Paris-XII, on strike
– By Scott Sayare –
PARIS — Roused by mounting popular foment and bristling at the government’s proposed education reforms, tens of thousands of French university professors and students, including as many as 50,000 in Paris, took to the streets across the country on Tuesday. Of France’s 83 public universities, only 15 were untouched by the protests.
“The government has to hear this anger that is founded upon our experience, upon our desire to achieve success in our research programs, to achieve success for the students,” Jean Fabbri, head of SNESUP, the national union of higher learning, told Le Parisien as he marched in Paris. “They must, finally, retract the contested texts and open negotiations that have never, never taken place.”
Last October, minister of higher learning and research Valérie Pécresse announced reforms designed to streamline and modernize an overextended university system. Critics disparage the public institutions for what they call low-quality research and instruction and an unwieldy bureaucratic structure that has hampered innovation and change. In a widely publicized late-January speech, President Sarkozy called the universities’ performance “mediocre.”
“Today, we are not in the lead group of industrialized countries for research and innovation. There is of course a reason for this. It is because quite often we have backed away from the necessity of reforming our universities and our research organizations,” he said. “The risk is not in change when reforms are coherent and are articulated around a strategy. The risk is in a refusal to evolve.
“Who can think that France and its 65 million inhabitants can move more slowly than the changes of the world?” asked the president. “If France wants to have weight in the organization of the world of the 21st century, it needs to move at the pace of this world.”
The speech outraged many in the scholastic and research communities here. In a January 22 press release, Save Research (Sauvons la recherche), an advocacy group of French academics, denounced “the President’s disdain for those who work in this sector, and his desire, nearly an obsession, to dismantle the whole of the institutions that organize, in France, the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.”
Tuesday’s manifestations appeared to have grown as much out of a generalized resentment of Sarkozy and his capitalist leanings as out of opposition to the réformes Pécresse. Marchers held signs and banners proclaiming, “No to the wrecking of universities and research” and “With Pécresse we regress,” but also “No to the bling-bling university” – a reference to Sarkozy, whose penchant for luxury and social ties to various entertainment industry stars have earned him the derogatory title “Président bling-bling” – and “What need do we have for universities since we have $uper-$arko to think for us?”
"Job offer: France seeks president"
Since Sarkozy’s election in 2007, his detractors on the French left have criticized his efforts to transform the French economy. The most memorable of Sarkozy’s campaign slogans, one that he and his ministers still employ, was “Work more to earn more” (“Travailler plus pour gagner plus“); he has long intended to repeal the law limiting French workers to an average of 35 working hours per week, legislation passed in 2000 under a majority left parliament.
Sarkozy’s party, the UMP, has recently begun rerunning campaign TV commercials from 2007 in an apparent effort to rally support for the president as he attempts to guide the country through the current financial crisis; “Travailler plus pour gagner plus” features prominently.
If on Tuesday some of the protesters seemed to be pulled off topic, so to speak, by anti-Sarkozy rhetoric, it is because the conflict over educational reform occurs at a political crossroads: it is a flashpoint in the broader socio-cultural battle over capitalism that has polarized France in recent years. As the country struggles to maintain its political relevance and stake out a key role in the global economy, much of the French citizenry is resisting a shift toward free-market ideals and seeking to reinforce traditional state-guaranteed services and professions.
The French university system is state-run, and its administrators, professors and researchers remain, above all, fonctionnaires, employees of the government. Promotions, recruitment, funding decisions and most other management tasks generally fall to the National Council of Universities, and not to university presidents. The reforms proposed by Pécresse, Sarkozy’s higher learning and research minister, would shift decision-making power into the hands of the universities in an effort to make France’s nationalized institutions of higher learning more competitive on a global scale.
The highest ranked French university, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities, was placed only 39th in 2007, and France as a whole finished well behind the US, the UK, Japan and Germany, among other nations. The results spurred French lawmakers this summer to push for the development of a Europe-specific classification system.
Pécresse and Sarkozy say that making the universities more autonomous would streamline performance evaluations and favor the most effective researchers and instructors. The academics who oppose the measures, joined by numerous university presidents, say that the reforms would expose their careers to the threats of “favoritism” and “arbitrariness.” Pécresse’s proposed legislation represents, writes Jean-Fabien Spitz, professor of political philosophy at the Sorbonne, in a blog for Libération, “a perfect illustration of the bureaucratic logic that decides without knowing anything about the reality concerned.”
Spitz admits, though, that the current system has its failings, and that those failings might themselves stem from a “bureaucratic logic.”
“Certain university professors do no research, they content themselves with giving their six or seven hours of courses each week during the 26 weeks that the university year lasts,” he writes. “The rest of the time, they give themselves to private activities or work elsewhere for some extra cash. This reality is undeniable.”
A recent report by the minister of national education, reports Le Figaro, confirms that 24 percent of France’s university professors do not belong to a research group, and shows that among those who do, 19 percent have not published since at least 2003. Their official status of “instructor-researcher” (enseignant-chercheur) obliges French professors to commit 192 hours per year to instruction and 1,415 hours to research and administrative tasks; only teaching hours are monitored and enforced, however, and many professors neglect the research requirement but still collect a full paycheck from the state, often supplementing that income with outside work taken on in place of research.
“One could say that the salary of an enseignant-chercheur is not huge when he fulfills his contract, but far too high when he does not fulfill it,” Alain Neuman, former president of the university Paris-XII, told Le Figaro.
But despite the manifest abuses of the current system, to place control of the universities in the hands of their presidents would open a “door to the most complete arbitrariness, the most shameless localism, partisan favoritism,” writes Professor Spitz. So deep is his mistrust of free-market principles – he dismisses the possibility that a university president might, out of self-interest and the interest of the university, promote only the most qualified, productive professors – that he prefers to maintain what he himself deems the “unacceptable” inefficiencies of a system governed by “bureaucratic logic.”
Surely, the employees of the French public universities would like to see their institutions improved, their reputations bolstered. But they’d also like to keep their jobs.
And so as they descended into the streets on Tuesday, their motivations were a diverse muddle: they decried the intervention of the state while demanding its assurances, expressed concern for the quality of the universities, but especially concern for a certain quality of life, demonstrated their commitment to students and education, but perhaps more so a commitment to self.
January 29, Place de l'Opéra
The complexity of the grievances voiced during Tuesday’s protests aside, though, France was this week already a nation in upheaval. On January 29, crowds of hundreds of thousands of striking government workers, student protesters and frustrated citizens forced street closures in major cities throughout the country. In response to the day of protest, which the French press called “Black Thursday,” President Sarkozy agreed to talks with leaders of the nation’s largest unions, scheduled for next week. But union leaders have already called for another nationwide strike on March 19. Protests have also paralyzed Guadelope and Martinique, France’s outre-mer ex-colonies, in recent days; the island of Réunion, the French department off the eastern African coast, today began calls for a grève générale.
Approval ratings for Sarkozy in France are at historic lows as a growing anti-Sarkozysme has taken hold in recent months, and his opponents in parliament have lately pursued a politics of disruption and dissidence in an effort to exploit that unpopularity. But even as they mount an offensive against the president and his party, the French left is itself imploding, wracked by internal conflict. This lack of unity across the government occurs as France faces its worst recession in more than 30 years amidst the global economic crisis, and has proved all the more destabilizing to the popular psyche as a result.
To make matters worse, the weather across France has taken on an apocalyptic tenor of late. In late January, the most powerful storm in a decade devastated south-western France, as winds as high as 120 miles per hour flattened entire forests and wild seas flooded coastal towns. The storm left eight dead and almost two million without electricity, and will cost insurers an estimated 1.4 billion euros. Gale-force winds once again swept the country earlier this week, threatening further damage.
The outrage of the academic community, then, is perhaps not the most pressing of the issues facing the French government. But even the professors agree that the university system needs to be updated.
“We are for reform,” Moïse Pinto, enseignant-chercheur at Paris-XI, told Le Monde on Tuesday. “But not this reform.”
2 Comments
02.12.2009 at 20:20
France’s eternal dilemma… ‘We want reform but not too much’. Sarkozy’s rhetoric uses this to promote and justify his government’s actions & projects. But he should have known that passing so many legislations in a row without negotiations would have created such an upheaval. Is he out of his mind? Anyway, are these his plans for France in the upcoming crisis – an open door in education to more laissez-faire capitalism to fight against an excess of it?
No-one’s spared, and the complexity of the situation becomes alarming.
This is just getting interesting.
03.02.2009 at 22:11
[...] strike here, joined by their students, who, like many French, love to hate President Sarkozy; on February 10, as many as 50 thousand marched through Paris in the cold, yelling the anti-establishment chants that are passed from generation to generation in [...]