France Reinvesting in Universities, Education Minister Says, D. D. Guttenplan, The New York Times, 22 mai 2011

PARIS — Valérie Pécresse, the minister for higher education and research of France, describes herself as “a prototype of the grande école.”

Ms. Pécresse, born in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, is the daughter of a prominent economist who taught at Université Paris Dauphine, a leading French business school, and now runs Bolloré Télécom. She studied law, first at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales and then at the École Nationale d’Administration, the traditional nursery for France’s governing class. Immediately after graduation, Ms. Pécresse became a judge on the Conseil d’État, which provides legal advice to the government.

She first entered politics in 1997, as an adviser to President Jacques Chirac after his party’s loss to the Socialists in the legislative elections.

In 2002, Ms. Pécresse ran for the National Assembly from the Yvelines Department as a candidate for Mr. Chirac’s party, the Union for a Popular Movement, defeating Lieut. Gen. Philippe Morillon, former commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia. In 2004, Ms. Pécresse became the spokeswoman for Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then party leader and appointed her to his cabinet after being elected president in 2007.

Controversial from the moment she took office, Ms. Pécresse introduced a series of changes to French universities that provoked professors and students take to the streets and demand her resignation. In 2009, a group opposed to the spread of English in France awarded her the Prix de la Carpette Anglaise (“English Doormat Prize”) for her willingness to speak English at international meetings. Ms. Pécresse, fluent in French, English, Russian and Japanese, spoke in English with a reporter in her office near the Panthéon.

Q. Four years in office is a long time for an education minister.

A. I nearly was fired two or three times now. Not fired. But I had huge demonstrations twice, which could have caused my departure.

Q. What were these demonstrations about ?

A. About the reform of universities. The L.R.U., the Law on the Responsibilities and Freedom of Universities. That was in 2007. The first demonstrations were autumn 2007. And then in 2009 we had the reform of what we call the status of researchers, which means that they are going to be evaluated — there is going to be flexibility between their research responsibilities and their teaching. Because if you have a boss at the top of a university, the boss has to have a human resource — the right to manage. This was really a big, big issue.

Q. Why make such sweeping changes ?

A. First there is a political choice : to give priority to teaching and innovation. But if we wanted to give this priority, then we had to reform the universities. Why ? Because we have a very separated system. Nearly everything in France has been built outside the universities. Napoleon created the grandes écoles [a system of elite engineering and professional schools.] General de Gaulle continued that, so we have some of the best pupils trained outside the universities, and not trained to do research.

At the same time we have research institutes — like C.N.R.S. [National Center for Scientific Research], CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research] — that do research outside universities. And the problem is that the world model is a university. If you have a ranking, you rank universities.

Q. So were you partly responding to the fact that France traditionally didn’t do very well in the rankings ?

A. For a long time we thought we had a French model that was different from the others, and was working better. But now we know that good research and good teaching means you need a multidisciplinary university. A place where you have bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees and Ph.D. degrees — three, five, eight, we say in France.

Q. This is the Bologna framework (of standardized degree courses across Europe) ?

A. That’s a university. But after 1968, French universities were split into disciplines. We have universities for law, universities for medicine, universities for science, universities for human and social science. Inside Paris, you have eight universities, organized thematically. That’s not how you do good research and good teaching in the 21st century.

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