Strike!

[krasnoludek]

So about the third day I was in France, I heard that the university was going to be on strike. Apparently, Sarkozy wanted to reform the higher educational system, especially its research component, to make it more competitive in the world. What he really meant was "privatize research" and build stronger connections between industry and academia. That alone would have just led to debates and some protest from professors who don't agree with the changes. However, Sarkozy rather arrogantly announced this plan, saying that French professors were lazy. That insult was the straw that broke the camel's back and now all the universities in France are on a coordinated strike, which has lasted more than a month now. I've been really amazed at the dogged persistence of this protest -- when the French get fired up about something, they really protest. It's also been delightful: after Bush basically steamrolled through many similar changes to higher education in the US, it feels good to have like-minded policies being met with such resistance.

Specific components of Sarkozy's plan that I've heard about:[alt source]

• Cut off a large portion of the government's funding for colleges, so that they have to seek out their research funding from industry. As a recent NYT article points out, having researchers dependent on their funding from a partial source compromises the independence and impartiality of the research, which at least are ideals that in the past academia has been pretty good to maintain (and self-monitor using peer review). There have been many stories (one at Berkeley) where the funding company has basically blackmailed professors out of funding/job because they refuse to tailor their research to cast a positive light on the company. As the NYT article mentions, even researchers who want to help the company end up encountering many difficulties on account of the companies.
• CNRS, the national research organization which is a much more powerful version of the NSF, will be reduced to having just an oversight role over research in France, before (probably) being dismantled entirely in a few years. I think anyone familiar with the good work the NSF has done in funding things will agree that this is a bad idea. Christian's postdoc, btw, is a CNRS position, so without CNRS we wouldn't even be here.
• Tenured professors will still be reviewed and have to produce "progress reports" to make sure they are getting results regularly and quickly, otherwise they stand to lose their job. This goes against the whole point of tenure, which is to assure that professors can have security to undertake large, long-term projects with an unsure payoff. If the reviews occur as often as they are proposing, this will reward people who undertake smaller projects with more certain goals, which are rarely the achievements that lead to great advances in the fields.

There's been an international petition that has gotten a lot of signatures, including from some big names like Noam Chomsky. There has been a "manifestation" (=demonstration) nearly every two or three days, some of which have disrupted the tram lines, and on those days my campus often feels like a ghost town. For the last two weeks, Universite Lyon 1 has declared itself "en lutte" = "in battle", meaning that all classes and instructional activities have been cancelled. This is quite prominently posted in windows all around campus, and, for example, on my institute's homepage. On Tuesday, they plan on doing a human chain from Universite Lyon 1 (my university) to Ecole Normale Superieure. For those of you unfamiliar with Lyon, this is clear across town, which would be amazing. They say they need 3000 volunteers minimum. I'll be impressed if they pull it off. Here is a Canadian student's perspective that I found, and here is a more recent, detailed update of the strike.