At the beginning of the year three Grandes Écoles”* (two of them part of Science Business network member Paris Tech) merged to constitute Paris Agro Tech. With 3,000 students, it now claims to be the Europe’s biggest agro/life science research institution. And it has every intention of using this new force to boost not only its scientific contribution but also the economic benefits.
“We are now covering the entire agribusiness spectrum,” explains Dominique Mizard, spokesperson for Paris Agro Tech. “This is clearly a competitive advantage in our participating in the Paris Life Science and Environment cluster.”
Yet even with 1,350 researchers and 100 research departments and companies involved, this cluster still failed make it as one of the 66 competitive clusters selected by the government in July 2005. With the creation of Paris Agro Tech, it is now on the shortlist for the next set of clusters, due to be selected later this year.
The urge to merge
Universities in the existing competitive clusters launched by the French regions have not had to merge to get the €200 million a year of public money and €400 million of matching private funds available for technology-oriented projects run by university–private partnerships. But the push to consolidate is strong, spurred by another instrument launched last year by the French government, the research and education cluster, or PRES.
This instrument offers a structure for pooling diplomas as well as scientific publications under one roof. There are already nine PRESs and two more are in the making. Except for Paris Tech, all the PRESs include universities and Grandes Écoles, breaking one of tougher Chinese walls of the French research system.
For example, a researcher of École des Ponts et Chaussées as well as a colleague from University of Marne la Vallée will be able to sign scientific paper under one common denomination: University Paris Est. It also means that a master’s degree awarded by the school or the university will be labelled the same way.
With 85 universities and more than 200 Grandes Écoles, the French higher education system is characterised by fragmentation. This has been reflected recently in classifications such as the Shanghai top 500, where French higher education obtained poor rankings. Still, as the prominent economist Daniel Cohen put it, “If you take all the universities and schools gathered in the Latin Quarter of Paris you would reach instantly the top 10 of the Shanghai 500.”
Size isn’t everthing
That may be so. But size is not the only problem. “After all, Caltech is in the top ten withonly 2,500 students,” remarks Institut Polytechnique National de Grenoble (INPG) president Paul Jaquet. “A more importance issue is governance.”
So INPG is finishing its own restructuring before joining a PRES. It has applied for permission under French law to have an industrialist as a president and entrepreneurs on the board. When that is done, the four universities created in Grenoble after 1968 plan to merge all their research activities. Jaquet does not rule out the possibility that the four universities nay be replaced two or three institutes.
Not all the PRESs are contemplating such a radical merger. Radical mergers have also been proposed for the universities and Institut Polytechnique of Nancy, as well as a proposed PRES in Strasbourg. But the other clusters (Aix-Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Lyon and three in Paris) are not planning to go that far. Most of them simply aim to eliminate redundancy and bring research together at the PhD level only.
Still, the map of mergers shows that they cover the innovative hot spots. The first PRESs were launched by campuses that are also taking the lead in the six most prominent competitive clusters (the so called “poles mondiaux”), such the one around aeronautics in Toulouse (Aerospace Valley around life science in Lyon (Lyonbiopole), around computer sciences in southern Paris (System@tic) or the Minalogic nanotech cluster in Grenoble.
Sheer coincidence – or does the dynamic of the competitive cluster trigger competitive thinking among university presidents?
“In spirit the PRESs have grown out of the competitive clusters,” explains Fabrice Leroy, in charge of this policy at the French ministry of Finance. “But institutionally they are two separate things.”
The election looms
“That is true,” says Paul Jaquet at INPG Grenoble. “But they share the same bottom-up and project-based philosophy.” In a country where centralism and dirigisme is deeply rooted into history, that is big news. But with the presidential election looming will the new philosophy survive political pressure and the “not invented there” syndrome every administration feels when the leadership changes?
In the election campaign the candidates of the right favour more autonomy for the universities. And during the Socialist Party’s internal selection process, presidential candidate and Charente-Poitou regional president Ségolenè Royal said that the bottom-up approach of competitive clusters was exactly what French innovation policy needed. Asked whether she was embracing a right-wing idea, she answered, “The competitive clusters are everybody’s project.”
The French regions – 21 out of 22 are run by the Socialist Party – have been very supportive of competitive clusters even though the idea was launched by centre-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy when he was finance minister. Will they now embrace the same pragmatic logic of competitiveness and its consequences for university consolidation and restructuring?
That is the likely outcome. Fundamentally, both camps agree on the reform, even if they want to be seen to have thought of it first. But this agreement may change if the clusters policy fails to deliver the innovation France so desperately needs.
* École nationale supérieure des instituts agricoles et alimentaires (Ensia), Institut national agronomique de Paris-Grignon (Ina P-G) and École nationale du génie rural, des eaux et forêts (Engref)
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