Battle looms in France over CNRS reform

Research minister Valerie Pecresse: her biggest battle yet?

The intervention may well be the start of the biggest fight yet in French science policy After launching a major reform of the country’s creaking and chronically underfunded university system by making individual universities autonomous, Pecresse has announced her intentions for a major reorganisation of the country’s most respected research institution, CNRS.

She told the Le Monde newspaper she wants to split the organisation into six national institutes identified as fields of excellence for CNRS, in mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering sciences, social sciences and ecology. But CNRS will lose its position in life sciences and computer sciences. Health research will go to INSERM and agriculture and veterinary science to INRA, while INRIA will take charge of computing research.

Researchers on the march

Needless to say, this long-awaited announcement has infuriated some. An “Academic pride” demonstration has been scheduled for 27 May by researcher’s unions opposed to the moves. The unions are particularly offended by the transfer of responsibility for life sciences research to INSERM and INRA, given that 23 per cent of CNRS staff work in that field. Social scientists are also afraid the reform will cost them their status and means.

It remains to be seen whether French public opinion will be supportive of the researchers, given that the multiple reforms instituted by President Nicolas Sarkozy are putting so many cherished French social values and institutions under stress at the same time. But French people love their monuments, and all the more so when they are institutions rather than buildings.

Created in 1939, CNRS is a focus for national pride. It employs 32,000 people, of which 11,600 are researchers and 14,400 engineers, technicians and administrative personnel. Its budget was €3.277 billion in 2008, of which €588 million came from its own resources, mainly from licensing.

Its scientific excellence is not disputed. And with 2,897 patents in its intellectual property portfolio, 677 licensing agreements and 1,611 industrial contracts, CNRS is undoubtedly a major force for technology transfer in France. In recent years it has also increased start-up creation, with 320 spin-offs since 1999.

But the problem is that CNRS’s structures are not fit for the international competition that dominates today’s science and technology.

Universities flex new autonomy

At a time when French universities, flexing their newly acquired autonomy, are increasing their focus on research, the 1,200 laboratories shared by CNRS and the universities are proving more complex than ever to manage. Yet these laboratories comprise the majority of CNRS’s physical infrastructure.

But there is a precedent for the proposed new structure. In the mid-1980s CNRS transferred two of its major research areas, nuclear physics and space, into separate institutes, a model that has proved very efficient.

In other words, the reform Pecresse is now announcing was already on the cards. The idea was floated with CNRS staff in a letters from the institution’s director, Catherine Brechignac, at the beginning of March. And it is supposed to be on the agenda of CNRS’ board meeting scheduled for today (22 May) and another meeting on June.

Pecresse has indicated in the past that she is in favour of a bottom-up, rather than a top-down approach to reform. By pre-empting the CNRS board meetings and putting her mark on the reforms, she may be trying to win the political plaudits.

And Pecresse probably reckons that the political momentum is there to move CNRS forward. After all, CNRS researchers’ biggest fear was that the institution would simply disappear, with its staff transferring to the universities and its budget to the grants agency ANR.

Because she plans to keep the CNRS, Pecresse may pull off a reform long considered impossible to accomplish. But it remains to be seen whether splitting CNRS between six institutes will produce the kind of administrative simplification that the French public research system so desperately needs.