… la clé to the future.
A vast multiversity’s being built just outside Paris, in Saclay.
In farm fields south of Paris, billions of euros are being ploughed into a new modern university campus designed to rival Harvard, MIT and Cambridge as one of the world’s best.
The Paris-Saclay super-campus is France’s answer to years of decline in higher education, with the result that the nation’s best university only ranks 40th in the world.
… “Our goal is to rank among the top 10 universities in the world,” said Herve Le Riche, who heads the 4.4-billion-euro project (5.9 billion dollars) in Saclay, a plateau of grain fields dotted with clusters of modern buildings.
Already home to some top-notch colleges such as the Polytechnique engineering school, the new campus will start opening its doors in 2015 as a grouping of 23 universities, colleges and research institutes.
New laboratories, amphitheatres, student housing along with shops and transport will be built with a view to making France a destination for some of the best and brightest who now head to US and British universities.
… Sarkozy got the academic world talking when he announced that one billion euros of his 35-billion-euro national loan program would go to Paris-Saclay.
That’s on top of 850 million euros earmarked for the project under his government’s university reform program….
May 5th, 2010 at 3:36AM
And the folks in Grenoble see Saclay as the natural competitor and bemoan that they don’t get as much funding; they also have their grandiose plans. Meanwhile, in Saclay, the faculty wonder out loud about these pharaonic plans, especially since it took so many years to get decent bus transportation.
In addition, how wonders how one could create a “shared campus” between establishments working under so many different statuses and charters – Orsay Paris-South University is a regular university, Polytechnique is partially military and works under the Ministry of Defense, so is ENSTA, etc.
In both cases, the plan is to group universities and colleges too small or specialized to rank well in the Shangai etc. rankings into something magnificent. In short, more is supposed to be better. I’ve personally not quite understood how putting scientists (*) into some kind of mass intellectually factory naturally produces better science, but some seem to believe in this.
(*) Humanities and social sciences are at best junior players in these constructions.
May 5th, 2010 at 3:59AM
DM: Interesting! I appreciate getting a sense from you of French responses to this move.