When Junior Minister for Higher Education and Research Geneviève Fioraso presented her resignation to President François Hollande earlier this month, hundreds of researchers, teachers and students were gathered in front of her Left Bank ministry buildings in a long-planned protest against the increasingly testing consequences of budget cuts.
It had been known for several weeks that Fioraso, 60, was to quit her job for health reasons, but the timing of her resignation, on March 5th, came as a surprise after Hollande had initially asked her to stay on until after the local (county) elections held this Sunday and next.
“My state of health is incompatible with a minister’s functions and it is impossible to be a part-time minister,” said Fioraso. “The doctors tell me that I must dedicate myself to treatment.” Fioraso did not detail her illness, but government spokesman and agriculture minister Stéphane Le Foll said her health problems “appear to be quite serious”. Hollande, meanwhile, thanked Fioraso “for the action accomplished in the service of the excellence of French research and the modernization of higher education”.
Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls will wait until the conclusion of the local elections - a mid-term political litmus test in which their Socialist Party is tipped to suffer heavy losses to the right and far-right - on March 29th before appointing Fioraso's successor. In the interim, her responsibilities have been transferred to education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem.
But before being forced to step down for health reasons, it was clear that Fioraso had reached an untenable position at the head of a ministry that had lost the confidence of many in the world of higher education and research.
The minister had also latterly encountered personal embarrassment after Mediapart revealed in February that she had never received a master’s degree in economics, contrary to her CV published on her website, in the French Who’s Who (and other listings) which submits the entry for review every year to the person cited. She later claimed that this was due to a misunderstanding over the fact she had a master’s degree in English-language studies, specialised in economic language.
Meanwhile, Mediapart last year revealed how Fioraso was placed in a situation of conflict of interest after a laboratory run by France’s atomic and alternative energies research agency, the CEA, was the only nanotechnology research centre to receive a government grant – and which amounted to 274 million euros over three years – in the 2015 public finances law. The potential conflict of interest arose because the minister’s companion, Stéphane Siebert, is the CEA’s technological research director and principal aide to CEA president Jean Therme.
After his election in May 2012, Hollande appointed Fioraso as minister of higher education and research as of his first government, with the hope that she would bring a degree of calm after what was by then five years of reforms that had profoundly shaken the university and research sectors in France.
One of the principal causes of the malaise was the move to make universities financially and operationally autonomous, with the payroll of staff becoming the direct responsibility of the individual university administrations. Among the subsequent problems was a shortfall in finances, after the amount of funds transferred from state to university was underestimated, not having taken into account an adjustment for pre-agreed salary increases, a subsequent rise in employer contributions, nor the increase in spending demanded by enlarged responsibilities.
But after the socialists came to power in 2012, Fioraso largely continued with the principle policy lines of the previous conservative government, and failed to gain the support of those who had previously placed hope in a true change of direction by the new government (see Hollande's pre-election pledges on higher education and research in an interview with Nature magazine here).
For the new law introduced by Fioraso in May 2013 governing higher education and research followed the same path furrowed by legislation introduced in August 2007 by the previous conservative government, the LRU, which set the timeline for universities’ autonomy, and also that of the August 2006 ‘Research Pact’ law (which notably opened up greater involvement of the private sector in research activity).
Upon her appointment as higher education and research minister, Fioraso named as her chief-of-staff Lionel Collet, a former head of the Conférence des Presidents d’Université, an organization representing presidents of universities and research institutions, who was one of the architects of the decried LRU law introduced by Fioraso’s conservative predecessor, Valérie Pécresse.
To avoid bankruptcy, French universities have been forced to make drastic savings, found by reducing the amount of teaching, freezing the number of academic posts, greater reliance on short-term contracts and postponing investment. Despite this, some universities are now in a critical situation.
At Lyon 2 University, part-time staff had by early March not been paid since six months. Many of them do not have a working contract. At Paris South University (Université Paris-Sud), the freezing of ATER posts - designated for doctorate students close to the end of their theses – led to a protest by teacher-researcher staff who took strike action by refusing to mark mid-year exams in January. The university’s administration complained a 2.8-million-euros shortfall for its payroll funds. At Paris-8 University and Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense University, both close to Paris, lower-echelon administrative staff are on strike over pay and conditions. Last year, Versailles University was placed under state protection after it became near-bankrupt. Montpellier University has announced that it will have to close its annexe in the town of Béziers, 70 kilometres away, because of lack of funds.
According to an estimation by the largest French student union, UNEF, France’s 73 universities altogether have an operating budget shortfall of about 200 million euros. As an indication of this unprecedented crisis, the universities have not yet received their state-allocated funds (with which they then manage their activities) three months after they were due. The backdrop to this is the demand by the French finance ministry that the education ministry finds savings of 100 million euros as part of the drive to cut France’s public spending deficit. While no-one appears to know just where such new savings can be found, the situation has become blocked. “For a while now we’re asking ourselves whether there’s still a pilot in the plane,” commented Marc Neveu, co-secretary general of the French higher education teachers’ union, SNESUP, pointing to Geneviève Fioraso’s silence over the issue and her lack of political clout in face of the finance ministry’s demands for budget cuts.
Over recent months, even the usually cautious Conférence des presidents d’Université (CPU), which represents the heads of French universities, has taken a stand to remind the government of the priority that should now be given to education and the interests of students after years of considerable efforts by universities to meet reform demands. In a recent post on the microblogging website Tumblr entitled “University ruins” , the association Sciences en Marche (Sciences on the March), a collective of researchers created last year to lobby for increased resources for the public higher education and research sector, presented photos of the decrepit and insalubrious conditions in some universities. These included damp-covered walls and ceilings, unheated lecture rooms, toilets without seats, muck-covered washbasins, and a disintegrating building facade. “To hesitate to go to the toilet, to work among 12 people in 20 square metres or to study in an unheated amphitheatre very much complicates our studies and our missions of research and teaching,” the collective wrote.
Geneviève Fioraso was unwilling to grapple with the question of underfunding in the higher education sector. As of her arrival at the ministry, on the rue Descartes in the Latin Quarter of Paris, she repeatedly said that what universities lacked was not resources but capable managers, and called upon universities to adopt a “new mentality” and consider themselves as centres of “profit”, such as by developing an offer of professional training.
A missed opportunity
Under a left-wing government, universities saw certain taboos lifted, such as an increase in student subscription fees – for the moment limited to the highly-selective and elitist Grandes Ecoles – and the introduction of private-sector funding of research. While the amount of funding of universities by private companies remains marginal in France – a recent education ministry report underlined that the majority of foundations have capital that is less than 1% of the institutions they are part of – the move towards private-sector financing is witnessing a rapid development. The foundation within the University of Strasbourg recently announced it had raised 20 million euros over the past four years. That represents a record figure for French universities, but the trend is viewed with concern by many in French academia, a world that largely still holds dear the notion of public service.
Three years after the arrival of the socialist government, the situation in the French public research sector is no better. Despite the large numbers who took part in last autumn’s march through Paris in protest at the increasingly precarious situation for many research centres around France, organised by the association Sciences en Marche and timed to coincide with parliament’s debates of the 2015 public finances bill, hardly any concessions were made by the government. “Having put on pressure during the debate on the 2015 public finances bill, we perhaps limited the damage a little and the will of Bercy [the French finance ministry] to again reduce a bit of the higher education and research budget,” said Patrick Lemaire, a biologist and researcher who heads the Sciences en Marche management committee. But one fundamental issue, that of the more than 5 billion euros given to the private sector each year in tax breaks against spending on R&D activity – the crédit impôt recherché, or CIR – escaped debate.
But the process of divorce between the world of public higher education and research and the government is not an overnight one. Ahead of the government reshuffle in April last year, a petition calling for a change in higher education policies gathered more than 11,000 signatures from among university staff. But at the time, President François Hollande stood by Geneviève Fioraso, even arguing that there had been no significant strike action among university staff.
The government’s strategy has been above all centred on ensuring continued dialogue and peace with student organizations, but there are signs that this too has reached its limit. The education ministry has insisted that important financial means have been provided to improve students’ conditions, notably increases in student grants which have benefitted 135,000 students. However, student unions have underlined that the worsening budgetary situation for universities naturally affects them too, with regard to problems such as dilapidated buildings, overpopulated group tutorial classes and cuts in curriculums.
Beyond budgetary issues, it is above all the lack of a clear ambition which has marked public higher education and research policy at this half-way point of Hollande’s presidency and government. Fioraso’s unhesitating statements comparing the management of universities with that of private companies, immediately defused by backtracking communiqués, often left an impression of a double language behind which higher education reforms, such as the increasingly important role of regional councils in university management, are progressing in stealth.
Fioraso’s controversial approach, obsessed by industrial and commercial valorization of research and openly contemptuous of human and social sciences, has done nothing to reestablish a relation of confidence with the world of higher education and research. At a moment when negotiations with higher education staff organizations are at a stalemate, and have been for months, there is an immense desire for change. Some have the hope that Fioraso’s departure will at last represent the turning of a page, that of a missed opportunity.
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- The French version of this article is available here.
English version by Graham Tearse