has been welcomed by some university bodies including the Conference of Italian University Chancellors and heads of research institutes.

There is a general consensus that the university system, which fails to gain a single entry in the top 100 universities in the world and which Gelmini has said “produces fewer graduates than Chile,” needs to be overhauled.

But critics have downplayed the usefulness of the decree in the light of government spending cuts of an estimated 1.5 billion euros in the sector planned from 2010.

Background here.