Foreword: Two years ago, I wrote an article which was published in the « Euroscience » newsletter under the title « Storm brewing in French universities ». The present text can be viewed as an answer to the questioning of my English speaking readers who are more and more puzzled by the French situation… Many “technical” references are omitted, which can be found in different articles of the present blog.
Trying to understand and form an opinion is a very hard task, because the situation is more complex than it might appear at first glance. I know perfectly that for many of my radical colleagues, the story could be summarized in a very simple way: an ultra-liberal government is trying to abolish the higher education public service. To follow this line, one would have to admit that the existing system has all the virtues of a public service, and that the political forces in power are genuinely liberal, although they stay very “Jacobin”. If one abandons this simplistic view, things become more difficult to analyze. Undoubtedly, it is a right-wing government who started this reform of the French University in a liberal spirit (in the European meaning of the term). But the reform has to be accepted by a state administration which is not at all liberal.
