The roots of the university crisis

We have been saying it loudly for years: French universities are doing badly. A new book continues the reflection, in particular evoking the fate of young, precarious generations. But the fragility of the academic world is also due to the absence of a common ideal.

Christophe Granger’s book is part of a long litany of works deploring or denouncing the evolution of higher education over more than twenty years. The study of titles or variations on a known theme, which new authors strive to embellish with new metaphors, would merit analysis in itself.

Calamities ” Or “ flourishing »

When I started to become interested in the subject, with the collective of the Association for Reflection on Higher Education and Research (REASING), we were content with Some urgent diagnoses and remedies for a university in danger. Six years later, it was in Latin that the Abélard collective invoked the “ calamities » which fell on the university. In 2004, another sociologist close to the same sensitivity, Christian de Montlibert, denounced the Know to sell. Higher education and research in danger. The following year, Nicolas Oblin and Patrick Vassort described a “ policy of annihilation », suggesting not natural calamities or perils against which one could guard, but a demolition enterprise planned in high places.

However, at the time, the Pécresse law of August 2007 had not yet been passed. ; only the Bologna process and theAERES were already in action. The general tone of Christophe Granger’s work is in the same line, with the additional perspective which now allows us to measure the effects of this law and the policies of grouping and competition on a national scale, even international (via competition for various laboratories, equipment or initiatives of excellence, inspired by the German policy ofExcellenz-initiativ).

Conversely, this theme of an ever-worsening crisis is only weakly combated by the proponents of enlightened reformism, present in general cultural magazines like Spirit, Commentary Or The Debateby authors who are advisors to the prince or located in the most favored segments of the system or who serve as experts to prepare or launch reforms. It is curiously among them that a lexicon of development, of reconstruction, of new momentum resembling the old planning of the Thirty Glorious Years would still find its place. Christine Musselin, scientific director of Sciences Po, recalled in 2001 “ the long march of French universities » ; the former president of Paris II-Panthéon Assas, Louis Vogel, tried to convince that the university was a “ luck for France “, as long as we commit more resolutely to the paths of a well-understood liberalism.

The only exception in this distribution of roles between conservative, optimistic reformers and nostalgic denunciators who are increasingly brooding is the surprising work, with its counter-current title, by Romuald Bodin and Sophie Orange: The University is not in crisis. He attempted, with surveys and statistics to back it up, to put an end to the eternal clichés about the disastrous function of higher education in its purely academic branch, themes complacently peddled by journalists, proponents of the Grandes Écoles and education. private superior or the followers of the Anglo-American models (or of what they imagine to be the reality).

The generations of the queue »

This historiographical preamble is not intended to evaluate the work of Christophe Granger in relation to all this literature of varying status, ranging from academic study to post-strike pamphlet, from the contemplation of the ruins of a world that we would have lost to the exaltation of a new world being born. If the tone of Granger’s book is indeed that of denunciation and a certain deploration, he corrects this somewhat boring posture, after twenty years of use, by a concern for precise information drawn from the best sources, by using effective comparisons and literature on foreign cases where similar policies have been conducted previously.

Younger than most of the authors cited above, he is careful not – a dominant bias – to limit himself to the mandarin view of the incumbents, but to take into account the effects of policies on the future of the “ relieving » of the younger generations, expiatory victims of widespread precariousness, forced expatriation, waiting in line for an increasingly uncertain future and salaries sometimes lower than those of minimum wage workers. However, these young people entering the new university world under construction have little say in the matter, under penalty of further compromising their future, which depends on incumbents who are committed to the reforms and of which they are the main beneficiaries, despite their recriminations.

The work is divided into three large chapters of around forty pages each (“ The forgetting of history “, “ Total liquidation “, “ Purgatory “) and a brief conclusion of seven pages (“ Proposals to serve those who cannot give up “). The two central chapters are a more condensed confirmation of the diagnoses present in the previous literature and where the author of these lines finds themes that he has developed for more than twenty years already, alone or in collaboration within theREASING.

My disagreement relates rather to the rereading of history which is proposed in the first chapter. To denounce the present and the future that is being prepared for us, there is no need to rosy the French academic past that the author, by definition, did not know. The error of assessment comes, it seems to me, from a historically erroneous postulate, the trace of which can be found in the title.

The absence of a common regulatory idea

What is this error ? It is the idea that, before all the recent reforms, France would have had a “ university » comparable to that of the countries of Europe and sharing the same principles which are summarized in Germany by the reverence for the Humboldtian ideal: a space of freedom to learn and teach, enjoying great intellectual autonomy and capacity of innovation independent of injunctions from above.

However, despite the reforms of the Third Republic, despite the innovations introduced during May 68, despite some positive changes proposed by left-wing ministers with a disastrous political destiny, like Alain Savary and Lionel Jospin (this perhaps explains that) , we cannot accept this starting point.

In all my work, I have on the contrary tried to demonstrate that, precisely, if these recent reforms were implemented and could not be slowed down or blocked, despite certain large-scale mobilizations of teacher-researchers (as in 2009 ), it is precisely because the university ideal described above has never been able to be a reality in France, except in very minority segments of higher education which only enroll a very small fraction of students: a few departments of large universities of human and social sciences or natural sciences supported by CNRSa few “ large establishments ” Or “ special schools », most often Parisian.

This absence of a common regulatory idea shared by large sectors of the academic world is one of the roots of the latter’s inability to form a common front in the face of ministerial interventions or policies inspired by transnational neoliberal programs. Christophe Granger forgets this initial deficit which persists and facilitates the imposition of new models, where entire sections of universities or other establishments recognize opportunities to accentuate their differentiation compared to the segments “ Humboldtians » Losing momentum demographically and denigrated throughout the media by proponents of the professionalizing and utilitarian vision of higher education.

Internal competitions

This is why, if we can sympathize with the epilogue recalling the fundamentals of this utopian university ideal of a place of critical knowledge in a world that does not care, it remains to find the means to remobilize on these values, including in our human and social science disciplines. The most obvious perverse effect of the reforms was to corrupt a number of colleagues, lured by a few bonuses and prebends offered by the multiple parallel bureaucracies that the so-called policy of autonomy has caused to proliferate.

These bonuses and prebends allowed them to compensate materially or symbolically, through delegated power, the deep feeling of downgrading specific to the university segment of higher education. They thus contributed, even a little more, to the breakdown of any consensus, including between colleagues who were initially perfectly equivalent, as indicated by the electoral struggles around the “ presidencies “, of the “ expert missions “, of the “ university communities », multiple and diverse committees, etc.

The process of being placed under external domination that Granger describes was all the more easily imposed because it was able to rely on these internal divisions within the academic profession and play on the multiple rivalries and antagonisms that run through it, between teacher-researchers. and researchers, between large and small universities, between selective sector and non-selective sector, between teaching favored by its social recruitment and channels of relative relegation, between establishments with resources limited to state windfall and those which can play on several tables, thanks to registration fees or private funds.

Granger is obliged to mention them in relation to revealing episodes, such as the metamorphosis of Sciences-Po Paris, but he neglects their very ancient roots that no reform for more than a century has ever addressed head on. Without this consideration of this complicated reality that the word “ university », his wish for a start and his utopia of the imposition of the ideal university by the sole force of the verb or the “ struggles » precarious proletarians or students anxious about their blocked future risk remaining just a voice crying in the desert.