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…
May 9th, 2009 at 6:20PM
I’ve never been to France and honestly don’t have much of a feel for the country, so this is a genuine question.
Does France have any tradition of private charitable organizations? The intellectuals of France don’t seem to be able to conceive any structure that isn’t either (1) a government-run socialist commune, or (2) a plutocratic dog-eat-dog capitalist meatgrinder.
Haven’t these people ever heard of non-profit corporations (like universities in many other countries) that are neither of these things?
May 9th, 2009 at 10:26PM
Sadly, this is nothing new…
Most anyone who is an academic knows a person who was educated in the French system and is amazed by its machinations.
There are a lot of bright French scientists – that’s my reference – who merely shake their collective heads about the situation. Jacob, Monod, The Pasteur Institute, Grenoble…
French scientists have made valuable contributions to the advancement of knowledge. Sadly this bureaucratic mess will eventually tumble of its own weight.
Viva la France!
May 10th, 2009 at 7:04AM
Some private charities exist, francofobe, but they have mostly died, been absorbed by governments, or stay in business only to pay their staffs. Education is seen as a natural government monopoly.
May 10th, 2009 at 10:36AM
If you have been following this, you will know that a good deal of this mess of this is Sarkozy’s fault: he is so shrill, nasty, and ideological that even supporters of university reform find it hard to ally themselves with him. Here is what Claude Calame of the EHESS wrote: "the Sarkozy administration is so reactionary, in the neoconservative sense of the word, that it has succeeded in making a situation that no one wishes either to defend or to maintain appear progressive."
http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/latour-in-the-french-debate-on-university-reform/
The whole debate has been framed in terms of false choices: status quo vs. "enterprise model," unaccountability vs. article quotas, etc…
May 11th, 2009 at 7:01PM
There are certainly problems with the French universities, most of them directly attributable to woeful underfunding. Facilities are in terrible condition–I taught in unheated trailers on one campus that had been serving as "temporary" classrooms for over a decade, and had to provide my own chalk (let’s not even talk about the non-teaching public spaces, such as bathrooms!). For their enormous teaching and research burdens, faculty are paid nothing. The equivalent of an assistant professor at one of the main Paris universities makes little more than the stipend of an American graduate student in the humanities or social sciences. Automatic entrance for all high school graduates means that many students are woefully under-prepared. It’s no wonder degrees from the public universities are essentially worthless these days. So I’m not defending the status quo, which serves all of its constituents very badly indeed.
What Americans like (presumably) francofobe have trouble understanding is that the foundational premise of the French university system is entirely different from ours. The reason that the French universities are so opposed to the non-profit model is that higher education is not a charitable service to be provided out of the goodness of some benefactor’s heart. France does have a tradition of non-profit charitable organizations, which once did provide much education, and still do at the primary and secondary level: the Jesuits and other Catholic orders, whom the French spent a century trying to dislodge from a monopoly over higher education. Since 1968, higher education has been considered a right of every French citizen, and it is the responsibility of the state to ensure that every French citizen has access to it. That makes it a public service, staffed by public servants and available to the people. We can debate whether or not universal, open-access higher education is a good idea, but we do need to begin by understanding this very basic difference.
All of this is not to say that the system doesn’t need fixing, but FrogProf is right about the politics of the question. Sarkozy has cast the whole debate in either-or-terms designed to force people to choose one side or another (privatization or defense of an indefensible status quo). And he has been totally disingenuous about what his reforms will mean for access and the value of degrees from different institutions. All of this leaves little room for productive discussion about how to fix what’s broken, without destroying the valuable aspects of the current system.
April 16th, 2010 at 7:17AM
Indeed, the problem is not that people don’t want reform (unless perhaps a small vocal minority), but that the current administration is so distrusted that any prospect of reform is seen in a negative light.
Note that president Sarkozy, in a public speech, more or less claimed that French professors and scientists were in general doing a bad job. Imagine the reaction if president Obama made a similar general claim about any profession in the US. I suspect the outrage would be enormous, and that this would destroy any possibility of meaningful debate afterwards.
April 16th, 2010 at 8:00AM
DM: I very much appreciate all of your comments on my French posts!
On this one, I’d have to disagree. I think Americans are incredibly competitive and restless people, and if Obama said that he was disappointed in the nation’s scientific output, I think this would spur scientists to greater efforts rather than make them petulant and that much more passive.
The problem is that, for various structural reasons, most French university professors don’t have much fire in their belly.