French university autonomy – enmeshed in a web of constraints

Lyon University – one of the first beneficiaries of France’s €5 billion infrastructure fund.

One year later, grand results are yet to be seen. Worse, the number of French universities appearing in the Top 100 in the world rankings published by Jiao Tong University of Shanghai fell to a measly three in 2008. As a whole, the French research system dropped from number six to number seven in the world. So was the reform flawed?

There’s a simple explanation for why French universities perform poorly in an international ranking that focuses on research – they do so little of it. Since 18th century, French governments have been notoriously suspicious of the universities. Napoleon created the Grandes Ecoles because he wanted engineers not researchers. And even today, apart from Polytechnique and Ecoles des Mines, few of the Grandes Ecoles carry out much research.

Then, in 1947, France adopted a unique system that made teaching the responsibility of the universities and handed the entire research portfolio to large organisations such as CNRS and Inserm. The idea was that locating large research laboratories on university campuses would enable the two sides to work together. But in practice, research management became the fiefdom of the large research organisations, leaving universities with little say on strategy and recruitment.

It’s about research…isn’t it?

The intention of the new law giving universities autonomy was to change this system, forcing the transformation of teaching universities into research universities – or was it?

“The short answer is yes,” explains Jean-Pierre Finance, president of Nancy University and head of the CPU, the conference of presidents of universities. “But you have to remember that universities have a five year period to move from the old system to the new one at their own pace.” Finance argues that for the most part, things are moving according to plan.

That is certainly true in terms of governance. All French universities have elected new boards with no more than 30 members – half what the maximum used to be. About 150 representatives from private companies are now sitting in those boards, twice what was expected.  With a turnout of 60 per cent the elections were passionate.

Despite this the turnover of people has been low. Sixty-five per cent of the members of the new boards sat on the old ones. Almost all the former universities presidents have been re-elected.  

So it remains to be seen whether those new governing bodies will be bold enough to push their independence in the three areas set out in the autonomy law: real estate, budgets and human resources. As things stand 12 universities have decided to move forward and embrace full autonomy starting next January. To encourage them, the government has added €250 000 each on top of their existing funding.

Fifty universities are in the process of creating foundations and two have made the transition, which will allow them to accept endowments from the private sector and alumni. But for the most part university budgets are still to be allocated by the Ministry of Research. Negotiations over next year’s budget are about to start. And according to Pierre Glorieux at the research evaluation agency, AERES, “They promise to be tough.”

Don’t hold your breath

With most spending constrained and very little raised as yet through endowments, the new budget autonomy is going to take years to make any perceptible difference.

On the positive side, universities now control their real estate. But much of it is in a poor state of repair. To prevent university funds from being sucked into its renewal, the French government launched Plan Campus, a dedicated fund of around €3.7 billion, raised through the sale of a stake of the utility company EDF. Twenty-four universities will share this money. More recently, the government has also announced it will convert former military camps into student housing.

These initiatives are steps in the right direction, but they only partly address the challenge facing French universities in the global competition for excellence in research and higher education. For example, the new student buildings will house only 6,000 more students, while the demand is for 1.3 million. And these buildings will not be on site, leaving French universities without the real campus life that has proved so efficient both in the US and in the UK.

But the key question about the efficiency of the reform is elsewhere. Once they choose full autonomy, universities will have the right to manage their human resources. But what kind of independence will they really have when all their employees will keep their civil servant status and their salaries and benefits will be under the control of the state?

Jean-Pierre Finance emphasises that universities “will be able to choose the nature of those jobs, replacing bureaucrats by researchers”. Currently university employment is split around 50/50 between teaching and administrative jobs.

There is also a shortage of research support staff such as engineers and labs technicians. “We need to upgrade the qualification in our institutions,” says Finance. He is confident that this can be done under the new law. And universities will be able to use different contracts of employment, for example introducing short term contracts to test assistant professors before they get hired as full professor.

But for all the novelties the reform may bring, it does not address the key issue of the research personnel coming from CNRS, Inserm and others, and working on campus. Last June, research minister Valerie Pecresse’s attempt to reorganise the CNRS fell short of expectations. Instead of dissolving the CNRS into the universities, leaving it in charge of large instrument and national priorities only, Pecresse managed only to push through a structural reorganisation that does not change the relationship between the large research organisations and the universities.

So can France’s universities build a research structure of their own? Shifting CNRS staff would certainly have accelerated the pace. But now that this has proved impossible, universities have no choice but to compete for grants with research organisations like CNRS.

The good news is that they can do it now that the budget of the funding agency ANR, created in 2007, is reaching €1 billion a year. They can also turn to private companies after a tax reform that has transformed France into “a tax haven for corporate labs”, according to Pecresse.