Musselin_The Long March

THE LONG MARCH OF FRENCHUNIVERSITIES

THE LONG MARCH OFFRENCH UNIVERSITIES

CHRISTINE MUSSELIN

ROUTLEDGEFALMERNEW YORK AND LONDON

The Long March of French Universities was originally published in French in 2001 under thetitle La longue marche des universités françaises

© Presses Universitaires de France, 2001

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments v

Introduction 1

Part I The “Faculty Republic”

1 From Napoleon’s Imperial University to the “FacultyRepublic”

7

2 The “Faculty Republic” 19

3 Universities Steered by the Disciplines 26

Part II French Universities Come into Their Own

4 The Centralized, Standardizing, Egalitarian ModelDestabilized

46

5 And the Ministry Recognized the Universities 59

6 French Universities Emerge 80

Part III From One University Configuration to Another

7 From Universities to University Configurations 96

8 University Configurations and Change 108

Conclusion 115

Glossary 124

Endnotes 128

References 155

Index 170

Acknowledgments

It is common practice to thank close family, the people who experienced thelong, slow process of manuscript production as part of their daily lives, at the endof the acknowledgments. I would like to reverse the established order and putthose who usually come last, first. The greater part of this book was written in1998–1999, the year I spent at Harvard’s Center for European Studies, and myfamily was with me for the adventure. I want to tell my children, Raphaël andLéa, how proud I am of them for adapting and integrating so readily during ourstay in America. I also want to thank my companion Laurent Canches, adocumentary filmmaker, for agreeing to spend a year of his professional lifeseveral thousand kilometers away from his place of work. I know the manydeadlines he had to meet beforehand to be able to stay in Cambridge with hisfamily, the concessions he had to make, and the many inconveniences.

This book owes much to my year at the Center for European Studies, forwhich I received a Franco-American Commission 1998–1999 Fulbrightscholarship and a fellowship from Harvard University. I am deeply grateful tothese two institutions for their trust, and for giving me the opportunity tocomplete the book amid the extraordinary intellectual effervescence of the CES.I would also like to thank all those at the Center who helped me clarify mythinking with their questions, comments, and musings, and those who throughtheir enthusiasm, availability, and in some cases friendship, made the writingprocess much more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been: PepperCulpepper, Laura Frader, Arthur Goldhammer, Peter Hall, Stanley Hoffman,Charles Maier, Andrew Martin, George Ross, Serenella Sfera, Rosemary Taylor,and Judith Vichniac. My thanks, too, to all the visiting scholars who, like myself,were welcomed at the CES in 1998–1999, as well as the CES doctoral students Ispent time with on the fourth floor. A special thought for Gretchen Bouliane,whose office and fine sense of humour I shared during the year, and forJacqueline Brown, Abby Collins, George Cumming, Lisa Eschenbach, AnnaPopiel, and Sandy Selesky, who ensured the smooth running of the Center andmade it such a pleasant place to work and live.

The book has benefited from attentive reading and illuminating comments byBernard Dizembourg, Dominique Desjeux, Olivier Favereau, CatherineParadeise, Pierre Muller, Antoine Prost, and Arndt Sorge, whose assistance has

been precious. And since it proposes a synthesis of nearly fifteen years ofsurveys and published reflection on higher education, it owes a great deal toErhard Friedberg, with whom I travelled a stretch of this research road andwho, later, as director of the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations in Paris,provided me with the means to successfully complete what had been begun.

The CSO has always played a crucial role in my research. Fellow researchersin the laboratory pay stimulating attention to one’s work, while dynamic,goodhumored doctoral students spur one on; in such surroundings one iscontinually rethinking one’s positions, finding points in others’ work that fuelone’s own, and enriching one’s thinking. Few at the centre have escaped readingfirst versions of my earlier books or articles, or hearing work presentations inlaboratory seminars. I thank them all, particularly those I turned to most often. Iam also deeply grateful to Martha Zuber and Marie-Annick Mazoyer of thecentre for their support, patience, and invaluable bibliographic and documentaryassistance, and to Annick Heddebault for her contagious enthusiasm.

The book is based on numerous empirical studies, all of which requiredconducting interviews and writing monographs and survey reports. My fellowresearchers and I could not have done this work without the good will of thehundreds of university and ministry administrators and teacher-researchers whoagreed to answer our questions. My sincerest thanks to them for their willingcooperation. I would also like to thank those with whom I conducted and wrotethe related field studies: Marc Blangy, Sophie Blanchet, Cécile Brisset-Sillion,Laurent Canches, Alexandra Fresse, Frédéric Hanin, Barbara Jankowski,Sandrine Lipiansky, Stéphanie Mignot-Gérard, Sylvie de Oliveira, PascalSanchez, and Luc Scheck, as well as all graduate students at the Paris Institutd’Etudes Politiques who participated in the 1995 and 1998 collective surveys.

The research program this book is in part based on could not have beensuccessfully completed without reiterated financial support from the Ministère del’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche, and the Agence de Modernisationdes Universités et des Etablissements. My thanks to them for their confidence inus. Special thanks to Alain Abecassis and Josette Soulas, who went beyondfinancial support to take an interest in the results, enriching them with theirconstructive reactions and comments.

Lastly, I would like to thank those of my colleagues who, like me, have chosenhigher education as their particular field of study, either for the long or short term.With Pierre Dubois, Marie-Françoise Fave-Bonnet, Bertrand Girod de l’Ain,Albert Gueissaz, Mary Henkel, Maurice Kogan, and François-Xavier Merrien Ihave had regular, stimulating exchanges, and in some cases the pleasure ofcollaborating. It is thanks to them that I’ve desired to continue working in thisarea. Not to mention the many warm discussions with Pierre Muller. Our friendlydisagreements have always been an opportunity for me to clarify my ideas, andalso, I hope, to further benefit from his work.

vi

Introduction

While administrative, economic, political, and technical elites in France aretrained primarily in grandes écoles,* university studies represent a majorsegment of French higher education.1 Of the 1,748,300 students enrolled in post-baccalauréat* education in 1998–99, 1,429,750 were university students—nearly 82 percent. In 1996–97, 68,000 academics (including teachers in InstitutsUniversitaires de Technologie* or IUTs and in Ecoles Nationales Supérieuresd’Ingénieurs but not in Instituts Universitaires de Formation des Maîtres orIUFMs [degree and certification programs for primary teachers]) and 55,179nonacademic personnel were working in French universities.2 In 1999, availablestate funding for salaries and social security charges for these two personnelcategories (which fell under the heading ‘ordinary civilian spending’) amountedto 29, 369, 115, 435 FF [€4,476,999,304]3 and the state’s operating budget foruniversities had reached the equivalent of €1,108,976,689.4

Nonetheless, it is often said and written that France has no universities— Charle,for instance, has written of the “impossible French university” (1994); likewisethat this sharply differentiates France from other industrialized countries, and thatit is one cause of the well-known recurrent French “university crisis” regularlyhighlighted by the media and regularly denounced.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that a country with nearly a million and ahalf students enrolled in university education “has no University.”5 It seems lessso when we recall that French university education developed over the nineteenthand most of the twentieth centuries within what were called facultés (faculties),single-discipline structures that had no relations with each other except if theybelonged to the same family or order of disciplines.6 For more than a 160 years,the four traditional faculties—letters, sciences, law, and medicine—in a giventown or city did not come together to form a university; they did not collectivelyrepresent a physical, administrative, scientific, normative entity with regard towhich academics and students might develop a sense of belonging and loyalty.Each faculty was an island. Its cohesion lay in its being a member of a family ofdisciplines. Faculty compartmentalization at the local level was not compensatedfor at a higher level by any university community whose members sharedcommon values, were unified in support of a single scientific ideal, conception,or idea of the University. And disciplinary compartmentalization was just as

strong at the national level, where it took the form of an academic “corporation”vertically structured into major disciplinary orders, each characterized by its owncareer management modes and under centralized control of its Paris professors.

By abolishing the faculties and advocating the development ofpluridisciplinary institutions with strengthened duties and powers, the 1968 LoiFaure (named after the education minister Edgar Faure who drafted it), aimed toput an end to faculty-dominant organization of university education andresuscitate universities in France. The law itself was not enough to bring aboutthese changes, however. Studies I conducted in the 1980s with Erhard Friedbergshow that French universities had hardly any substance, if they could be said toexist at all. Hence the title of our work En quête d’universités [In quest ofuniversities] (Friedberg and Musselin 1989).7

Now the situation has changed, and French universities are no longerimpossible. Quietly, with little or no media attention and almost withoutanyone’s realizing it, universities in France were profoundly transformed. Theirself-governance capabilities have been increased, and their place within theFrench higher education system strengthened. Concomitantly, the jointmanagement tie between the education ministry in charge of overseeinguniversities and the academic corporation has been weakened. In this way,universities have once more become full-fledged actors in the French universitysystem. The process that made this change possible was initiated by the Loid’orientation or general framework law of 1968, the Loi Faure, but it only reallygot going twenty years later, in 1988, when the ministry changed its steeringmodes for these institutions from a focus on the disciplines, thus the formerfaculties, to a focus on universities, that is, the individual university institutions.This change in turn shook up and redefined the whole French university system,as it impacted the way the ministry related to universities, the universitiesthemselves, and career management of university academics.

I make this affirmation not on the basis of personal feeling or lessons drawnfrom personal experience. On the contrary, it is founded on approximately fifteenyears of empirical study and analysis of the French university world, includingcomparative study of operating modes in different French universities,intervention modes of the overseeing ministries in France and Germany,academic job markets in the two countries, and systematic comparison of studiesI conducted in the mid-1980s and those I have more recently directed.8 Thismeans it is founded on significant measure on the many interviews I and mycolleagues have conducted with academics and administrators in a number ofuniversities, elected officials and ministerial cabinet members, as well asanalysis of numerous documents. Prolonged, detailed empirical research is whatenables me to affirm that French universities “exist.” On the basis of thisempirical material, I will show that French universities are today recognized bythe ministry as full-fledged partners, that each is engaged in defining its ownpolicies, that they are fully capable of making decisions, and that now much

2 • THE LONG MARCH OF FRENCH UNIVERSITIES

more than in the past they are being directed by university presidents and theirteams.

To account for the present dynamic, and above all to understand why it hasbecome possible only in the last ten years, it is crucial to adopt a longitudinalapproach. To explain how and why the system functioned as it did and hascontinued to do so, we must go back in time, situate the changes in a longerperspective, and reconstitute the major developmental phases of the Frenchuniversity system, starting in the early nineteenth century, with Napoleon’sfounding of the Imperial University (after the abolition of the ancien régimeuniversities during the French Revolution). Studies retracing the history ofFrench universities are useful to a point in this, but they do not in themselvesenable us to understand why the most recent developments could not haveoccurred before the late twentieth century. I shall therefore be working fromsecondary analysis of historical studies.9

My long-term approach is informed by the concept of “path dependency”(Collier and Collier 1991; Pierson 1996,2000). I bring to light how the weight ofexisting arrangements or, alternatively, history, slowed or limited the impact ofattempts to make profound changes in French university education, and whycertain structural traits remained operative for more than 160 years. Moreover,recent developments require us to go beyond identifying and explaining thecauses of the longevity or stability of a certain French “model”; we must alsoinquire into what made it possible to shake up that system in the last ten yearsand bring about profound changes. For this, other approaches must be used, sincepath dependency cannot effectively account for the possibility of redefining apath. The question of change is as much at the heart of this book as that ofstability, for we must try to understand and explain what recently made itpossible to leave the given path and follow another, which, though notperpendicular to the first, represents a significant change in direction.

To best answer these different questions, this study is structured in three parts.In Part I, entitled “The faculty republic” and composed of chapters 1, 2, and 3, Idescribe the remarkably stable, change-resistant characteristics of Frenchuniversity education before the late 1980s. This first requires examining thehistory of French universities, since the characteristics of the French system wereinstitutionalized by the Napoleonic reforms, which not only worked to strengthenwhat had already, under the ancien régime, been a standardized, nationaluniversity sector run by an administrative center (the Ministry of Education), butalso created an utterly new corporatist center and vertically structured Frenchacademic corporation. I then show that the late nineteenth-century republicanreformers ultimately—and involuntarily—helped consolidate these differentfeatures, instating the “faculty republic,” despite their intention to bring about therenaissance of French universities (chapter 1).

After retracing the foundations of the faculty republic, I present its definingfeatures and how they marked the development of French university educationup to the mid-1960s (chapter 2).

INTRODUCTION • 3

In chapter 3, I look at the paradoxes of the Loi Faure, why this law, whichabolished the faculties and seemed able to empower the “new” universities sothat they could hold their own within the French university system and becomestronger, more autonomous institutions, actually only had limited impact andultimately produced the anomic university functioning I studied in the 1980s.

Part II (chapters 4, 5, and 6) presents and analyzes the profoundtransformations of the last ten or so years. In chapter 4, 1 describe the context inwhich these changes occurred. It is important to understand that though thecharacteristics of French university education were not altered by the Loi Faure,the new universities nonetheless experienced—or suffered—two majortransformations. The first of these is the well-known increase in studentnumbers; the second, which is not generally granted sufficient importance, ismarked internal differentiation, due in part to the fact that university educationhad become not only a mass phenomenon, but also because study programs hadbecome diversified, namely, the shorter and/or professional degree programs hadbeen introduced. French universities thus became much more heterogeneous anddiversified, while the national framework for them, centralized and standardizing,remained unchanged.

It was in this context that the characteristics of the French university systemwere redefined. That redefinition was brought about by the ministry’s newcontract policy, first implemented in 1988, whereby each university was calledupon to sign a four-year contract with the central administration. I analyze theeffects of this policy on the education ministry’s steering modes, showing whyand in how they were transformed but also why and how the policy madepossible the emergence of a new representation of what French universities, andthe role of the national overseeing ministry, should be (chapter 5).

I then show how these changes in ministry intervention modes went hand inhand with stronger French university governance: after the 1980s universityfunctioning changed (chapter 6).

In the third and last part (chapters 7 and 8) I propose a concept for analyzingall university systems and developments within them. In effect, the study ofFrench universities and their late emergence shows that their developmentcannot be understood without looking at how the central administration changed.Consequently, rather than considering academics, universities, and nationalsystems as three separate worlds (this is the underlying assumption of moststudies of university education), I insist on the ties that exist among thesedifferent levels, ties that create what I define as a “university configuration”(chapter 7). I then show the theoretical and practical uses and value of thenotion, as well as its implications for the study of change (chapter 8).

This all-encompassing approach, which assumes that university governance,overseeing ministry steering modes, and the academic corporation fit andfunction together and seeks to analyze how, I believe is indispensable fordiscovering and understanding what characterizes the French university system. Ialso believe that it contributes new, complementary insights into matters that I


will be treating less directly here, such as student population characteristics,study program content, the academic profession, research work, the fit betweenstudy programs offered in various areas and labor market needs, the place ofuniversities in French higher education, relations between academics and theprivate sector, ties between universities and research institutions, and so forth.Lastly, I believe it constitutes the most propitious approach for determining howto accomplish what often seems more arduous than the twelve labors of Hercules,namely, making French universities change.

INTRODUCTION • 5

I

The “Faculty Republic”

What I call the “faculty republic” was fully realized only at the end of thenineteenth century, after a series of reforms began during the Third Republic thatculminated in the major reform law of 1896. French universities then remainedvirtually unchanged until 1968. But though this system became fully operativeonly at the turn of the twentieth century, its principal characteristics are to befound well before the Third Republic reforms, in its beginning, namely, inNapoleon’s Imperial University created in 1808.

The reforms propelled by education minister Louis Liard during the ThirdRepublic were designed in reaction against the Napoleonic ideal and aretherefore often presented as acts abolishing the Imperial University. I show thatthey in fact legitimated and reinforced that heritage. But in order to show howand why these republican-spirited reformers failed in their attempt to destabilizethe Napoleonic model, it is necessary to go back in time to the very firstmanifestations of the faculty republic and describe the conditions for itsemergence.

My analysis will make clear the full meaning of the term faculty republic—and the corresponding impotence of French universities, a condition that lastedthrough the 1960s. French universities were legislatively regenerated in 1968,when the Loi Faure simply abolished the faculties. Nonetheless, and despite allexpectations to the contrary, the law was not in itself enough to enable the newuniversities it created to become autonomous, self-managing institutions. It ishere that Part I, which is focused on stability, comes to an end. Part II isconcerned with change and the institutional renaissance of French universities.

1From Napoleon’s Imperial University to the

“Faculty Republic”

French universities, first created in the Middle Ages, have always attracted theinterest and attention of the state authorities—even when they themselves werenot seeking state protection or financial support to ensure their development.1The first attempt to “municipalize” universities, which Verger situates in thefifteenth century at the moment French universities became autonomous from theclergy, was soon brought to an end by royal intervention.2 In contrast to otherpublic sectors, university education became a legitimate sphere for governmentaction (de Swann 1995) with the constitution of the modern French state lessthan two centuries after the Sorbonne was founded. Under the various monarchs,and up until the French Revolution, a great number of measures were taken toharmonize the statutes regulating university institutions and certification modes.Charles VII’s thorough reform of the universities at the end of the Middle Ages,3Louis XI’s interventions,4 the reform of legal studies under Louis XIV are but afew examples. All such measures worked to establish a set of rules forharmonizing the criteria on the basis of which university academics couldpractice, specifying curricula and examination content and organization, definingprofessional statuses, and so forth.

The ancien régime’s standardizing thrust gave French university education anational character early on and helped construct an institutional framework thatcould be applied throughout the territory. “A number of techniques forstandardizing the educational system had already been developed and testedduring the Ancien Regime,” writes Karady; expelling the Jesuits in 1762 left thepublic authority “free to intervene in ways that rationalized the carte scolaire,*secularized the teaching corps, and normed criteria for hiring professors throughthe instatement in 1766 of a competitive examination known as the agrégation*for the Paris faculty of arts” (Karady 1986a, 261–262).

Napoleon’s Imperial University: The End of Universitiesand the Institutionalization of the University Corporation

During the French Revolution, despite lively debates on differing conceptions ofhigher education (Liard 1888; Chevallier et al. 1968), the national character of

the educational system was not called into question. However, faculties anduniversity corporations were abolished, replaced with specialized, moreprofessionally oriented schools.

This meant that when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power he found himselflooking at nearly virgin territory as far as education was concerned, and between1806 and 1808, he designed a new educational system, the Imperial University.5At precisely the time Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reform of German universitieswas laying the foundations for institutions characterized by freedom of teachingand study (Lern und Lehrfreiheit) and assigned the mission to transmit andproduce knowledge, Napoleon’s Imperial University instated a minimalist,strictly utilitarian concept, one that would sterilize higher education and producea national, centralized system. The four faculties of the Imperial University wererestricted to two narrow roles: law and medicine would train students for thoseprofessions, while faculties of letters and sciences would confer “degrees.” In thelatter disciplines, as Prost underlines, “it was not a matter of creating specialschools but rather baccalauréat* juries. This meant that the faculties were madeup of just the number of professors necessary to constitute a jury, and that theprofessor of belles lettres at the lycée* of the main town of each académie*[education district] was a member of the faculty of letters, while the professor ofmathématiques transcendentes at that lycée* was a member of the faculty ofsciences” (Prost 1968, 227).

Though they did impose changes, the Napoleonic reforms were also perfectlycontinuous with the higher education system of the ancien régime: theyreinforced the system’s national dimension from secondary through highereducation. The idea on which the Imperial University was based was statemonopoly of instruction, and its principles and rules applied throughout thenational territory. Thoroughgoing harmonization of regulations instituted onenational organizational and regulatory framework for all fields.

The Imperial University controlled study course content, defined howstudents’ knowledge was to be tested, further developed the practice ofconferring state degrees that had been established under the Consulate,6 specifiedcorrespondences between these degrees and access to certain professions, and soforth. In 1807 the baccalauréat was declared the first university degree, anduniversity academics were put exclusively in charge of baccalauréat exams, adecision that had a significant effect on their teaching load.7 That effect is stillbeing felt today: The baccalauréat became compulsory for admission in the earlynineteenth century; then, in the 1960s, with the increase in the number of holders,it became a sufficient condition for admission,8 which of course had a directeffect on the number of students enrolled in higher education.9

The structures of the new university were likewise standardized. France wasdivided up into distinct académies, each with faculties representing five possibledisciplinary orders: theology, medecine, law, sciences, and letters.Theoret ically, all faculties were identical and the same model was reproducedwithin each order.10 Faculties were also independent of each other. It has often


been pointed out that the ties between lycées and faculties of letters and scienceswere much closer than ties between those faculties and faculties of medecine andlaw, which were organized on the model of professional schools.11

Lastly, national regulations were developed for managing academics in termsof remuneration, statuses,12 and conditions for access to the academiccorporation.

All these measures worked to further the construction of national universityeducation begun under the ancien régime. Karady concludes that “what was newin the [1896] reform [see below] was not so much the creation of a new type ofestablishment as the integration of education units within a centralized, nationaladministrative structure” (1986a, 262).

The centralizing, standardizing, statist character of the Napoleonic reforms hasbeen amply demonstrated elsewhere, for all levels of the education system. It is,however, often forgotten than Napoleonic Jacobinism was characterized not onlyby the idea of state control but also by a corporatist approach, which led in thecase of higher education to the creation of a central authority for managingacademic careers. Above and beyond the innumerable reforms it has undergone,this central career management authority has remained in place up to the presenttime; its present form is the Conseil National des Universités* or CNU.13 Thiswas surely the main innovation of the First Empire reforms, the first major breakwith the ancien régime. And it is one of the founding features of thecontemporary French University.

Curiously, little attention has been paid to this aspect of the legacy of theNapoleonic reforms. The fact that the Imperial University had the status of uniqueacademic corps is always cited as a manifestation of the strength andreinforcement of state prerogatives, since that corps was placed under the controlof the Grand Maître de l’Université, who had extensive official powers.14

Successive holders of this position were called upon to “[define] universitypolicy to the Chambers, public opinion, and personnel; [regulate] theadvancement of state civil servants; [impose] sentences of reprimand, censure,transfer, and temporary suspension, with no possibility of appeal; and broadentheir surveillance to include financial and accounting management ofuniversities” (Gerbod 1965, 39). The fact is that while this measure reinforcedstate control, it also radically changed the organization of the university“profession”, transforming the earlier university corporations into a single,centralized one.15

Before the Revolution, the profession was structured into as manycorporations as there were universities. At the end of the eighteenth century,these corporations were proving incapable of regulating members’ behavior—Louis Liard’s 1888 account shows that they could not make members respect acode of conduct or combat corruption and power abuses16—and these failuresand others were cited during the Convention to justify abolishing them. Whilethe Napoleonic reforms later restored the faculties, they did not restore thecorporations. Given that the purpose of those reforms was to construct a

FROM NAPOLEON’S IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY TO THE “FACULTY REPUBLIC” • 9

national, centralized educational system, they worked to create a single,nationalized and centralized corporation. The consequence of this measure wasthe institutionalization of two practices that were to become deep characteristicsof the French system. First, the Conseil de l’Instruction Publique, wasestablished alongside the Grand Maître. Its members, appointed by the politicalauthorities together with all university professors, represented the differentdisciplines. This marked the beginning of state-corporation joint management ofuniversity education.17 Second, the reform introduced a type of academic careermanagement that was not only centralized and state-controlled but also organizedby disciplinary field. As Gerbod clearly showed in his 1965 study of academicsin the nineteenth century, up through the July Monarchy the Grand Maître wasnot as influential as his function seemed to suggest; he very quickly lost theprerogative of managing academics to the Conseil de l’Instruction Publique,which became the central actor in corporation regulation. Each member of theConseil administered the education system in the discipline he represented,managing careers, presiding over agrégation juries and study programs,finances, the creation of chairs, and so forth.

In place of the old university corporations, then, the Imperial University gaverise to a hierarchical, centralized structure that governed the whole of theeducational system, discipline by discipline. This structure marked the deathknell for universities. It provided no system for coordinating the faculties of agiven académie, and it limited the vocation of higher education to degreeconferment and training of legal and medical professionals. In addition, bycreating hierarchical, centralized academic corporations that managed “their”academics, it reinforced the institutional compartmentalization of the disciplines.Each family of disciplines was free to develop its own modes of internalregulation, impose its own rules of the game. The disciplines were thus in aposition to deprive first the faculties, and later the reconstituted universities, offree management of their academic personnel. The Napoleonic reforms negatedthe idea of the University as a place in which the different types of knowledgecame together. Those reforms are one of the main reasons why it has been nearlyimpossible for French universities to emerge. The interests and logics of thedifferent disciplines were allowed to develop within a framework in whichorganization and profession perfectly coincided; one in which universityorganization, completely without autonomy, was merely the faithful reflection ofthe profession (Musselin 1998).

The impact of discipline-based structuring was so strong that the standardizingdynamique of the Napoleonic reforms never penetrated academic careermanagement modalities. Each disciplinary order developed its own rules andresisted attempts at cross-discipline standardization of conditions for acced ing tofull professorship. This has been true from the nineteenth century to the present,from Victor Cousin’s 1840 attempt to make the agrégation in letters andsciences the equivalent of the agrégation du supérieur* in law and medicine(Mayeur 1985) to unsuccessful attempts to replace the agrégation du supérieur


by the new habilitation à diriger des recherches* (accreditation for supervisingresearch).18

Since the time of the Imperial University, the French university system hasbecome doubly centralized: The state center has been duly complemented by thecorporation center. And while the two have distinct official powers—the stateallocates funding and regulates while the corporation manages careers throughnational bodies—they became closely intertwined quite early on, as we shall see.

The Late-Nineteenth-Century Reforms: A “MissedOpportunity”19

The education system was amended several times after Napoleon’s fall, but it wasonly in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that the university model wasdebated and rethought. The late-nineteenth-century reforms, particularly the lawof 1896, making it legal once again for there to be a plurality of universities, aregenerally understood to have killed and buried the Imperial University. I shall tryto show that this was not at all the case, that, on the contrary, the reformsredefined and consolidated several aspects of the Napoleonic reforms. AsGeorges Gusdorf wrote, “By what may seem a kind of fate, struggles against theNapoleonic system always took place within the Napoleonic arrangement”(Gusdorf 1964, 146)—though fate was not the only cause.

In the 1870s, after initial reforms conducted by the minister of publicinstruction Victor Duruy under Napoleon III, the initiative for academic reformcame from a set of figures with fully established intellectual and researchreputations,20 and reforming ideas were expressed above all in the Société del’Enseignement Supérieur and through its publication, the Revue Internationalede l’Enseignement.21 University academics, politicians, and the Ministry ofPublic Instruction (with Louis Liard as director for higher education) shared thesame opinions and worked together on several reforms. These culminated in thelaw of July 10,1896, which provided, among other things, for the rebirth ofuniversities. It endowed these institutions with decision-making bodies made upof representatives from the five faculty orders, and each university became theresponsibility of the rector of the académie it was located in. The law marked the“reappearance, for the first time since the Revolution, of the term ‘university’ inFrench administrative language” (Renaut 1995, p. 155). Once again, theuniversity institution had a place in French higher education.

The 1896 reforms were largely inspired by the German university modelestablished in Prussia in the early nineteenth century by Wilhelm von Humboldt.German “solutions” were thus imported into France in part because of the Frenchdesire to compete against German economic, cultural, and military superiority,which had been so cruelly revealed by the French defeat in 1870. Also, manyFrench academics had spent time in Germany, and they were strongly attracted tothe Humboldt university system.22 This attraction is expressed in numerous textspublished in the Revue Internationale de l’Enseignement. As Christophe Charle


shows in his careful 1994 study based on texts by contemporaneous Frenchacademics,23 what attracted them most was the autonomy enjoyed by theirGerman counterparts and the place given to research activities. In effect, thereformers were calling for higher education to be less taken up with examinationpreparation and degree conferment and more focused on transmitting andproducing knowledge. The faculties of sciences and letters should no longer belycée annexes; rather, they should receive “professional” students who coulddevote themselves entirely to the pursuit of knowledge.

French university education seemed narrow-minded, corseted, evenunderdeveloped in comparison to its German counterpart. There were few Frenchstudents, and they had a reputation for being dilettantes; French faculties werepoor and the “scientific” activities of French academics both quantitatively andqualitatively weak. Weisz writes: “Probably the most frequent complaints werethat higher education was overcentralized, administrative regulations stifled allinitiative on the part of the professors, and the rigid hierarchical structureengendered intellectual inertia” (Weisz 1977, 211). There seems to have beenunanimous support for one solution: “wisely regulated but real autonomy”(ibid.). The influence of Humboldt’s ideas on late-nineteenth-century Frenchprojects for reform may be seen in calls to grant a greater place to knowledge(and thus research) in the “new” French university and in the recurring theme of“the pursuit of the unity of knowledge,” which would facilitate bringing all thefaculty orders together in a single institutional space. It should be noted,however, that for Humboldt and the Prussian idealist philosophers of the earlynineteenth century—Schelling, Fichte, Schleiermacher—the point around whichthe unity of knowledge should be forged was the faculty of philosophy (thoughKant considered it a lower faculty24), whereas the French reformers werepursuing a scientistic ideal. In other words, “the contest of the faculties wasarbitrated in two very different ways: in favor of philosophy and the humanitiesin one case; of physics and mathematical science in the other” (Renaut 1995,190).

Reforms inspired by this scientistic ideal were not, however, successfullyimplemented in French universities. It cannot be denied that the late-nineteenth-century reforms enabled French university education to take off quantitatively:The number of students attending the faculties increased quickly, from anaverage of 17,503 over the five-year study period 1886–1890 to 23,020 for 1891–1895, 27,960 for 1896–1900, and 31,514 for 1901–1905—an increase of 180percent in 20 years.25 But qualitatively these reforms failed in two fundamentalways.

First, research remained a largely secondary activity compared to degreeconferment and teaching. Charle (1994) points out that the new “pure re search”degrees introduced—the Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures and the Doctorat del’Université—were thrown off course or absorbed by the system in place, aswere the new research institutes. The reforms imported from the German modelran up against the “dominant logic of the French model,” which either turned


them toward other goals, that is, the new degrees, or circumvented them, therebymaintaining itself, as with the new research institutes, which, instead offacilitating university decentralization, ultimately reinforced the center, Paris.26

Second, the scientistic ideal never worked as a principle for rallying anduniting the different faculties. Universities did not acquire greater institutionalsubstance; they had no means of making their component parts act collectivelyor establish common values among their members; no means of getting thedifferent faculties to develop similar conceptions of their purpose and tasks,criteria for excellence, work methods, or of getting them to grant legimacy to adisciplinary balance of power that favored the sciences. The biologist MauriceCaullery in his 1920 report, nearly a quarter of a century after the law of 1896was passed, sums up this twofold failure, criticizing the “preponderance ofdegree conferment, the lack of freedom and autonomy in shaping universitypolicies and daily university life, and the weakness of universities” relations withthe outside world at the national and international levels (Caullery 1920, 51;quoted in Charle 1994,420). The reforms’ intellectual ambition had not beenrealized; they had not engendered the emergence of a French academic andresearch community.

What prevented the positivist republican ideal from being established andsuccessfully realized? Why were French universities still “impossible” at the endof the nineteenth century and why was the question of university rebirth still atthe core of debates and reformers’ intentions through most of the twentieth?

One way to answer those questions is to analyze what stood in the way ofsuccessfuly disseminating the philosophical inspiration for the reforms, namely,the scientistic ideal. Charle takes this avenue, demonstrating that “it was everyonefor himself, with each of the faculties withdrawing into its specificity” (Charle1994, 136).27 He identifies and analyzes the structural obstacles—academics’social backgrounds, relations between Paris and the provinces, each discipline’sparticular regulation modes—that made it difficult to disseminate the scientisticideal, hypothesizing as follows:

In order for science academics to have successfully converted the otherfaculties to their solutions, the time-honored cultural and disciplinaryhierarchy would have had to be overturned, making the scientists’ positionon the academic prestige ladder coincide with their objective rise towardsocial legitimacy, itself due to science’s new role in economicdevelopment. This in turn presupposes a consensus in scientific circles thatthere had to be a kind of sacred union of the sciences for dealing with theoutside world (139).

Whether or not academics as a whole supported the reform ideal seems to me thewrong question, however. The failures of the late-nineteenth-century reformscannot be satisfactorily explained by the absence of across-the-board support forthe intellectual ideal that inspired them. Indeed, this would mean positing that


French universities cannot exist without a shared ideal of the “university” or, toput it another way, without French university academics having been broughttogether into a community structured and organized by a single principle(positivism, for example). In fact, if we compare French experience with that ofother countries, we see that no such condition is required for universities to exist.American research universities were developed for the most part before anacademic ‘community’ had emerged in the United States. The academicprofession there was organized relatively late,28 and well after Johns Hopkins orHarvard University had become involved in scientific activities and researchertraining.29

The case of Germany should also be considered. After Humboldt’s reformswere implemented, German universities acquired an institutional status that theypreserved even in periods when their intellectual and social influence in thecountry and world at large was relatively weak (Ringer 1969). Still, it would be amistake to see those universities as proof of the successful dissemination of theearly-nineteenth-century Humboldtian ideal, because German universitiesactually distanced themselves from those reforms on many points. AdoptingMoraw’s arguments on the question (1982), Torstendahl (1993) stresses that theBerlin University model was modified by other German universities, and that theideal of the different types of knowledge coming together around the faculty ofphilosophy was never realized. Nineteenthcentury German universitiesunderwent major differentiation and specialization processes that favored thedevelopment of new disciplines in sciences as well as humanities, and this put anend to the unifying approach (Liedman 1993). The solidity and substance of theGerman university institution were thus not the pure product of any sharedcommunity adherence to the Humboldtian ideal.

We must therefore find other factors to explain the failures of the Frenchrepublican reforms and the aborted rebirth of French universities. In my view, twofeatures played a central role: maintenance of the twofold state-corporationcentralization inherited from the Napoleonic reforms and the difficulty oftransforming ideas into actions.

At the end of the reform period, state centralization clearly remained intact.The new provisions did not actually call into question universities’ monopoly onacademic degree conferment. Though the law of 1875, continuing the LoiFalloux (see below), recognized the principle of academic freedom and openedthe way for developing nonpublic-sector universities, the law of 1880 ultimatelyreturned the monopoly on academic degree conferment to the state and thusdeprived private institutions of the right to call themselves universi ties. Renaut(1995) pointed up this about-face and brilliantly analyzed the causes. He alsospecified the lessons to be drawn from it: The reaffirmation of the state’smonopoly made developing independent universities impossible, and “from thenon, [the French University] would have trouble having any kind of new future;its relations with the state—woven and indeed knotted at the time of Napoleon—would not really be loosened” (173). The return to a state monopoly meant there


was no competition between universities and nonpublic training institutions,since national degrees maintained their primacy30 and continued to be preferredby students.31 By means of those degrees the state exercised its right to overseeeducation content. In sum, state central power, with its standardizing dynamic, wasmaintained.

Nonetheless, and contrary to Renaut’s interpretation (1995), the late-nineteenth-century reforms did not merely tighten existing ties betweenuniversity and state; they also reconstituted and reinforced corporation anddiscipline centralization. During the nineteenth century, several provisions hadmodified the functioning of the unique corps created by the Napoleonic reforms,among them the Loi Falloux of 1850, which gave “nonacademics” a place on theConseil de l’Instruction Publique. As long as oversight was a matter for state-appointed peers, academics had felt relatively protected and secure; the LoiFalloux, on the other hand, made oversight part of the exercise of political power,and for several years that power was harsher than the imperial yoke had been.Under Hypolite de Fortoul, education minister from 1851 to 1856, teachers wereregularly censured and repressed; higher education curricula were restructuredand detailed course outlines had to be submitted for ministry approval (Gerbod1965). It is hardly surprising, then, that late-nineteenth-century discussions onreforming the Conseil de l’Instruction Publique focused not on whether or not toabolish it but on whether or not to make it independent, and not on whether or notto abolish the peer monopoly but on whether or not to reestablish it. After tensedebate, it was ultimately decided that peers should manage peers. The law ofJanuary 2,1880, stipulated that the Conseil Supérieur de l’Instruction Publiquewas to be composed exclusively of university members. Clearly the republicanreforms fully reconstituted the corporatist center, returning it to its fulllegitimacy in the eyes of university academics.

The Conseil acquired even further legitimacy when projects to“deconcentrate” higher education teacher management by handing it over toindividual universities failed. In fact, above and beyond the consensus forcreating universities, there was strong tension between partisans of thecorporatist tradition, seeking to “reestablish lost corporatist solidarity andcohesion,” and economic and political liberals, who advocated “completefreedom for the faculties in determining study programs and hiring professors”(Weisz 1977, 212–213). The first group won out. According to Weisz, this wasbecause the reforms also corresponded to a “professionalization” strategy on thepart of the academic community, a strategy driven by the desire to promote theuniversity community as a whole, without internal distinction, a desire tobecome “independent academics and researchers accountable neither to the statenor society at large, but to their peers in the international scientific community”(ibid. 70–71). In fact, this approach involved defending the corporation againstany type of differentiation among peers. In Weisz’s studies (1977 and 1983), the“winner” in the debate on remunerating university academics was the principleof noncompetition. While some participants, including the liberal


parliamentarian Edouard Laboulaye, called for instituting a principle that wouldallow French professors to be paid out of student tuition fees for their courses (aswas the case for professors in Germany), the minister, after long debate, optedfor a standard salary scale: equal pay for equal degree and title, whatever thecontent and quality of the work, whatever the number of students enrolled.32

Charle’s conclusion is essentially the same (1994). He speaks of a “refusal onsocial grounds,”33 an elegant way of saying that those who propelled the reformwere not exactly ardent proponents of a German-style approach based oncompetition and decentralization, which would have necessitated new and muchless favorable career rules.34

All these facts show that the late-nineteenth-century reforms worked toreconstitute and consolidate the corporatist center. The right of each disciplinaryfamily to have its own modalities was not questioned, and the intenselycentralized, discipline-based type of career management was maintained,reinforced, and once again legitimated.

Another factor that explains the disappointing results of the late-nineteenth-century reforms was the incomplete translation of the positivist republican idealinto operational structures. On this point, too, it is instructive to compare Franceand Germany. The structures that developed out of the early nineteeth-centuryPrussian reforms constituted a more faithful reflection of the intellectual projectthan in France, as Renaut inadvertently shows in his account of the disputebetween Schleiermacher and Fichte on how to organize the future BerlinUniversity (1995).35 According to Renaut, the German idealist model could carrythe day because Humboldt was wise enough to choose Schleiermacher’sinstitutional project over Fichte’s authoritarian one. Conversely, in France, therewas none of the rehauling of structural conditions that would have beennecessary for the republican positivist ideal for reforming the French Universityto succeed.36 Let me be perfectly clear. I am not suggesting that to “makepossible” the French university it would have been enough to conceive of anorganizational form adequate to the intellectual concept. I am simply saying thatthe concept is not enough, and that it can be realized only if consistent institutionalstructures are developed in its wake. Contrary to what Renaut would have usbelieve, it was not the high quality of early-nineteenth-century public debate onGerman universities that made possible the emergence of the “Humboldtian”model, but rather the fact that that ideal was embodied in structures andoperating modes that could allow German universities to develop and,ultimately, to emancipate themselves from the very ideal that had brought theminto being. In France, the “institutional design” propelled by the law of 1896 infact put into place two organizational features that were incompatible with thephilosophy behind the reform: first, it concentrated decision-making powerwithin the faculties, thus weakening the university level; second, it did notcritically consider the fact that each major disciplinary family had its ownparticular rules of the game, thereby allowing those families to withdraw intothemselves (Charle 1994).


The reform process itself was largely responsible for the power of these twofeatures. Weisz’s analysis of that process (1977 and 1983) enables us tounderstand why there was no French equivalent to the dispute betweenSchleiermacher and Fichte despite the fact that in late-nineteenth-century debateson the reforms there were indeed two opposed conceptions, one liberal, the othercorporatist.37 The two groups agreed on one point: French universities had to bereborn. And it was precisely the fact that there was no discussion of what exactlythey understood that to mean that made possible such wide agreement. The greatpolitical skill of the reformers, particularly Louis Liard, consisted precisely ingrasping and consolidating this clear (though minimal) consensus, all the whilemanaging not to stir the profound differences of opinion just beneath the surface.Weisz maintains that the reformers were able to avoid open confrontationbetween the two competing visions by mobilizing everyone around the notion of“University,” a concept vague enough for each to see in it what he liked.38

Rather than shatter the fragile consensus on the University idea by generating adebate that would have crystallized oppositions, they chose a step-by-stepapproach—small measures taken incrementally one after another.39 This resultedmost often in victory for the corporatist conception over the liberal theses, andthus a reinforcement of disciplinary specificities and differences.

Though the reform can be presented by means of a few major dates, namely,1885 and 1896,40 there were also less momentous but likewise important stepstaken, steps which laid out the chosen path more clearly. The reform process didnot begin with the creation of universities—that was its crowning achievement.In other words, the creation of universities was not the cornerstone of the wholereform but only the final touch to an already reconstructed edifice of which thefaculties were and remained the foundation. In bringing the faculties togetherunder one roof, the law of 1896 did indeed return to the definition of a universityas a place where the different types of knowledge came together and wereintegrated; and, in creating a common deliberative body for the differentfaculties,41 it made a supplementary breakthrough. Collaboration and powerbalances among the disciplines would now be handled, in part at least, withineach university. Still, this “whole,” understood to bring together and eventranscend the “parts,” was in fact instituted eighty-eight years after the ‘parts’had been reconstituted, that is, in 1808, within the Imperial University and nearlyeleven years after they had been given a certain degree of autonomy. In 1885 thefaculties had become legal entities, a first step toward financial autonomy as theycould now raise and spend private funds. A few months later, “the decree ofDecember 28 strengthened the autonomy of higher education institutions bycreating the function of faculty dean. While deans were to be appointed by thenational education minister, they were first of all elected by the relevant facultyassembly, and they were charged with administering the faculty entity, both asrepresentatives of it and agents of the central authority” (Renaut 1995, 155).Furthermore, within each faculty a council and assembly had been created. Theassembly, composed of all faculty members, was to make decisions concerning


libraries, students, and so forth. More important decisions, namely, in the area ofhiring, were the business of the council, where only permanent teachers sat(T.N.Clark 1973, 25–26). If to these changes we add a set of decrees that, from1880 to 1883, successively abolished professors’ obligation to submit courseoutlines to the ministry and reduced the state’s power to intervene in academiccareer management, then the 1889 finance law endowing individual facultieswith a budget, and, lastly, the development of procedures allowing for relevantuniversity professors to participate in decisions on appointments of tenuredprofessors to chairs, it is clear that the rebirth of universities was preceded by therebirth of the faculties.

The consensus that had been forged around the idea of re-creating universitiesthus logically led to the rebirth of apprehensions and resistance when it came torealizing the idea in the late 1880s. Louis Liard’s initial project, which providedfor the creation of a small number of full research universities rather than ascattering of institutions not all of which would include all the faculty orders,was withdrawn.42 “Indeed, it was necessary to satisfy regional pressure groups,who wanted to turn each local group of faculties into a university, while calmingthe faculties’ fears of losing their autonomy43 and making it clear that poolingresources and making common infrastructure investments would guaranteemaximum efficiency” (Karady 1986b, 332). The reformers’ step-by-step strategy,which led them to construct the law of 1896 without radically rearranging things,did make it possible to prepare the ground for the creation of new universities,44

and it made that prospect seem ineluctable. But it also meant that the last andhighest level of the reform “rocket” was extremely dependent on all the lowerlevels.

Furthermore, the law of 1896 did not seriously modify the previouslyconstructed edifice.45 As early as 1885 every académie had set up a ConseilGénéral des Facultés composed of deans and the académie rector [localrepresentative of the national education ministry], and in 1893 these councils hadbecome legal entities (T.N.Clark 1973). The Conseil d’Université instituted bythe law of July 1896 was thus only a continuation of this earlier council, thoughthis did not give it any greater legitimacy among academics, as it was to bepresided over by none other than the rector, who, in contrast to the faculty dean,was appointed by the national education minister rather than chosen by tenuredprofessors.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, all was in place to ensure the enduranceof the faculty republic.


2The “Faculty Republic”

It cannot be denied that French university education no longer resembled what ithad been in the Napoleonic period, either in scope or content, after the reformsundertaken during the Third Republic. The faculties had become autonomousfrom secondary education; students and teachers were becoming professionalizedand acquiring firmer statuses than before. Nevertheless, these reforms did notcall into question the defining characteristics of French higher education asinstituted by Napoleon’s Imperial University—centralized, national, part of thestate apparatus. Indeed, they strengthened those characteristics. Frenchuniversities were re-created in 1896, but their prerogatives and their legitimacy,compared to that of the faculties, remained strictly limited. The aborted advent ofFrench universities in 1896, and the corresponding reinforcement of thefaculties, strongly marked the institutional history of French universityinstitutions through the twentieth century. And what I call the “faculty republic”remained in place until 1968.1

The faculty republic had three fundamental characteristics. First, academiccareers in universities continued to be managed from within the discipline;universities had no role. This feature was, in fact, reinforced as careermanagement became less a matter for state intervention and, gradually, becamethe exclusive province of academics. Second, within what were for all intentsand purposes nonexistent universities, the central actors were faculty deans.Third, the state steered universities by means of the faculty structures. In sum,state steering modes, academic career management, and university “government”all reinforced each other, thereby creating a university system dominated byvertical disciplinary logic, a system in which universities had no real place.

Before considering these three characteristics in detail, it should be clarifiedthat certain strong features of the first sixty years of the twentieth century werenot particular to that period—either they preexisted them or they have beenmaintained through the present time. It is not so much any single one of thesecomponents as their simultaneous presence and aggregated effect that definewhat I am calling the faculty republic.

Career Management and the Faculty Structure

The first characteristic is the direct result of the fact that universities’administrative reemergence after 1896 did not change the discipline-basedstructures put in place by the Napoleonic reforms. On the contrary, at the end ofthe nineteenth century, vertical fragmentation of the university community wasfurther accentuated. Weisz explains that, despite efforts by the Sociétéd’Enseignement Supérieur to remain the only professional association,specialized associations did develop,2 as did demands for more thoroughlydiscipline-based organization of career administration, namely, calls to replacethe Conseil Supérieur de l’Instruction Publique and the Comité Consultatif by aset of national councils, one for each faculty order. This demand was met in 1945with the establishment of national-level subcouncils corresponding to thedifferent faculty orders (Cohen 1978).

Furthermore, it should be noted that career management followed rulesspecific to each faculty order.3 The procedures for acceding to full professorshipand formal career advancement in general were not the same for law, medicine,sciences, and letters. There was and continues to be a strong demarcation linebetween disciplines in which full professorship is obtained through theagrégation du supérieur nationwide competitive examination and all others.Among faculties without agrégation du supérieur exams the split is betweenletters, in which a prior post in secondary school education quickly became astrong hiring asset, and sciences, in which it is highly advisable not to beginone’s career as a high school teacher. These practices subsisted throughout thefaculty republic and still exist today.4

Until the early 1960s, there was also geographic segmentation between whatwere called “departmental” faculties [reference is to the département, afundamental French administrative unit] and Paris faculties, a segmentationreflected particularly in salary differences. But administrative and salarydifferences were only the most visible part of Paris’s domination in matters ofcareer management. To begin with, many Paris academics taught in a number ofParis institutions, had professional practices, and received royalties on primaryand secondary textbooks (Weisz 1983); they thus had additional sources ofrevenue. Second, Paris academics largely dominated the central bodies— theCounseil Supérieur de l’Instruction Publique and Conseil Consultatif—responsible for examining hiring decisions for vacant chairs. Also, one-third ofstudents study in Paris, the majority of doctoral theses are defended there, andParis is where the vast majority of research centers are. Lastly and perhaps mostimportant, the Paris faculties were the university system’s magnetic center: asuccessful academic career culminated in Paris.5

The sharp inequality between Paris and the provinces continued through thefirst half of the twentieth century and only began to diminish in 1960.6 Over thesame period, however, disciplinary differences were continually reinforced. Oneof the most visible manifestations of this was the development of academic staff


categories particular to each disciplinary order. Mayeur (1985) studied manypossible examples, of which I will discuss two: maîtres de conférences* andassistants. The academic corps known as maîtres de conférences was created in1878, but only in letters and sciences. In medicine and law, a second corps, inaddition to full professors, already existed: auxiliaries who had already passedthe agrégation du supérieur exam and were waiting for professorships to openup. Regarding assistants, practices varied from faculty to faculty (Mayeur). Insciences and medicine, assistants came into official existence in 1925, whenpermanent-status lab demonstrators (present in laboratories since the nineteenthcentury) were given that title. In letters this category was only established in1942 and it did not constitute a body of permanent higher education academics.7Lastly, in law, assistant posts were distributed as scholarships enabling the holderto prepare a doctoral thesis or the agrégation du supérieur exam. For this singlestaff category, then, there was wide variation from one family of disciplines to thenext.8

The two strongest features of the French university profession for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century were thus the vertical, centralized structure ofcareer management and faculty particularities. Universities were entirelyexcluded from promotion and hiring decisions, and there was no place orstructure capable of creating living horizontal connections between the differentfaculty communities or sparking the development of transversal teaching orresearch projects among the compartmentalized worlds of the faculty orders.

Institutionalizing Faculty-dominant Steering

This general situation was reinforced by the fact that the faculty republic wasalso a period of joint management of universities by the central stateadministration and the national-level corporatist bodies, and this way of steeringuniversity education respected and legitimated the vertical field constituted byeach faculty order. The Imperial University had been characterized by jointmanagement and disciplinary specialization, as Gerbod (1965) showed, pointingup the particular importance of the Conseil de l’Instruction Publique, and thelate-nineteenth-century reforms hardly worked to loosen the close ties existingbetween the ministry, where department directors and even the minister himselfwere former professors, and university “representatives,” who in fact representedtheir discipline and faculty order. Indeed, the Conseil de l’Instruction Publiquerecovered its original purity in this period—nonuniversity staff were excluded—and, while according to the official texts the ministry disposed of numerousprerogatives, practice was quite remote from theory. Up through World War II,the creation of new chairs and appointing of inaugural chairholders wereofficially ministry business while it was up to the national corps and facultycouncils to fill vacant professorships. In reality, as Clark has shown, the ministerconsulted the Conseil de l’Instruction Publique in all decisions regarding thecreation of new chairs: “National councils of senior universitaires, largely from

THE “FACUITY REPUBLIC” • 21

Parisian institutions, continued to advise the Ministry through the late nineteenthand twentieth centuries…. Their approval was necessary for changes in the titlesof chairs and the naming of all incumbents of chairs (T.N.Clark 1973, 26). Forfilling vacant chairs, the faculty concerned and the Conseil Supérieur del’Instruction Publique each proposed a list of two names; ministry most oftenfollowed the faculty’s choice, even if “the system functioned as an implicitthreat, which forced the faculty councils to make choices justifiable onintellectual grounds” (Weisz 1983, 197). Charle does report cases where theministry used its position to overtly political ends: “Republican governments didnot hesitate to create chairs on the basis of extra-university considerations, eitherto introduce new study programs that the faculties or Collège de France hadrejected, or, fairly frequently, to pay back loyal political supporters” (1994, 322–323). The ministry could also forego agreement from the corporatist center onoccasion. But the cases Charle cites all occurred between 1900 and 1908, and heaffirms that strong state intervention of this type became increasingly rare. Ittherefore seems fair to say that the first half of the twentieth century was markedby collusion between the ministry and the corporatist center, and a blurring oftheir respective responsibilities and official powers.

After World War II, the system remained one of joint management but begandeveloping in three directions. First, it became even more faculty driven due tothe reorganizing of the central corporation authority into five specializedsections, each corresponding to a faculty order (it was now called the ConseilConsultatif des Universités, precursor of the present-day Conseil National desUniversités or CNU). Second, distribution of powers between the ministry and thisnew authority became much more clear-cut. The ministry was to be in charge ofpost creation, management, and distribution of posts among the faculties; itwould also formulate rules for career advancement and organize hiring andpromotion procedures. The national corporatist authority, on the other hand, wasmade responsible in 1945 for the selection of individuals: “It had to approve thefirst incumbent of a new chair (instead of leaving this to the ministry as in earlieryears), and it established national ‘pools’ of names from which junior faculty forthe entire system were drawn” (T.N.Clark 1973, 26).9

Lastly, the balance of power was clearly established in favor of the faculties;they had never had so much weight in teacher hiring. Though the regulationsofficially left the last word to the education minister, he almost always followedthe faculty’s recommendation, as Ellrodt (1992) points out. Consulting thefaculty was not compulsory in all cases, but “it was the informal rule…. Theregime that preceded the abolition of aptitude lists thus left the faculties a greatdeal of real autonomy, at least for filling vacant posts, which are by far morenumerous than new one in periods of stability” (1992, 229).10

Joint management was not limited to careers and posts; as a reality, it wasbroadly reflected in the state’s approach to intervening in university education. Ifwe consider the administration directory, we see that in 1947 the NationalMinistry of Education included a Department of Higher Education (Direction de


l’Enseignement Supérieur or DES) made up of three bureaus respectively incharge of staff—this in turn was divided into three sections by discipline; studyprogram organization, and budget. This structure remained in place and virtuallyidentical until 1960. In 1961 the DES was restructured into three subdepartmentswith exactly the same powers as the three bureaus that preceded them. Theadministrative registry itself, then, reflects how important segmentation in termsof discipline was. This is confirmed by texts on the French University publishedin the 1960s, and later, in interpretations of the events of May 1968. Salmon(1982) explains that “the curriculum in law was fixed for every faculty of law inminute detail by committees of professors of law, meeting in the ministry” andhe concludes: “There was therefore selfgovernment in each field on a nationalscale, with little possibility of variation at the local level” (1982, 66). Likewise,faculty influence is observable in official ministry texts. The curricula reformconducted by Christian Fouchet in 1966 perfectly reflects how strong disciplinecompartmentalization was and the efforts of each discipline to impose its modelthroughout France: “Each field (sociology, history, and so forth) was defined inthe greatest detail, with a specific number of hours given for each subject andyear of study. The examinations were defined in typically French style:universities had no choice, and for each program of study [my emphasis], thereform imposed the nature and length of the different exams and how much eachwas to count in the final evaluation” (Prost 1992, 124).

Clearly, the ministry had litle leverage over the faculty orders. They chosetheir members, decided on the content of study programs, and negotiated theirbudget directly with the central administration. In this faculty-dominatedstructure, the deans, especially those of the major Paris faculties, played a centralrole, and the ministry considered them its true interlocutors, to the detriment ofacadémie rectors. Within the universities, the deans were the only actorslegitimately in charge.

The Deans as Central University Figures

Among the remarkable features of the faculty republic were its universities’ lackof substance and the importance of the role of faculty deans. According to Prost,before 1969 “the university was nothing more than a group of faculties, and realpower belonged to the faculty deans. The disciplinary departments below them,together with all other forms of organization, had no real power, no budget tomanage. The rector above them, a state functionary who presided over theConseil de l’Université, had a ceremonial symbolic role” (Prost 1992, 136–137).

The rector was often decried as the ministry’s “secular arm.” As Gusdorf putit, “The rector is the guarantor not of our independence, but our dependence”(1964, 146). These words express an objection not to rectors’ real action andconstraining power but rather their lack of legitimacy, the fact that theyrepresented the state, which appointed them, rather than the corporation,from which they most often hailed. The following mid-1960s account by Rector


Gérald Antoine confirms the two major limitiations of the function. Rectors hadvirtually no means of taking action, but, above all, they suffered from apronounced lack of legitimacy:

Governing thus at third remove is an ambiguous, uneasy undertaking forthe state-appointed rector. Indeed, what is such a “president” doing at thehead of a University Council…when, with few exceptions, he is not anoriginal member of that university? He necessarily appears an intruder, or,to put it in more kindly fashion, a piece of architecture that has beensuperimposed on the exterior of the edifice (Antoine and Passeron 1966,33).11

For deans the situation was radically different. Elected by their peers, theyenjoyed great legitimacy. And it was at the faculty level that all importantdecisions were made: budget negotiations, internal budget allocation,organization of study programs, hiring, and so forth. Here organizationalstructures perfectly corresponded to professional, discipline-based ones; indeed,organization was dissolved in profession (Musselin 1998). What made itparticularly easy for this to occur was that decision-making processes wereentirely collegial, in the sense that they were in the hands of full professors onlyand thus, exclusively, of peers.12

The corollary of faculty and faculty dean-dominated functioning was absenceof interfaculty relations and intra-university dynamics. The lack of cooperationwas visible from the early twentieth century. Weisz cites the difficultiesexperienced by disciplines that cut across faculty boundaries (the social sciencesand geography, for example, or business programs) and duplication of coursesfrom one faculty to another. This situation was also noted in the 1920 Caulleryreport, and it was at the core of critiques developed at the first Colloque de Caenin 1956 (see chap. 3). Department compartmentalization, the difficulty oforganizing multidisciplinary curricula and arranging for courses to be taught byteachers from other faculties in the same university were all noted and criticizedat this conference. The weakness of ties among faculties was due to the verticalstructure of the French university system. Relevant interlocutors for a facultydean were not in fact other faculty deans at the same university, but rather otherdeans of the same faculty order throughout France, and the national conference ofdeans from the same family of disciplines was of much greater importance thanthe university council.

Clearly, French universities did not exist before 1968. But their nonexistenceis only one of the reasons for referring to this period as the faculty republic. As Ihave shown throughout this chapter, the insubstantialness of the “university”level cannot be dissociated from the strength of the faculty-based structure instate steering modes, in relations between ministry and corporation, and inacademic career management. It is the consistency of the system as a whole, andthe reinforcing effect it had, that make it possible to speak of a faculty republic.


The absence of course exchange between faculties of the same university cannotbe explained solely by university conformism or an inability to imagine such anarrangement. Attempts at exchange were made in some universities—they didnot succeed. To understand this situation fully we must also take into account theobstacles that such projects encountered outside the universities, problems suchas incompatibility with national acadamic program models (what are known asmaquettes nationales), budget allocation for course hours (in the case of courseexchange, would hours taught be paid for by the professor’s “home” faculty orthe one he/she went to teach in?), and lack of mutual recognition amongcolleagues from different faculties. In sum, the faculty republic extended wellbeyond the faculties themselves.


3Universities Steered by the Disciplines

Two fundamental dynamics have been identified in the development of Frenchuniversity education to the mid-1960s. One is a standardizing dynamic leading tothe construction of a national system. By means of state-sanctioned degrees andharmonized statuses and structures, the system aims to guarantee that the samequality education supply will be found throughout France and that any citizenwith the baccalauréat degree can enter university. The particularities of thispublic, virtually free system provided by state-paid civil servants and fundedexclusively by the state are its uniformity, the academic character of its studyprograms, its weak adaptive capacity, and the narrow range of careers it preparesstudents for. With the exception of medicine and law, university study in Franceleads to degrees that open doors to careers in secondary school teaching andpublic administration—period. Furthermore, there is nothing to threaten theuniversity sector’s remarkable stability and homogeneity (Bourricaud 1971, 47),as these have been counterbalanced by the development of a nonuniversityhigher education sector, the grandes écoles. Created to compensate for universitydeficiencies, this sector in fact profited from them, assuming for itself the work oftraining the country’s technical, administrative, political, and economic elites.Until the 1960s, then, French higher education expanded in accordance with twodevelopmental models: the centralizing, rigorously egalitarian, standardizingmodel of university education, and the multicentered, diversified model of allother higher education institutions, produced by external differentiation.1

Parallel to the standardizing dynamic, French university education has beenstrongly marked by what can be called a faculty dynamic. As explained, the FrenchUniversity is structured by vertical, compartmentalized disciplines that arestrongly homogeneous internally and significantly different from each other (inmatters of academic staff status, career advancement process, study programorganization, etc.). This second dynamic was strengthened by the “facultyrepublic” described in the preceding chapter.

That “republic” came to an end with the law of November 1968, the Loi Faure,which abolished the faculties. The political and social context in which this lawwas passed are well known, and it has often been pointed out that it waspromulgated after ten years of growth in student numbers during which

successive education ministers were unable to effectively implement anyreform.

The Loi Faure has been criticized often and by many: for shattering thecollegial model and thereby disincorporating professorial power; for setting up asystem where the electoral modes and composition of university decision-makingbodies made them vulnerable to politicization; for reconstituting the old facultieswithin “incomplete” universities,2 now constructed around political alliancesrather than consistent training and research structures; and for the new basicuniversity component it created, the Unité d’Enseignement et de Recherche* orUER [Teaching and research unit], perceived as a kind of extra level between the“college” and “department” of American universities. It cannot be denied,however, that the law of 1968 returned universities to French higher educationafter nearly 200 years of absence. It thus made possible what the law of July1896 had failed to realize: supradisciplinary institutions. The law of November7, 1968, marked the beginning of a fundamental stage in the history of theFrench University. Not only, as Prost has written, did “the year 1968 mark theend of the twentieth-century university as organized under the egis of LouisLiard by the decrees of 1885 and the law of 1896” (1992, 138), but it also dealt ablow to the faculty-based conception of university education instituted with theImperial University.

But while the law aimed to provide the new universities with immediateinstitutional means to become more autonomous and capable of developing theirown collective projects, the organizational learning process within thoseuniversities was very slow, and their governance modes remained weak. Is theslowness to be imputed to the institutional choices made in the Loi Faure andlater, in 1984, the Loi Savary? Only in part. We must once again take intoaccount the immobilism of the central administration’s steering modes, ofministry-academic corporation relations, and of career management structures. Inlight of the main conclusions I reached in my 1980s studies of Frenchuniversities and central administration functioning, it is clear that weakuniversity governance was due to, and in large part maintained by, the steeringmodes of the overseeing Ministère d’Education Nationale.

After reviewing the circumstances in which the Loi Faure was passed and thechanges it brought about, I shall show how the universities that succeeded thefaculty republic in the twenty years following passage of the law continued to besteered by the disciplines.

The Loi Faure of 1968: A Pragmatic Rather Than IdealisticConception of the University

The Loi Faure can be interpreted in several ways, since, as Edgar Faure’sspeeches to the National Assembly and the Senate show (Faure 1969), itcontained a far-reaching social project. For Edgar Faure the University crisis wasonly one aspect of the larger crisis that was shaking up France’s youth and the

UNIVERSITIES STEERED BY THE DISCIPLINES • 27

society at large. The issue was how to prepare young people to live in a societycharacterized by upward socio-occupational mobility. This involved“learning how to learn” and acquiring multidisciplinary skills, rather than merelyaccumulating knowledge. The reform was not for the University; its purpose wasto enable the University to participate effectively in training future citizens. Thiswas why the organization of university education had to be changed, the facultiesabolished, and true universities created.

The idea underlying the law, namely, that modern, dynamic higher educationwas inconceivable without universities, derived in fact from conclusions reachedby a number of university academics, who, in the 1950s, had already begunpublishing critical essays and straightforward diagnoses of the situation andmaking suggestions for change (cf. Esprit 1964; Gusdorf 1964; Antoine andPasseron; 1966, among others). In this way, what Bourricaud (1982) has called a“reform coalition” was created; its positions were formulated to a large degree atthe first and second Colloques de Caen in 1956 and 1966.3 As in the latenineteenth century, the constitution of autonomous universities stood at the coreof their ideas for reform, a kind of a leitmotiv toward which sometimes quitedistinct positions converged.4 Most pre-1968 critiques focused on the rigid chairsystem as a factor of dispersion, resistance to innovation, and sterilefragmentation of knowledge,5 and they called for the development of universitiesthat would allow for interdisciplinary exchange and a hybridizing of differenttypes of knowledge.

Colloquium participants’ belief that universities were the solution to theproblem can only recall late-nineteenth-century thinking on the matter. Readingessays and proposals from the two periods gives one the feeling that history wasrepeating itself, even though the earlier thinkers were inspired by Humboldt’suniversity and the later ones by American research universities. In the generalreport to the 1966 colloquium, for example, after deploring the absence ofuniversities in France, the mathemetician André Lichnerowicz called for thecreation of autonomous, competing institutions, each with an elected presidentand structured into departments with several professorships. Such an arrangementwould put an end to the chair system and break up the five great faculty orders.He also proposed abolishing national degrees and allocating a lump-sum budgetcomponent for teaching posts to each university, a sum not preallocated by theeducation ministry. The universities imagined by participants to the 1966 Caencolloquium were institutions with a high degree of autonomy in matters ofadministration, budget, teaching approaches and methods, and academic staffmanagement. Their program would surely not have been rejected by the mostliberal republican reformers of the preceding century.

While the parallel between the nineteenth-century republican reforms and the1968 reform is tempting, it cannot be pushed too far, for three reasons. First, thecontexts were significantly different. It is true that the guiding principles of the LoiFaure were influenced by ideas sketched out by the “reform coalition” of theColloques de Caen, but the law was not the culmination of a process of reflection


and debate in the way the late-nineteenth-century measures were. The law wasnot oblivious to such reflection and debate, but it did not proceed from them, forthe Loi Faure, and the speed with which it was prepared, discussed, and passed,were due above all to “the events of May.” Though a few reforms had beenimplemented in the preceding years, namely, the creation of InstitutsUniversitaires de Technologie* or lUTs—and though the ministry was on theverge of adopting modifications even as the first barricades went up (Prost1992), before the student uprisings no fundamental reform figured on thegovernment’s agenda. The Loi Faure was a consequence of May ’68 rather thana few university professors’ ideas for reform, though it did take inspiration fromthose ideas. Moreover, there was no joint preparatory work between universityreformers and the central administration before the student actions, ascooperation between the two sets of actors was very weak. Over the 1950s,education ministry officials had focused above all on secondary school reform(with some exceptions, such as Pierre Mendès France among politicians and theHigher Education Department director Gaston Berger among administrativeofficials; see Bourricaud 1982). Over the 1960s, higher education directors at theministry never received the kind of support from the reformers that Louis Liardhad received eighty years before.

The second difference between the two reform periods involves fundamentalconceptions of the University. While the Loi Faure did indeed return to the idealof uniting the different kinds of knowledge—already the goal of the ThirdRepublic reformers—its approach for reaching that end, namely,mutidisciplinarity, was much more pragmatic. The myth of integrating allknowledge around a single organizing principle, whether derived from science orphilosophy, was abandoned in favor of a myth of transversal cooperation.Collaboration between the disciplines and engagement in joint teaching andresearch activities would compensate for the effects of differentiation andspecialization by discipline, and ultimately integrate knowledge. This was madeclear in the new and highly symbolic term devised to designate universityacademics—“teacher-researcher”—and the aforecited term for departments,UER, “Teaching and research unit.” Cooperation was to be facilitated throughthe creation of new institutional conditions. The law of 1968 aimed at reducingthe effective power of the faculties and strengthening the collective dimension ofindividual universities by endowing them with deliberative bodies: the ConseilScientifique*, composed of members elected from all the disciplines and meantto breathe life into multidisciplinarity, the not exclusively academic Conseild’Université [the rough equivalent of today’s Conseil d’Administration*], meantto strengthen university-level decision-making power. Furthermore, to make itclear that the state would henceforth exercise softer control, and to give the newinstitutions greater legitimacy, each was to be run by a “president” elected fromamong its full professors for a nonrenewable five-year term.

So whereas the aim of the Third Republic reforms was for the scientistic idealto be unanimously adopted by university academics who could then, thanks to


convergent conceptions, methodologies, and goals, facilitate the constitution ofuniversities, the notion of multidisciplinary cooperation central to the Loi Faurewas a goal in itself, to be attained by creating the appropriate structures. The lawcreated not only institutions, but visible physical places: campuses with facilitiessuch as buildings for housing central services, university libraries that could holdtheir own next to faculty and research center libraries, and so forth.

Lastly, the Loi Faure turned its back on collegial functioning among peers. Inthe minds of the nineteenth-century republican reformers, the university was tobe first and foremost a professional organization whose direction, decisions, andfate were to be determined exclusively by professors. This conception likewisepredominated among the organizers of the Colloques de Caen.6 Edgar Faure, onthe other hand, invoking the Gaullian principle of “participation,” affirmed thatuniversities could not be run solely by academics; all actors in university lifemust be involved. The law thus legitimated certain May ’68 student demands.Universities were to be governed jointly by students, administrative staff, and allteachers, including junior academics, and a place was to be made for actorsexternal to the institution proper but with important roles in the universityenvironment, what may be called stakeholders (personnalités extérieures*).

This was the framework laid out by the Loi Faure for the renaissance ofFrench universities. The new-born institutions were to mature by learningsimultaneously how to manage multidisciplinarity and participation.

A Slow Organizational Learning Process

There were two phases to the development of universities as defined by the LoiFaure. For the first ten years, and particularly in the early 1970s, the governingbodies were highly politicized, with conflicts among groups making it difficult toreach consensus. This situation then yielded to anomic governing modescharacterized by weak decision-making capacity.

In the 1970s the universities experienced the pitfalls of politicization. Thoughthe empirical corpus for studying the years immediately following passage of theLoi Faure is small and the analysis that follows may seem reductive, it seems fairto say that no sooner were the new universities in place than they foundthemselves confronting two sources of tension.

The first was juxtaposition of disciplines with divergent interests. Theuniversities that took shape immediately following passage of the law clearly hadlittle in common with the multidisciplinary institutions Edgar Faure hadimagined. Political differences proved a much more effective organizingprinciple than the theme of integrating all knowledge, and they often led to thecreation of two or three universities per large city. This in turn tended toreconstitute the old faculties, but only partially, since political alliances alsoled to previously unknown rapprochements between disciplines. Indeed, the newuniversities extended beyond the framework of the former faculties, obliging thedifferent disciplines to engage in more markedly collective management.


Switching from intradisciplinary faculty management to interdisciplinaryuniversity management would in itself have demanded a certain amount of know-how, hence, learning on the part of university academics. But they also had tosurrender collegial functioning and allow other categories of actors, nonpeers, tohave their say. This was the second source of tension. Whereas all full professorshad had a seat on the faculty council, university council composition requiredacademics to elect representatives from their number. Collegiality had beenreplaced by elective representative democracy, and the question of just howrepresentative the representatives were became acute.

The Loi Faure thus obliged actors in the new universities to constructagreements among parties with divergent interests. They had to overcomefacultytype particularities in order to set common guidelines that wouldtranscend disciplinary bastions and, simultaneously, introduce new actorcategories into the game.

According to René Rémond, these two linked requirements put the universitiesin the contradictory situation of having to create a whole from scratch by firstmultiplying the number of parts:

If the definition of the university as an autonomous unit and a whole thatboth precedes and is greater than its parts and can assert power as a majordecision-making center were to have been realized, more attention wouldhave had to be paid to what unites and unifies than to what differentiatesand separates. The process adopted for realizing the new universities, andthe law’s provisions for electing representatives and ensuringrepresentation of the different categories in the governing bodies allworked against this…. The top-level university council was no more than asum of collegial delegates whose main concern was to defend theircategory interests. (Rémond 1979, 51)

At first, opposition among the different parties prevailed, favoring conflictexacerbation. The university councils became spaces not for elaborating decisionsbut for stance-taking, debating, contesting. It is not surprising that in relating hisexperience as president of the Université de Paris X-Nanterre, René Rémondassimilated university government to the governing of a society and comparedthe university council to a parliamentary assembly rather than to a companyboard of directors. The image and symbolism of his comparison are telling,suggesting as they do that the universities were more a world of speech-makingand interminable deliberations than action. This representation predominated inthe French universities of the 1970s, where the councils were often transformedinto general assemblies and verbal sparring in the pursuit of particularist andcategory interests won out over concerted solution-seeking and reconciling ofdifferences. The many press articles relating incidents that occurred on universitycampuses during this period—occasion ally violent ones—together with certainuniversity presidents’ accounts of their experience (Merlin 1980, Rémond 1979)


attest to how difficult it was to govern universities.7 “To take charge of auniversity collective in 1970 was suddenly to find oneself confronted withproblems that are obscured in ordinary daily life but that here were posed in themost radical terms: the stark choice between violence or order, discovery of theaggressiveness latent in all human groups, awareness that democracy is notnaturally given but constructed through reason and will” (ibid., 11 and 12).

In the 1980s, after these turbulent beginnings, the universities created by theLoi Faure showed a different face: anomie and low capacity for collective action.Instead of political or union conflicts, verbal or physical violence, the moststriking feature of these institutions became their anomie. It had now becomefamiliar practice for representatives of different status categories promotingdistinct political or union programs to sit around the same table; this situation nolonger unleashed much in the way of passions. And while political and unionconflicts continued to crystallize around council elections and while it remainedimportant to display partisan membership, the decision-making bodies hadgrown fairly insensitive to these kinds of division in their daily functioning.

A price was paid for the recovered calm, however. Keeping a low profile andplaying by improvised rules had their own effects on council functioning, theexercise of leadership, and general university governance, effects which may besummed up thus: nondecision, nonintervention. These are the conclusions Ireached on the basis of research conducted in the first half of the 1980s, theresults of which I will now present in fairly spare terms.8

In all countries, universities function on the basis of numerous meetings.While academics accept councils, and commissions, and committees asnecessary evils that limit individual power and power-seizing, enable diverseinterests to be represented, and make it possible to express disagreement, theyrail against them for being time-consuming, getting bogged down, not followingup on decisions from one session to the next, and so forth. Such criticism iscommon, but French academics’ criticism of their university governing councilsin the 1980s went much further. The views of academics not on councils werehighly convergent: They were contemptuous of the work of those bodies,particularly the Conseil d’Université. And their criticism extended beyond workdone by the councils to the quality of council members; they were suspected ofhaving nothing better to do, of conducting no serious research.

For their part, council members were not strongly committed to the task.Being present to defend their interests seemed much more important to them thanany contribution they might make to collective decision making. They spent littletime preparing for meetings, and they rarely read meeting-related documentswhen these were transmitted, even when they received them in advance.

Members’ low degree of commitment went hand in hand with the councils’nonconflictual character (Beckmeir and Neusel 1991). Conflicts were fewover all; for those that did come up, flexible coalitions formed for the occasion,then came undone. Power balances did not seem to stabilize around political orunion oppositions, status oppositions (maîtres de conferences versus full


professors), disciplinary enmities, or conflicts between different types ofcolleagues (administrative versus academic staff). Indeed, the main characteristicof these bodies was their apathy. The fact that internal oppositions and purelypolitical debates were no longer as strong had not made it easier to constructcollective agreements. On the contrary, the decision-making capacity of thesebodies seemed markedly low; they seemed to have withdrawn into the comfortof not deciding.

Specifically, two decision-making modes dominated. The first consisted inrenewing arrangements that had been decided elsewhere without modifying them.This prevailed in two cases. One was proposals from individual academics, suchas curricula proposals requiring successive approval by three different councils(the department board if there was one, the UER council, the university council).The collective choices of directly concerned academics, that is, those in the fieldor discipline, were often passed up through the different stages without change,or, in the case of several competing projects, without any selection. The otherinvolved top-down processes. In deciding how to divide up funding among thedifferent UERs, for example, the exact same set of criteria was applied byuniversity councils as that used by the education ministry to determine budgetallocations for each university.

Second, decisions were often simply not made, especially when the decision-making body itself was supposed to generate or make choices or rank differentproposals. Instead, the responsibility was left to the highest level—the ministry.Several universities never presented a priority ranking of the new posts they wererequesting, leaving the ministry free to decide if it was more urgent to create apost in history or philosophy, for example.

The councils of the universities I studied had clearly managed to put thetumult of the 1970s behind them, but the resulting calm went hand in hand withan effacing of their roles, as if nonintervention were the price to pay for peace.

Another indication of anomie was the low-profile roles of university leaders.They did not compensate for the weakness of decision-making bodies by playingstronger leadership roles. Presidents and UER directors alike understood theirrole as being first and foremost that of primus inter pares and they fulfilledessentially two functions: internal mediation and representing the interests oftheir body, UER or university, externally. This meant the complementaryfunctions of guiding and being a go-between (i.e., UER directors relayinginformation between president and teachers and university presidents relayinginformation between the ministry and the UERs) were neglected.

The mode of designating university presidents, together with thenonrenewable five-year term, worked to temper any interventionist or dirigistezeal they might have had. The same was true for UER directors. Though theycould in principle be elected for two successive terms, not many teachers werewilling to accept the job for more than one: the fact that they would become onceagain “a teacher like the others” had a moderating effect on any enthusiasm forthe position. This meant that neither presidents nor UER directors were actually


in a position to exercise power. The law and statutes granted them a number ofprerogatives, but these were difficult to use in practice. Over and beyond crisissituations (Musselin 1987), there was hardly any strong leadership, especiallysince a post-’68 primus inter pares, though elected by a broader community, didnot have the same strong legitimacy as the former faculty dean. What had been atype of distinction and to some degree a measure of academic recognition hadbecome a task that some merely accepted to perform temporarily for thecommunity.

University leaders thus found themselves in a situation of weakness, and thiswas accentuated by the ambiguity inherent in the law of 1968 (and not dispelledby the law of 1984), which instituted two possible governing structures, onefavoring the president-UER directors axis while minimizing the role of thecouncils and thus weakening the deliberative basis for university decisionmaking, the other favoring the president-councils axis while marginalizing UERdirectors, who were not elected by university councils.

The councils’ weak decision-making capacity and UER directors’ low-profile,low-intensity leadership considerably weakened French universities’selfgoverning capability. Academics did not feel committed to any collectivelyfixed institutionwide strategic plans. The world they belonged to and thatconstituted their frame of reference remained that of their discipline. Moreover,there was no mechanism, whether hierarchical, participatory, collegial, orbureaucratic, to enable proposals developed by individual academics to go beforea decision-making committee and thereby become universitywide projects, thatis, publicly recognized by the university and viewed as a matter of priority.Lastly, universities underused the maneuvering room they did have, the zones ofautonomy shaped by the law. Instead of refusing to rank requests for new postsby priority, transmitting competing requests for study program accreditation tothe ministry without choosing between them, scrupulously following GARACESnorms for distributing operating funds among the UERs,9 each university couldhave defined its own preferences and developed its own policies—but theydidn’t. Viewed from without, French universities appeared to lack maturity, andthere seemed no point in giving greater autonomy to university academicsincapable of making use of the autonomy they already had.

Critics pointing up the difficulties encountered by the universities generallyarrived at the same conclusion: The institutional design in the Loi Faure wasunsatisfactory and had to be changed. This diagnosis led to several reform projects,all of which focused on universities and university structures, some of whichwere adopted. In the mid-1970s, the Loi Sauvage changed council composition,giving more weight to full professors, with the explicit purposes of reinforcingprofessorial power and reducing politicization. Those who thought the Loi Faurehad failed to introduce sufficient democracy and favored even greaterparticipation—mainly leftist academics—were particularly unhappy with thisnew law, and their criticism led to its abrogation in 1981, when the Socialiststook power. This same group exercised strong influence during drafting of the


Loi Savary, which, in its general approach to university functioning, was a directcontinuation of the Loi Faure. The Loi Savary increased the number and size ofdecision-making bodies. When, after three years of consultations, discussions,and debates, the Loi Savary was finally passed in 1984, certain universitiesrefused to apply it, and, in 1986, when the right took control of the legislatureand government, opening France’s first period of “cohabitation,”10 the law wasstill not operative in all universities. Among the reasons given for refusing to applyit was that the increased number of councils and their composition would onlymake the less than smooth functioning of the decision-making bodies rougherstill.

The proposed Loi Devaquet, drafted in 1986 just after the Socialist presidentFrançois Mitterrand appointed the gaullist leader Jacques Chirac prime minister,took account of these arguments and provided for reducing the number ofcouncils and changing their composition. The statutes would surely have beenrewritten once again had not this project been abandoned after the death of MalikOussekine in the student demonstrations it provoked.11 The sudden withdrawalof the proposed law enabled the government of Socialist prime minister MichelRocard, two years later, to impose the Loi Savary on all universities, though itdid so without enthusiasm.

From this rapid overview it is clear that the successive reforms all closelyfollowed the same reasoning: poor university functioning (overly politicized/anomic) was due to poor functioning of the decision-making bodies (notdemocratic enough/too participatory); therefore these structures had to bereformed (reduced/increased in number; composed differently, electeddifferently, etc.). All the reforms focused on university structures; none referredto the larger context within which they would be integrated. None of them—notthe Loi Faure, the Loi Sauvage, the Loi Savary, or the proposed Loi Devaquet—tackled the reality of state-corporatist centralization or the standardized nationalsystem. They did not break with the Napoleonic arrangement any more than thelaw of 1896 had.

Systemwide Inertia

Undeniably, contemporary French universities were founded by the Loi Faure,and in doing so, the law brought about the emergence of a new actor in theuniversity system. “The reform of 1968 brought about…a decisive change: itbroke the faculty framework up into two new entities, the UERs, which werenarrower than the faculties, and the university, wider than them” (Prost 1992,137). Still, this founding act was performed within a university systemwhose architecture had not been modified by pre-1968 reforms and would not bemodified by the Loi Faure itself.

The Loi Faure took effect at the end of a major wave of student enrollments, awave that had begun to build in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the 1960s.According to Salmon (1982), from the academic years 1958–1959 to 1968–


1969, the number of students enrolled in university in France increased by 305percent (from 192,128 to 586,466 students), while the number enrolled innonuniversity institutions “only” went up 210 percent (from 67,672 to 142, 334).Between 1970 and 1988, however, annual growth returned to a more normal rateof 2 to 4 percent a year.12

The increase in student numbers was not a controlled phenomenon; the arrivalof growing numbers of baccalauréat holders at university gates was not so mucha matter of deliberate choice as the “mechanical” consequence of post-1945primary and secondary school reforms. Moreover, higher education massificationrolled in on faculty structures that had hardly been changed since the latenineteenth century. The reforms of the 1950s and 1960s mainly involved revisingstudy programs—specifically, in medicine (Jamous 1969)— and creating newdegrees. In 1954 a new doctoral degree, the troisième cycle* thesis, was createdin the sciences; in 1958, it was established for the humanities. The politicalauthorities of the time were hardly unaware of the increase in bac-holdersbrought about by the increase in secondary student numbers, nor of thequantitive consequences of this development for higher education, but nomeasures had been taken to adapt faculty structures or their study programs. Thestandardized, national, public university system, with 160,000 students in themid-1950s, had to take in four times that number over the next fifteen yearswithout having at all prepared for the change. There was no questioning of therelevance of maintaining identical study programs throughout the territoryregardless of student numbers, on the contrary, the 1966 Fouchet reformreflected an unshakeable belief in the possibility of conceiving a singlecurriculum for every discipline. Nor was there any discussion of how to changefunding and budgets for a university system that was going to triple in size.While the cheery economic outlook of the time goes a long way towardexplaining this, it is still surprising that with the prospect of major increases instudent numbers, there was no debate either on whether higher education shouldremain virtually free or on whether it should rely only on public funds—twofundamental components of the French university system.

Only the third fundamental component was debated—nonselection—and theprinciple was nearly dropped. In his 1992 study of higher education policy at thebeginning of the Fifth Republic, Prost explains that De Gaulle was indeedpreoccupied by the prospect of a massive increase in students due to increasednumber of bac-holders, but he failed to obtain approval for either of the twoideas then under consideration for counteracting that effect: turning thebaccalauréat into a competitive exam for a limited number of student slots, andmaking university admission selective. The second alternative was scheduled forpassage in early 1968, after seven years of controversy in the education ministry.It was swept into oblivion by the events of May.13

Consequently, higher education expanded in France by replicating the facultyrepublic at a larger scale. After the May protests, the Loi Faure did indeedabolish the faculties, but it modified none of the three systemic components just


mentioned, nor did it tackle education system centralization. While providing foruniversities’ budgetary autonomy and recommending lump-sum allocations foroperating costs and ex-post oversight of expenditures, it maintained exclusive statefunding. This made it fairly easy for the ministry to “forget” the other newprinciples and continue exercising the same budget control over universities.

The Loi Faure provided for pedagogical autonomy and allowed eachuniversity to fashion its own degrees.14 However, since national degrees had notbeen abolished, very little in the way of university-specific degrees weredeveloped. Students continued to prefer state-recognized degrees, so the mainactivity of universities continued to be conferment of such degrees, and theministry made no moves to withdraw from this crucial regulation and oversightdomain. As for selective student admission, the law explicitly ruled it out. In aspeech delivered in the fall of 1968, Edgar Faure lambasted the idea as “a refugefor an outdated conception of culture,” thereby precluding for a long time to comeDe Gaulle’s plan of controlling admission to higher education. Lastly, no changein career management modes was envisioned, except establishing a highlyspecialized central corporatist authority, as will be explained below.

The aim of the Loi Faure and the laws that followed was first and foremost toreform the universities. These laws made no mention of the ministry or theacademic corporation, which were left to function as if the laws did not exist.The ministry in particular continued to ignore the universities created by the lawof 1968, hearkening instead to the disciplines.

That the central administration ignored the birth of the universities was clearin two of its operating modes. First, the existence of these new institutions wasnot reflected anywhere in ministry reorganizations; second, faculty logicremained strong in ministry departments in charge of higher education.

Sociologists of organization have often demonstrated the discrepanciesbetween operating modes as prescribed by organization charts and the wayorganizations actually operate, and clearly we should not give the charts undueattention if what we are interested in are internal power structures andorganization games. If we try to read the “concrete realities” of collective actionin the branching hierarchies that compose these formal descriptions, theirpredictive value is low. We cannot, however, disregard their symbolic content.“Reading” the various versions of the French central administration directoryfrom the early 1960s to the late 1980s is highly instructive. It reveals that the lawof 1968 brought about no changes in central administration organization modes.The new universities were in no way integrated into successive administrativeorganization charts.

In 1961 university education was the exclusive province of the DES orDirection des Enseignements Supérieurs [Department of higher education],structured into three subdepartments: personnel, equipment and accounting, andstudy programs. In 1966, after five years without any major changes, the DESwas completely restructured to incorporate a new hierarchical echelon, the‘services,’ positioned just above the subdepartments.15 In addition, the DES’s


three basic tasks were given greater substance: a subdepartment for coordinatingmatters common to the different DES bureaus was created [bureaus are thesmallest administration units]; accounting became a “service” in its own right;and a “service for higher technical education and training” was created. Later,however, there is no trace of any effort to adapt ministerial organization to thetransformations announced by the law of 1968. In the 1970s, the implacableprocess of expansion continued, with the creation in 1975 of a “Secretary of statefor universities” [just below the education minister]; then, in 1979, a ministrydevoted entirely to universities, with each of the major task areas acquiring thestatus of “department” [the first ministry division]. From 1981 to 1994, thearchitecture of the organization charts remained the same: a department in chargeof education (including university and technical, initial and continuing), one foruniversity research [as distinct from that conducted by the major state researchinstitutions such as the CNRS and INSERM],16 one for academic and technicalpersonnel, and one for budget funding.17

If we take a closer look we see that as each main task area developed, it wasrestructured in such a way as to distinguish between higher education institutionswith specific status on the one hand, universities (or faculties) on the other, and,within the second category, to distinguish among families of disciplines (in thecase of study course management, the discipline criterion was sometimesreplaced by a division in terms of education cycle). This meant that as theorganization chart expanded it was further segmented, which in turn increasedcoordination costs, since there was no horizontal integration, no matrix structurecombining the discipline-based approach with an approach in terms of project,académie, or institution. Coordination could only be vertical, centralized—andfragile. It occurred at a far remove from the bureaus, which were the realoperation units, and it was limited by the informal relations obtaining betweenbureaus and their partners outside the ministry. Consistent with what Dupuy andThoenig (1983) call an essential characteristic of French administration, eachbureau attached much more importance to the relations it maintained with thesegment of the environment it logically had access to (university staff services forsome, study program directors for others, local accounting services for yet others,and so forth) than to the development of intraministerial cooperation.

Lastly, the division into major task areas, subdivision into institutionalstatuses, and sub-subdivision into disciplines or education cycles dissolved thenotion of individual universities and prevented the development of expertministry knowledge of those universities. It is hardly surprising that this was thepre-1968 situation, since, as explained, universities were no more than anadministrative echelon then whereas faculties were the relevant level for theministry to find interlocutors at, namely, deans. It is more surprising that thissituation continued after the Loi Faure. In fact, the ministry restructurationorchestrated by education minister Olivier Guichard between 1970 and 1975 ledto sharply accentuated fragmentation and even greater dilution of the universityinstitution. Most higher education tasks were divided up among departments


whose domains extended to the whole of the education system, fromkindergarten to the equivalent of graduate school. Managing the carteuniversitaire* thus fell to the same forecast and planning department thatmanaged the carte scolaire; higher education staff was a “service” in thedepartment in charge of the education staff as a whole (from nursery school touniversity), and so forth. And while the creation of a secretariat followed by afull-fledged ministry for universities at least made it possible to bring togetherall higher education services within a single entity, fragmentation remainedmarked. Above all, there was no department or bureau able to develop anintegrated vision of each higher education institution. In other words, the formalstructure of the overseeing ministry meant that for the universities created by theLoi Faure, only one interlocutor could handle a question concerning budget,teaching, personnel, and research matters all at once, and that was the secretary ofstate, or minister, him or herself. The rearranging done by the Left after it tookpower in 1981 did not at all change this situation. The fragmentation of thecentral administration, like the absence of universities in the administration’sorganization chart, were amply confirmed by Erhard Friedberg and my 1987survey of ministry actors. Indeed, that study revealed how little account theministry took of university institutions and the omnipresence of the disciplinesand disciplinary experts.18

What impact did the disciplines have on ministerial decision-makingprocesses? Above and beyond purely regulational activities, the maindepartments of the education ministry managed the university sector throughdecision making in four major areas: accreditation of study programs leading tonational degrees, allocation of prebudgeted operating funds, distribution ofteaching posts, and allocation of university research funding. Allocation ofuniversity research funds was managed separately,19 while the other three areaswere closely intertwined, with all three coming together in one crucial ministryprocedure: accrediting study programs leading to national degrees. Decisions onwhether or not to allocate supplementary funds depended on decisions aboutwhether or not to maintain programs or create new ones. The importance ofaccreditation procedures in the ministry is reflected in both the concentration ofinterdepartmental relations around those procedures and the strong position ofthe ministry department in charge of steering them, the Direction desEnseignements Supérieurs. In 1987, when we conducted our study, accreditationwas managed on a strictly disciplinary basis. This meant that every four years,the bureau in charge of humanities had to decide whether to renew each andevery existing study program in that set of disciplines and examine all requestsfor creating new ones. The fact that these degrees could be obtained in ahumanities-dominant university or a multidisciplinary one, the fact that theymight pertain to an institutional strategy or reflect an individual project had littleeffect on decisions.20 The main criteria used were the intrinsic pedagogic andacademic relevance of the program under scrutiny, and this relevance wasevaluated in terms of how well it conformed to the minimal compulsory national


guidelines (maquette nationale) and how closely its content matched theacademic requirements of the relevant disciplinary field. In fact, budgetcalculations were doubly affected by discipline-centered logic, first in thatoperating budgets were calculated primarily on the basis of accreditationdecisions, second because calculation modes were based on norms (average cost,number of student enrollments per study program, and so forth) that tookaccount of disciplinary differences (anticipated cost and degree of academicsupervision were different for a law student and a science student, for example).

The impact of the disciplines on decision-making processes was strengthenedby the fact that the ministry systematically consulted university experts. Eachcase was examined by a specialist from the discipline in question, and above all,decisions strongly tended to be made in accordance with specialists’recommendations. Experts were also consulted in matters of post creation andevaluation of projects submitted for university research funding. There again, theirrecommendations were generally followed. We concluded (Friedberg andMusselin 1993) that the central administration’s work was actually beingoverseen by the corporation and that the corporation component of ministerialdecisions was stronger than the administrative one.

The system of joint management by the central administration and individualuniversity academics suffered from low visibility and a lack of legitimacy. First,the experts’ action was virtually invisible. There was no trace in theadministration directory of who composed any mission scientifique*; only thenames of the official in charge (usually a physicist) and his/her deputy (mostoften a historian) figured in the organization charts. Above all, it was not wellknown that such experts were active in ministry decision making, and the factthat their recommendations were in large measure followed by the administrationwas not made public. Consequently, the prevailing sentiment was that expertrecommendations were secondary and that administrators were merely followingtheir own will and pleasure. When the experts’ role did become known, it wasoften contested, as the experts were not considered either “representatives” of thefields for which they were making recommendations or uncontested scholars.They enjoyed neither electoral nor academic legitimacy. That they wereappointed by the education minister and therefore changed with each changeoverof political power, and in some cases each change of minister, meant that theirrecommendations were viewed with suspicion; specifically, they were oftensuspected of having political or ideological biases, even when their scholarlyreputations were well established.

As in the time of the faculty republic, then, the overseeing ministry was thelocus of administration-academic corporation joint management,21 and thecorporation’s expertise weighed more heavily than the administration’s in choicesaffecting funding allocation. Corporatist joint management suffered from adeficit of legitimacy while greatly impacting ministry intervention modes,strengthening systematic attention to disciplinary specificities, and increasing


university marginalization, since the experts’ recommendations concernedsegments of disciplines, not individual university institutions.

While the law of 1968 had abolished the faculties, the central administration’ssteering modes clearly remained loyal to the faculty-based organization that hadprevailed prior to it. Nor did the law reduce prevailing vertical academic careermanagement and corporatist centralization, which actually became stronger, as weshall now see.

It cannot be denied that the academic profession in France underwentprofound changes in the 1960s. First and foremost, it grew, and its growthaffected established status balances, age pyramid trends (the profession becamemuch “younger”), and sociability and interacquaintance networks. Furthermore,the preponderantly influential position of Paris professors and faculty deans(often dubbed mandarins) was seriously shaken, both by the dismantling of the oldfaculties and the increasing numbers of recognized research centers outsideParis.

However, the Loi Faure and the laws that followed did not in fact lead torethinking hiring or promotion modes or recasting roles for steering theprofession as a whole. This does not mean that no measures were taken. On thecontrary, post-1968 regulatory activity was intense. Still, the distribution of rolesbetween the central administration and academics remained exactly the same. Noroom was made for universities, and academic career management remainedcentralized, vertical, and independent of universities.

The size of the profession (number of budgeted academic posts), its content(the relative weights of the disciplines), its internal structure (in terms of statuscategories), the fixing of rules for access—all remain today in the hands of thestate authorities, who in turn are obliged to come to terms with the corporation.The remit-sharing instituted after World War II has been maintained, and thesystem continues to be managed jointly. Decisions concerning academic postsare still made in concert with “representatives” of the profession, whether electedor not. Proposals for post creation are examined by ministry-selected academicexperts assembled into a mission scientifique*; changes in the professional statussystem are made only after consultation with teachers’ unions and the variouscategory-based associations, and so forth.

In the period under study there were a great number of occasions for jointmanagement, especially since teaching posts became a major focus for the centraladministration. One effect of the faculty republic had been to accentuatedifferences between faculty orders in matters of career and status management.The increase in teacher numbers due to the influx of students aggravated thissituation by multiplying statuses and creating a new group, teachers employedthrough a variety of fixed contracts, who, in passing from one contract renewal tothe next, came to constitute a group of “permanent temporary staff”—with twomajor consequences.

First, starting in the late 1970s, many of these contractual staff were madepermanent civil servants. This measure was taken after student growth rates


slowed, and through the first half of the 1980s it blocked hiring of newacademics while intensifying promotion problems and occasionally allowingteachers who might well not have been selected if they had had to go through theusual procedures to accede to the academic profession. This made it more difficultto hire temporary academic staff and thus to adjust to developments in teachingand research workloads. After this wave of teachers were made permanent, andto prevent a similar situation from arising, all new contractual posts could onlybe renewed a limited number of times.22

Second, efforts were made to simplify statuses and harmonize them acrossdisciplines. Professional statuses in law, humanities, and sciences were madeidentical (the exception was medicine), though law, political science, economics,and business administration kept their own modes of acceding to professorship:the agrégation du supérieur.

Remarkably, all these changes were decided through negotiations betweenstate authorities and the profession. Universities and university presidents playedonly marginal roles.23 The exclusion of universities is just as striking if weconsider the numerous reforms of academic hiring procedures. The procedure ofdrawing up lists of qualified candidates, where it was up to the ComitéConsultatif des Universités (which later became the Conseil National desUniversités or CNU), to decide which candidates were qualified for the positionof maître de conferences and full professor and up to local faculty committees tochoose a candidate from that list, had proven problematic: with the increase inteacher numbers, qualified lists were getting longer and longer and seniority onthe list had become the decisive selection criterion. In 1979 it was decided to doaway with the lists in all disciplines where they existed. The procedure thatreplaced them strengthened national over local power. Commissions deSpécialistes* in university UERs were now called upon to examineapplication files, list at most five candidates by order of preference, and sendtheir ranking to the relevant national-level section of the new Conseil Nationaldes Universités, which could then approve the list, change it, or reject it. Thenational level thus had the last word, and it could act as censor. The 1984 LoiSavary then redefined the composition of the academic profession,24 therebyreversing this procedure,25 but only for two years, until 1986, when the Rightwon the legislative elections and executive power and the laws were changedonce again, with the final decision put back into the hands of the relevant sectionof the CNU.

This regulatory instability, which stands in contrast to the stability of careermanagement rules in other countries, may be explained by the concern toregulate the flow of candidacies and avoid bottlenecks. But it is alsosymptomatic of the ties that existed between the ministry and certainrepresentatives of the corporation. In effect, nearly everything depended onwhich university academics had the ministry’s ear. If they were against mandarinpower, they recommended solutions that would strengthen the universityspecialist commissions and further decentralize decision making. If they were


against the dangers of localism,26 they would try to reinforce the centralauthority, claiming that it alone could guarantee progress toward the goal ofacademic excellence.

Lastly, though the ministry does not intervene directly in hiring and promotiondecisions, it did have and still has a “regulatory” role in the composition ofnational authority sections: while two-thirds of section members are elected bythe profession, the remaining third is appointed by the ministry, though it doesnot itself determine the list of possible appointees, relying heavily for this on its“academic experts.” Ministry appointments can help correct imbalances inrepresentation engendered by election results; if there is no elected representativefor a field with a significant university presence, ministry appointments cancompensate. But understandably, ministerial appointments can also affectpolitical balances, for it often happens that figures favorable to the government—if not overtly partisan and known to be so—are named (Ellrodt 1992, 227). Inministry appointments it is hard to distinguish between political and academiccriteria.27

All these points demonstrate that career management after 1968 remained inthe linked hands of the ministry and the academic corporation. Universityinstitutions got the meanest share of decision-making power. The Conseild’Université was, of course, in a position to examine the list of candidatesproduced by the university Commission de Spécialistes, but here too,nondecision seems to have been the prevailing practice; universities usuallysimply approved academic specialists’ decisions. In other words, abolishing“qualified candidate lists” ultimately led to reducing the freedom of choice thefaculties had enjoyed, a state of affairs that benefited the central authority whilefailing to make the universities created on paper by the Loi Faure into influentialprocess actors.

The Paris ministry and academic corporation’s joint management of universityaffairs has thus been a constant in the French university system since the timeNapoleon set up a single, centralized, discipline-structured corporation. Nothing—neither the administrative re-creation of universities during the Third Republicnor the post-May 1968 legislative abolition of the faculty orders and constructionof multidisciplinary universities with stronger decision-making bodies—was ableto shake or weaken that fundamental characteristic.

The alliance between ministry and corporation, between state and corporationcenters, meant the ministry was obliged to find ways of meeting the demands ofcorporation representatives. This constraint was especially strong given that therewere numerous types of representation (by union, discipline, category, status)and numerous claimants to the title of “representative,” none of whom were fullylegitimate, that is, recognized by all French academics or even a large majorityof them. The ministry-corporation “alliance” also explains why it was impossiblefor intermediary levels to emerge that might have developed forms of transversalcooperation between the vertical, centralized pillars constituted by the disciplinesand subdisciplines. From 1808 to the late 1980s, the faculty structure was always


“ahead” of the universities. Despite the Loi Faure, universities remained weakinstitutions, hard pressed to find a place for themselves between corporation andministry and unable to develop governance modes strong enough to combat“faculty” logic with “autonomous institution” logic. Lastly, that alliance took theform of a ministry steering approach that gave priority to disciplinarycharacteristics and specificities and denied the existence of universities, evenafter their legislative re-creation. The central administration’s intervention modesthus precluded any chance the universities might have had of developing intostrong institutions.

Another strong component of the French university system may be seen in theever-present, ever-renewed will to construct a national system that, ideally,reproduces identical institutions, curricula, even teachers, throughout theterritory.

These two constants, the type of relations they bring about among ministry,universities, and academic corporation and the operating modes they favor withineach of these collective actors, characterize the particular configuration withinwhich French university education developed from the time of the ImperialUniversity until very recently.

The longevity or stability of these characteristics deserved to be examined. Ihave sought to explain why the ambitious reforms that succeeded uponNapoleon’s own had only moderate impact. One of the recurrent causesidentified here is the constant focus on rehauling university structure withoutcalling into question discipline-focused logic, ministry-corporation jointmanagement, and the standardizing national model. But there were other causesat work, as we shall see in the next section, causes that enable us to explain why,in the last decade of the twentieth century, change could finally occur.


II

French Universities Come into Their Own

The last twelve years mark an unprecedented break from the faculty republic andthe transition period that followed it. All recently conducted empirical studiesshow how great the new changes are. Against all expectations, Frenchuniversities have become possible. The anomic, leadership-less institutions of theearly 1980s have developed their decision-making capabilities, chosen activepresidents and presidential teams, and strengthened their respective collectiveidentities.

These changes reveal universities’ ability to take reactive advantage of thechanges in steering modes that the ministry initiated in the late 1980s. Byintroducing four-year contracts between the ministry and each university, and astronger relation of negotiation between these two system components, theministry simultaneously encouraged the emergence of more autonomousuniversities and brought the central administration around to recognizing theuniversities. While faculty logic and state-corporatist joint management have notdisappeared, they are now in competition with steering modes wherein purelydisciplinary references are integrated into the all-encompassing vision of thepolicies specific to each university.

Putting university institutions at the center and using more negotiativeprocesses have worked to encourage still greater institutional diversity and calledinto question whether a national public system financed entirely by the state andmanaged from above should indeed be maintained.

None of the three changes mentioned above marks an absolute break with thepast. The centralized, standardizing model has been shaken by the increasingdiversity of university education, but it has not disappeared. Likewise theministry has “recognized” the universities in its intervention modes and policies,but this does not mean it no longer takes the disciplines into account. Lastly,universities have become professionalized, and their decisions are morecollective, but what they have been able to realize is often still far from what wasintended, because resistance to the changes remain strong. In sum, there has beena significant change in direction, not an about-face. The following three chapterswill examine the changes that constitute that change and their consequences.

4The Centralized, Standardizing, Egalitarian

Model Destabilized

As explained in Part I, the standardizing dynamic of French university educationbegan in the ancien régime, reached its apogee with Napoleon’s ImperialUniversity, and valiantly persevered through the faculty republic, theoreticallyensuring identical university education throughout French territory. Thisdynamic was fueled by the egalitarian principle that it was essential to guaranteethe strict equivalence of all study courses offered to students enrolled in similardegree programs at different locations in France, the strict equivalence of allindividual institutions with the same official status, and of all teachers of the sameprofessional status. The principles of uniformity and equality were actualized inconcrete measures guaranteeing the same rules of access to university educationfor all, the same enrollment fees, national validity of university degrees, and soforth. The strong homogeneity of study program supply during the facultyrepublic is to be explained by this firm respect for the single mold: a limited numberof students preparing for a narrow spectrum of careers were offered highlystandardized, nondiversified curricula.

But the sharp increase in student numbers from 1958 to 1968 tripled the sizeof French university education, with a prodigious annual growth rate of between11 and 18 percent.1 And from 1970 to 1987, universities grew continuously,though the rate over these years was much more moderate—2 to 4 percent, asmentioned. The cumulative effect was to multiply student numbers by 1.65between 1968 and 1987.2 At that point a new massive increase began—thesecond wave; it subsided in the mid-1990s.3 At first glance, it would seem that thisremarkable quantitative growth had little effect on the two principles ofuniformity and equality. They remained as present—and legitimate—as ever inFrench university education. But this should not mask the fact that over the lastthirty years discrepancies between those principles and the reality of Frenchuniversities have widened. French universities have become significantly moreheterogeneous, making centralized, standardizing, egalitarian management of thesystem a delicate exercise.

Uniformity and Equality: Two Principles ConsideredEminently Legitimate

Despite the growing contradiction between these guiding principles and the realsituation of French universities, the principles continue to have great power.They are part of French norms in education; they continue to be understood aseminently legitimate grounds for public action in this sphere and to suffuse theministry’s modalities for action in higher education.

While the legitimacy enjoyed by these principles is quite real, it should beclarified. We cannot really speak of massive, activist support for uniformity andequality. The most we can say is that the two principles do not elicit any markedhostility or give rise to “anti-uniformity-equality” collective mobilization. Aneducation minister who declares himself or herself in favor of standard nationaluniversity degrees will certainly not bring anyone onto the streets in protest. Butuniformity and equality are in fact supported by default,4 and this has to do withwhat may be called the naturalist quality of their legitimacy. The two principlesare so taken for granted by all public and political actors that no one bothers tojustify or defend them any more; no one considers it necessary to demonstratetheir legitimacy, which is recognized, protected by law, regularly upheld onconstitutional grounds,5 but above all, implicit. When data are published showingdisparities between universities, for example, this never gives rise to argumentsjustifying those disparities. On the contrary, all instances of inequality areautomatically, systematically considered “unjust,” “unjustified,” and“unjustifiable,” eliciting speeches on how to bring forward those universities thatare behind. Consider the position taken in the daily newspaper Le Monde byEducation Minister François Bayrou in November 1995, at a time when studentsin several French universities were on strike:

I am determined to put a speedy end to the most glaring injustices in termsof positions and funding. We have norms that enable us to compare thebudget funding available to the various universities, and even if those normsare debated and debatable, even if they will one day have to be improved,they do enable us to make objective comparisons. And what we see is thatcertain universities actually receive more than 250% of what they havebeen theoretically allotted [in accordance with government fundingcalculations] whereas others are quite forgotten at only 40%. I will notallow such injustices to be perpetuated. (Le Monde, November 10, 1995)

What is clear in the minister’s words is that while criteria for measuringinequalities could be subject to debate, there could be no debate on whether suchinequalities had to be remedied. The situation, the way it is analyzed, and thetype of actions to be taken in response to it are so obvious that there is no needfor the minister to justify why public action aimed at enabling trailinguniversities to catch up is legitimate.

THE CENTRALIZED, STANDARDIZING, EGALITARIAN MODEL DESTABILIZED • 47

The legitimacy enjoyed by the principles of equality and uniformity may alsobe seen in the influence they have on how new solutions—reforms, policies—aresought and designed. In sum, public action is defined and limited by thiscognitive grid. Curriculum reform, for example, is systematically national, to beapplied in universities throughout the nation. This seems “normal” to the French.It seems obvious that such reforms should apply everywhere and to all, to thepoint where it is extremely difficult to imagine tackling problems differently.Who would dream of proposing a reform that concerned only the universities ofthe ‘Centre’ region?6 Who would ever suggest a reform in doctoral thesisrequirements that individual universities or their departments might adopt orreject?

Another example concerns computerizing university administration. Here wesee the same logic at work, though the ministry was not the decisionmaker. Thetask was given to a public, not-for-profit grouping called the GIGUE(Groupement pour l’Informatique de Gestion des Universités et desEtablissements), the concern being to respect university autonomy and enabledifferent universities to cooperate in the experiment.7 But the real objective wasto get as many institutions as possible to use the same three programs: Nabuco(Nouvelle approche budgétaire et comptable) for budget and accounting; Apogée(Application globale de gestion de la scolarité et des étudiants) to managestudent enrollment and academic records; and Harpège (Harmonisation pour laGestion des Personnels) to manage personnel. It is possible to change parameterswith these different programs, and thus to handle local variations.8 But theydon’t really allow for fine-tuning. The tighter the regulations a givenadministrative area is subject to, the more necessary it becomes to use therelevant parameters. In the case of Nabuco, a program that had to be approved bythe national department of public accounting of the Economy and FinanceMinistry, universities could only use it after extensive adjustments had beenmade. In fact, to use this program an institution must closely follow publicaccounting rules. Moreover, only highly integrated applications were developed.With Apogée the idea in the long run was not only to enroll students and keepacademic records but also to set up exams and academic juries, assignclassrooms, follow up on each entering class, and so on. Compared to thetechnical options offered by a German service comparable to the GIGUE, theHochschul-Information-System (HIS), the standardization of the French systemis striking. HIS offers as many applications as there are types of student recordsand other functions. Instead of an “all or nothing” system—and one that requiresthe same treatment for everyone and, if possible, everywhere—Germaninstitutions can decide to computerize management of student enrollment but notclassroom assignment, for example.9

The cognitive framework imposed by the principles of uniformity and equalityis clearly quite a limiting one. And it is extremely difficult to challenge it, forreasons either of conviction, interest, or blindness to the problem. The fact thatthose principles have been fully incorporated into rules and procedures makes it


all the more unlikely they will be challenged.10 That each and every holder of thebaccalauréat degree is assured of university admission; that university studies(those leading to a national degree) are virtually free; that what are minimalenrollment fees will be identical from one institution to another; and that studyprogram content will be determined at the national level cannot be consideredmerely formal arrangements. Such rules are indissociable from the principles ofuniformity and equality on which their legitimacy rests. Indeed, their status ismore one of norms than rules, and as such they define as much what maylegitimately be done as what has to be done. The close link between rules andprinciples endows the former with great stability and protects them from change,since modifying them would imply denouncing the eminently legitimateprinciples upon which they are founded. And that legitimacy, together with theabsence of any commonly recognized rival principles, have made it impossible,at least until now, to question the standardizing, egalitarian conception ofuniversity education. Attempts at abrogating or changing the rule of nonselectiveuniversity admission or identical enrollment fees (for study programs leading tonational degrees) have always failed.11

Lastly, the stability of these principles is ensured by the fact that they are partand parcel of the ministry’s intervention modes, particularly of the way ministrydecision-making procedures are organized. Choices are made not throughassessment of the intrinsic worth or interest of program projects submitted, butrather by comparison with all projects submitted on a given theme. Whether theissue at hand is procedures for creating academic posts or filling vacant ones,hiring academics, allocating research funding, funding operating budgets, or,until recently, accrediting new disciplinary specializations, the same synopticapproach is used. All decisions are taken at regular intervals— once a year forbudgets, every four years for study programs and research funding—bydecisionmakers in possession of all relevant applications or requests. Projects areranked and ultimately chosen through comparison of all related applications. Forexample, all academic job openings are announced once a year, meaning that allcandidates submit their applications at the same time and all higher educationinstitutions examine applications simultaneously. All programs leading to theDiplôme d’Etudes Approfondies * (DEA) in nuclear physics, for instance, aresubmitted every four years for state reaccreditation so that the applications canall be reviewed at the same time.12 The aim of these procedures is to demonstrateclearly that all applications receive equal treatment and that the choices made arecoherent, since all dossiers have been examined synchronically by the samepersons.

The principles of uniformity and equality are essential to understanding thepresent state of French university education. They have been at the heart of theuniversity system as constructed over the last two centuries, and they remainprofoundly present in how French universities are conceived, solutions toexisting problems defined, policy implemented, and actions taken in this sector.But though many phenomena testify to their active presence, there are also signs


that these principles are weakening. Over the last decades, the in creasingheterogeneity of French universities has made centralized, standardizingmanagement of university education significantly more complex.

Increasingly Heterogeneous Universities

Until the late 1950s French universities were highly homogeneous and showedan astounding ability to resist innovation. In four decades this situation haschanged considerably (Dubois 1997a).

There is a sharp contrast between the faculties of the 1950s, with their limitednumber of neatly formated curricula and their limited number of homogeneous-profile students (cf. for example, Bourdieu and Passeron 1964) with their tightlycalibrated career prospects, and today’s universities, which offer a wide range oftypes of education to a now sharply heterogeneous student population.13

Innovation and diversity are therefore no longer exclusive to the nonuniversityhigher education sector. Since the mid-1960s, universities have developedatypical study programs, that is, programs that do not correspond to their“traditional” vocation in terms of duration (short higher education programs, forexample), type of studies (more directly utilitarian), career prospects (privatesector), or access (selective admission).

The first wave of massification in higher education (1958–1968) constitutedmore than the mechanical consequence of nonselective faculty admission. In fact,the nonuniversity sector “refused” to perform the new tasks that were expectedof postsecondary education, “leaving” them to the university. Until the 1980s,the grandes écoles played the Malthusian card and kept their graduating classessmall, both by increasing only slightly the number of student slots (admission tothe grandes écoles was, of course, selective) and only belatedly opening upalternative admission paths—for students who already had a university degree,for example.14 The creation of new post-bac technicaltertiary degree coursesgiven in lycées was not sufficient to satisfy demand or divide growth “fairly”between university and nonuniversity sectors. As mentioned the former grew bymore than 300 percent from 1958 to 1968, compared to a “mere” 200 percent forthe latter, mostly outside the grandes écoles. This was a major change from thetraditional expansion mode of French higher education: “normally” theuniversity sector kept to its traditional tasks while the nonuniversity sectorsuccessfully developed innovative programs. In the 1960s, “the Universityintruded into domains that had been reserved for the grandes écoles” (Magliulo1982, 27), and universities began offering a wider range of educational programs.The result was that internal diversification took over from the mechanisms ofexternal institutional differentiation. And the ministry played the role of initiatorin this development. It launched measures encouraging study programdiversification and development of curricula that would be better adapted to thelabor market, accompanying them with incentives to universities in the form of


additional funding.15 This time, in contrast to what happened at the end of thenineteenth century, universities responded to these attentions.

Three new types of university education were developed: short trainingprograms; long study programs with selective admission; and university-specific,nonstate-accredited degree programs. Their weight in university education todayis far from negligeable: out of 1,341,200 students enrolled in public universitiesin 1994–1995 (not including those in Instituts Universitaires de Technologie andthe Ecoles Nationales Supérieures d’Ingénieurs), 63,183, or 4.7 percent, wereenrolled in MSB, MIAGE, MSG, MSBM programs, magistères, and DESS*programs.16 With IUT and ENSI students, the figure is 185,033 out of 1,473,050,or 12.6 percent.

The IUTs are an extremely interesting type of program. They were created in1966, five years after a decree instituting the Diplômes d’Etudes SupérieuresTechniques (DEST) degrees, a first attempt to introduce shorter study coursesinto science faculties (Schriewer 1972). Their rocky beginnings elicitedparticular interest.17 Several authors sought to explain the “failure” of the firstyears.18 What they did not point out was the peculiarity of integrating shorttermtechnological training programs into the French universities of the time. Giventhe dynamic of French higher education development then, it would have beenmore likely for IUTs either to constitute a new institutional niche in thenonuniversity sector, half way between the grandes écoles and the faculties, or tobe attached to the lycées.19 Neither of these things happened. Instead IUTs madea place for themselves within universities, without being absorbed by them (thiswas later due to their exceptional institutional status as stipulated by Article 33of the Loi Savary20). Integrating IUTs into the French university landscaperepresented a major change; such innovations had either been doomed to failurethere or else had had to develop outside the university.21 Rhoades (1990) wasthus incorrect in affirming that IUTs had fallen victim to university conservatism,that they had been recalibrated to fit the norms of the university sector and hadtherefore undergone a process of dedifferentiation that belied their purposes asconceived by the Commission des 18 and the Commission des Instituts deFormation Technique Supérieure.22 In fact, just the opposite process occurred.What was remarkable about the IUTs was that they remained within theuniversities while maintaining most of their original design characteristics:multidisciplinarity, short, technology-dominant programs; mainly secondary andtertiary sector employment training; specific teaching methods, includingtraining periods in industries or companies; and selective admission. IUTs areboth “separate” from universities—a fact which leads them at times to claimautonomy from “their university”23—and “within” them, since they offer auniversity degree. And if there has been any dissemination or “drift” it has beenfrom IUTs to other types of university programs. A number of traditionalprograms now include training periods, and there is new attention to students’employment prospects.


After the IUTs were launched, other programs were developed. In the 1970s,again on the ministry’s initiative, universities began offering selective-admissionmaîtrise* programs with clearer access to the job market: the MST, MSG,MIAGE, and MSBM (see n. 16). In 1985 the magistères were added (n. 16) andin 1990 university vocational institutes. Above maîtrise level there were alsoinnovations. In 1973 the Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures Spécialisées* waslaunched, a set of one-year programs open to maîtrise holders. Like the IUTs,these education programs have nothing in common with traditional ones; unlikethem, they do not enjoy exceptional status and have simply been integrated intothe relevant UFR (Unite de Formation et de Recherche*) like any other program.All these programs constitute both professional, employment-oriented trainingand full-fledged university education, and with the exception of the magistères,they lead to national degrees.24

University-specific degrees are the last innovation category. The idea was notnew; as mentioned, it had been clearly announced in the late-nineteenth-centuryreforms. Though included in the Loi Faure, it had only limited effects (seechap. 3), and such programs still constitute only a very small part of universityeducation. What prevents them from developing is that since they offer nonational degree, they receive no public subsidies. This is also precisely whatmakes them special: their innovative potential lies in the fact that they are notconstrained by the officially set national model and therefore have greatpedagogical latitude. In some cases they are self-funding, as their enrollment feesare not subject to national regulation.

These innovations are a reminder that the transformations that Frenchuniversity education underwent in the 1960s were qualitative as well asquantitative. University education supply began to be diversified then, and studyprograms that could have developed in the nonuniversity sector were implantedand acquired legitimacy within universities. Moreover, alongside disciplinarydifferentiation came diversification of curricula.25 The homogeneity of educationsupply, and of university graduates’ prospective employment, was no more.

The direction taken by French universities may be observed in most universitysystems. In response to the clear trend of increasing demand for highly skilledworkers, many countries sought to open up higher education to greater numbersof students and diversify study programs (see, for example, Kogan 1997 andMeek et al. 1996). This process is generally viewed favorably as being welladapted to student population heterogeneity, labor market demand, thecoexistence of mass and elite education, and the fact of its innovativeexperimentation.26

Usually, diversifying education programs leads to broadening the spectrum ofinstitutions, though most researchers observe a concurrent trend towarddedifferentiation, as new institutions tend to reduce the gap between theirpedagogic norms and those of the most prestigious institutions, namely,universities, through a phenomenon known as academic drift.27 The Frenchcase bucks this trend in two ways. First, while there is a tendency for differences


to be reduced, and for borrowing between the two institutional sectors of Frenchhigher education, this does not occur through academic drift toward a dominantmodel considered superior, but rather through mechanisms of interpenetrationbetween the “models” particular to each sector.28 Certain grandes écoles havenow been accredited to confer university degrees (namely at the post-graduatelevel) and are trying to apply university norms to their professorial corps.29 As foruniversities, they are offering selective, professional programs. Internships incompanies or industries, long considered a grande école specificity, are notunusual in university programs, even classical ones, and will most likely becomegeneral practice. In sum, features that were specific to one institutional sector aretending now to be taken up and integrated by others.

Due to the work of interpenetration and diversification mechanisms, Frenchuniversities are offering a much more diverse range of education programs, andin many cases a greater variety of programs than their foreign counterparts(namely, German). One of the consequences of this trend is the singularization ofindividual French universities. Each now offers its own education supply,specific in terms of ratio of selective to nonselective admission programs,traditional academic versus vocational programs, and so forth. This meansdifferences among universities are greater. Education program diversification hasthus brought about increased institutional variety.

The Internal Contradictions of an Increasingly DiversifiedMass University

French higher education has thus been propelled in two opposite directions inrecent years. The time-honored standardizing, egalitarian model is still operative;the higher education system still functions by means of national regulations,statuses, curricula and degrees, synoptic management of issues, sweepingreforms that apply to everybody everywhere—all aimed to guarantee equaltreatment, strong homogeneity, and the maintenance of the national framework.Moreover, the overwhelming portion of state funding in university budgets givesthe education ministry great leverage to redistribute, reduce inequalities, andprovide incentives.

The second, more recent direction corresponds, on the contrary, to a dynamicof interuniversity diversification. That French universities took this direction isdue in part to the spectacular increases in student numbers in the 1960s and late1980s: the ministry is today (2003) in charge of some 1,404,014 students, 84universities, and 77,102 academics.30 It is also due to an internal differentiationtrend whereby heterogeneity among university institutions has been accentuated.

The ministry must therefore handle a university system that is both massiveand diversified, and here its centralized, corporatist steering model runs into twotypes of constraint. The first is size, which translates directly into financialconstraints. The funding of a nonselective, virtually free university sectorcom prising 1.4 million students represents a considerable proportion of the state


budget.31 The second is the accentuated contradiction between an increasinglyheterogeneous reality and regulations and action modes that have remainedstandardizing and egalitarian.

The financial constraint is the more visible of the two and attracts more mediaattention. The French state is having a hard time being the sole funding source forthe education of 1.4 million students and all university research. Most universitieshave understood this and are seeking to diversify their funding sources andincrease the percentage of university-raised funding in their operating budgets.

My analysis here may seem representative of the general critique of the toutEtat [all-controlling, all funding state]. It might therefore be argued that it is asign of the domination of classic liberal theses in favor of state disengagement.Perhaps. But it would be irresponsible to suggest that, realizable economies ofscale notwithstanding, a budget for accomodating more than 202,000 students in1959–1960 has anything in common with the one required to take in seven timesthat many today. The new surge of quantitative growth that French highereducation experienced in the early 1990s, at a time when the state had committeditself to reducing deficits, only added to this pressure. Accommodating one and ahalf million students in exchange for absurdly low enrollment fees costs dearly inan economic context where state revenues are hard to come by.32 Universities’financial difficulties are not virtual; they correspond to economic and budgetaryrealities.33 These contextual difficulties are compounded by the crisis oflegitimacy that state intervention in general is in, and universities’ overall lack ofcredibility, which make any massive increase in public spending on universitiesunlikely, whatever the prospects for economic growth.

Among potential solutions for easing budget constraints, two have beencrossed off the political agenda for the time being: reducing student numbersthrough selective admission and switching from current enrollment fees to tuitionfees that would be closer to real costs. Two others have the ministry’s favor:rationalizing management within university institutions (this will be examined inchaps. 6 and 7) and diversifying funding.34 Universities are being invited todevelop, or further develop, relations with the private sector, and the ministry hasincreased and diversified the structures facilitating such relations (cf. the law ofJuly 12,1999, promoting innovation and research within universities). While inthe 1980s it was often considered suspect for universities to have relations withbusiness, such relations are better accepted35 and more frequent today.36

Universities are also being encouraged to look more to continuing educationprograms as a source of funding, and to provide appropriate responses to currentvalorization of occupational skills and the specific education needs of differentage groups. Lastly, local communities are being asked to help fund universities.Though the decentralization law of 1982 did not provide for any transfer ofhigher education responsibilities from state to local level, local communitieswere already making it clear in the mid-1980s that they were ready to take overthis area. In dire economic straits, cities and towns sought to be selected by theministry as sites for university extensions, and thereby to add further proof of their


dynamism to the businesses they were hoping to attract.37 Some communitieseven disregarded the principle of the carte universitaire and set up universityextensions without ministry approval. Filâtre remarks that of the approximatelyfifty university extensions counted by the Comité National d’Evaluation desUniversités (CNE) in 1989 (CNE 1990), thirty were sauvage, that is, known tobut not recognized by the ministry, and that “all that existed between parentuniversity and a town, or an associated group of towns, was a simple writtenagreement” (Filâtre 1993, 40). In the late 1980s, the ministry used thisdemonstrated appetite on the part of local communities in its Université 2000plan (recently succeeded by the U3M [Université du Troisième Millennaire]),setting up a vast program for implanting universities or university extensions thatwould allow the régions (as well as départements and cities) to participate indecision making on developing the carte universitaire, and allow localcommunities to have an extension or to create a university if they could raise atleast half of matching funds.38 Furthermore, regulatory decisions made in 1990allowed local communities to obtain building contracts for the new infrastructureand, under certain conditions, collect VAT on them.

The proportion of diversified-source funding in French university budgets(from local communities but also European Union programs and businesses) isstill low if we consider total university budget, operating plus payroll. It cannotreally be said that the state has financially disengaged. The shift is perceptible,however, and, more important, it too works to increase interuniversityheterogeneity, in terms of geographical implantation of institutions, amount offunding from nearby local communities, and local policies, which can be more orless favorable to universities.

We might have expected that the recent decrease in student numbers andreturn to economic growth would have reduced incentives for fundingdiversification. But that would be to leave aside the other contradictions thatcentralized state steering has to grapple with. Up against the wideningdiscrepancy between the principles of standardization and egalitarianism on theone hand, real university heterogeneity on the other, the ministry is obliged to“manage large-scale singularity.”39 This results in two types of difficulties forthe state: it can no longer guarantee national homogeneity and it is havingtrouble containing institutions’ rule-bending.

There is no dearth of examples to demonstrate that the ministry is havingdifficulty fulfilling its function of norm definer and guarantor of local-practicestandardization through national rules. I shall present only two. First, the matterof determining and fixing academic workloads in such a way as to homogenizepractices or at least attenuate differences from one institution to another. Thistask would not seem particularly difficult. Teacher workloads are calculated interms of hours and type of course taught. There are three course types: coursmagistraux or CM (lecture courses), travaux dirigés or TD (the rough equivalentof section meetings with teaching assistants), and travaux pratiques or TP (labsections of various sorts—science, language lab—under teaching assistant


supervision). One hour of CM is equal to one and a half hours of TD and twohours of TP. Each teacher “owes” 192 hours of TD per year.40 In theory, then,the workload and cost involved in teaching each degree program should be fairlyeasy to calculate. In reality, the diversification of university programs has in turndiversified teaching tasks, creating tasks that were not provided for in theregulatory definition of service hours (follow-up of students on external trainingperiods, tutor coordination, etc.) The notion of teaching load no longercorresponds to any national norm. Taking account of the new teaching activitiessometimes means integrating them into existing workloads; meanwhile someuniversities are deducting them from compulsory teaching hours while others arecounting them as supplementary hours, and so forth. The simplest—and mostrealistic—solution would surely be for each university to develop its owndefinition of teaching loads. The ministry could not possibly accept such an idea,however, since calculating teaching loads gives it a “universal” reference pointfor determining the number of supplementary hours to allot each university andevaluating adequacy of teacher-student ratios. Clearly it needs a national norm tojustify its distribution criteria. The problem is that this also condemns it todealing with widening discrepancies between figures (calculated with measuringunit varying from one universities to another) and the realities they refer to.

The second example involves accrediting study programs leading to nationaldegrees. Here again, the ministry is at a loss to guarantee equivalence amonguniversities. As explained, degree programs are subject to national regulationscalled maquettes that define the minimum conditions for accrediting a programleading to the degree in question. Diversification of education supply hasbrought about an unprecedented increase in the number of national maquettes. Intrying to manage this situation, the ministry has adopted two, alternatingapproaches. The first involves creating as many new national maquettes as thereare new study programs.41 This ensures some degree of maquette standardization.However, since no limits have been placed on disciplinary specialization, it alsorequires the ministry to manage an increasing number of maquettes, call onincreasing numbers of experts to examine accreditation applications, organizeincreasing numbers of accreditation procedures, and so forth. Taken to its logicalextreme—a separate maquette for every study program offered—this dynamiccould dilute the notion of national degree. The second approach is to define themaquettes broadly enough that modulation is possible under a single programtitle.42 In this case the number of maquettes remains reasonable, but the notion ofnational degree still loses meaning. In effect, one purpose of those maquettes isto guarantee—to prospective employers, among others—that there is strongqualification similarity between two holders of maîtrise degrees with the samespecialization obtained in different universities. The broader the maquette andthe more open it is to local variation, the weaker that guarantee. In both cases,maintaining national maquettes is incompatible with the increasing diversity ofstudy programs and makes the guarantee of homogeneity among them across thenational territory increasingly illusory.


Centralized management based on national procedures, regulations, and rulescan therefore be maintained only at the cost of diminishing the capacity of suchnorms to apply to highly diverse real situations. The measuring units that weremeant to create a common code for all partners, a unified language, and thus toguarantee stable equivalences, have become relative; the “standard meter”defined by the ministry no longer has the same value throughout the territory.

This development has meant weakened obedience to national norms byindividual universities in their local practices, as we can see if we look again atthe example of national degrees. For academics themselves, the value of thosedegrees is highly relative. The first things Commission de Spécialistes membersspontaneously do when reading a candidate’s application file is look to see whothe candidate’s thesis director is, who was on his/her thesis jury, and to try toread between the lines of the thesis defense report. In other words, the actorsmost involved in, and directly responsible for, degree conferment do notthemselves believe in the equivalency of national degrees.

Moreover, attempts to circumvent national regulations are legion. Here we runinto the well-known issue of creative rule interpretation, a widespread practice inFrench administration (Crozier 1964) and according to Dupuy and Thoenig(1983), a permanent source of local innovation. Academics, too, successfullyengage in this exercise, as Potocki-Malicet (1997) has shown for courseprerequisites and degree requirements, and the ministry does not have real controlover such arrangements. It’s not that the ministry doesn’t know what’s going on.Everyone there can cite discrepancies between number of administrativelyenrolled students and number of students enrolled in and attending classes, forexample. But no one can say what the real gap between these two figures is foreach university. And what of the liberal interpretation of national maquettes oncea university’s programs have been accredited? Knowing such practices exist isone thing; knowing how widespread they are and what regulations they infringeon is another.

Then there is the matter of outright illicit practices, those that have led tolawsuits against particular universities. Nonselective university admission andfixed enrollment fees identical throughout France are examples of rules that getbroken. The University of Paris IX-Dauphine is one university that openlyselects students for admission to the premier cycle*—a practice regularlyex posed in the press.43 The second type of rule-breaking, less well knownthough it too draws media attention,44 involves the “abusive practice” ofcharging students “complementary fees.” Since universities cannot changeenrollment fees, some have tried, surreptitiously, to require a lump-sum paymentfor specific student services such as application processing, course notes, sportsactivities, and so forth.45 In neither of these cases was the ministry the first toreact. It only sanctioned universities that had used these procedures after lawsuitswere filed against them by students or student unions. It was as if the centraladministration had given up on intervening itself, and as if everyone—administrators, politicians, academics—while continuing to defend the


legitimacy of uniformity and equality, nonetheless tolerated the flouting of theseprinciples.

The trend in university education over the last three decades thus points toincreasing incompatibility between the reality of university institutions and theidea of maintaining the single, centralized model operative since the ImperialUniversity. That model has been profoundly shaken by the combined pressure ofhigher education massification and internal diversification of the university sector(Girod de l’Ain, 1997). The overseeing education ministry is not having an easytime taking this development into account while remaining loyal to the principlesof uniformity and equality. However, as we shall now see, it has itselftransformed its intervention modes in the last ten years.


5And the Ministry Recognized the

Universities…

The second major change to occur in the last decade concerns the ministry’spiloting of university education. The discipline-focused approach gave way toaction modes more focused on university institutions. This change isindissociable from a new policy for establishing contracts between the ministryand each university. More than any other measure, this policy gave rise to amajor rehauling of central administration intervention modes and changes in itsrelations with the universities.1

The change was as profound as it was unexpected. A few months afterFrançois Mitterrand was reelected in May 1988, the central administration wasstill steering largely by faculty logic: Decisions were made in terms of a givendiscipline, considered throughout the territory, rather than by taking account ofthe particular situation of each university, and there was no reference touniversities as institutions in ministry agents’ discourse, representations, orpractices. The overseeing French education ministry had simply not taken intoaccount the framework law of 1968 (the Loi Faure),2 not to mention theextremely controversial law of 1984 (the Loi Savary). The faculty-focusedcharacter of university education steering, which had taken root during thefaculty republic, had been maintained after the faculties were abolished, and ithardly seemed under threat in 1987 when I co-conducted the first of severalsurveys within the ministry (Musselin and Brisset 1989; Friedberg and Musselin1993).

The 1988 presidential campaign gave no reason to expect changes. Theplatforms of candidates Chirac and Mitterrand did not contain any projects forhigher education. In contrast to the 1981 presidential and 1986 legislativeelections (the latter focused on abolishing the Loi Savary), in 1988 no one oneither right or left was speaking of reform, new laws, or a general plan for theUniversity. Immediately after the presidential elections, however, the newlyappointed Socialist prime minister Michel Rocard declared that education wouldbe a priority for his government. All waited to see what concrete measures wouldfollow this announcement. But the press showed relatively little interest innational education minister Lionel Jospin’s September 1988 speech to universitypresidents announcing a policy for allocating a part of state funding on the basisof contracts. Nor was there any reaction from teachers or students. Applying

Garraud’s typology of ways that issues get put on the policy agenda, we can saythat the ministry’s new contract policy followed models for “silent” inclusion,namely the archetypal “anticipation model” of voluntarist public action, “usuallycharacterized by absence of conflict, public controversy, media or politicalexploitation, but also, in most cases, absence of explicit, defined social demand…[It] is in great measure a function of the ministries’ own capacity for expertevaluation” (1990, 37).3

This silent policy, which no one was calling for and which had been placed onthe ministry’s institutional agenda without controversy (Cobb and Elder 1972),4sparked a profound change in the French university system.5 In the space of oneyear, the ministry had thought out the basic design of the contracts and freed upbudget funding. The central administration had been entirely reorganized toimplement the new measure. New department directors were hired, and adirective was published in March 1989 specifying how to proceed. In December1989 the first contracts were signed, and four years later, most universities hadestablished their first four-year contract with the ministry. Above all, andcontrary to all expectations, the policy put universities at the center of procedure,minimizing and marginalizing reference to the disciplines and overturning in afew months’ time the practices and principles that had characterized theministry’s steering modes since Napoleon.

How can this change be explained? Why was the contract idea accepted in thefirst place and how did it manage to become so strongly established and, for atime, to dominate? The answer has less to do with the use of contracts as policyinstruments than with the way the directive was implemented within the ministry.The universities were able to take over power within the central administrationbecause the policy was accompanied by a process of meaning production andlegitimation.

To support this explanation in terms of process I will show that (1)universityministry contracts were developed independently of experiments thatpreceded them; the change therefore cannot be understood as the last stage indissemination of an already formed representation of public action in the area ofhigher education; (2) the success of the contracts had less to do with any intrinsicvalue of the “contract solution” than with the way in which that policy wasimplemented.

Three Past Experiments and Their Nonrelevance

As soon as one asks where the idea of strengthening the university level camefrom, it is sorely tempting to explain the 1988 contract policy as the continuationof a trend that had been underway for several years. Indeed, a quick review ofthe recent past reveals that just such an idea was already contained in priorpolicies. Still, we cannot affirm that those policies were the beginnings of areorientation of state action in the area of university education. There were threeexperiments prior to 1989. All of them promoted the “individual institution”


component in university steering, and all failed to deflect the disciplinary focus ofthe ministry’s intervention modes.

The first experiment involving ministry-university contracts forministryallocated resources was set up in 1975, less than seven years afterpassage of the Loi Faure. The initiator was Jean-Louis Quermonne, director ofthe ministry’s department of higher education and research from 1974 to 1975and an ardent supporter of university autonomy. The Conférence des Présidentsd’Université (CPU) gave its support to the initiative at its 1975 colloquium inVillard-de-Lans.

The experiment lasted only a few months. In 1976, Raymond Barre succeededJacques Chirac as prime minister, and when the new higher education minister,Alice Saunier-Seïté, arrived, replacing Jean-Pierre Soisson, the experiment wasstopped and soon forgotten. Though the 1975 project can be credited withdisseminating ideas favorable to university-central administration contracting,6none of the actors who participated in the 1988 contract policy cited it as areference for the idea they were implementing or even mentioned its existence.Nor is it evoked in the preparatory texts—“service”-level memoranda, meetingminutes, intermediate projects—that circulated within the ministry in the last yearsof the 1980s.7

The second initiative was the 1985 creation of the Comité Nationald’Evaluation des Universités (CNE). Its purpose was to evaluate universities, notdisciplines8—a fact worth noting in a university system so strongly marked bydisciplinary focus.9 But despite active mobilization in favor of evaluatinguniversity institutions, numerous methodology notes in support of a universityapproach, and the many university evaluation reports themselves, this initiativehad no major repercussions on the ministry’s steering modes.

From its creation the CNE displayed its independence from the ministry;indeed, in July 1989 it obtained the status of independent administrativeauthority. The corollary to this was the decision that CNE evaluations could notbe used by the ministry to guide university funding allocation. The relationbetween the CNE and the ministry was thus one of mutual distrust rather thancooperation. Ministry agents saw the CNE as a structure that might well infringeon their own official powers, and CNE members did not want to be thought of asauxilliaries to the ministry. This reduced cooperation. Above all, the ministrytended to ignore the CNE: CNE reports were hardly used by the centraladministration. As a result, neither the approach developed by the CNE nor therepresentations and knowledge that informed its productions had any realinfluence on the ministry.10

The CNE’s commitment to the universities over the disciplines (each reportsystematically included a section on university governance) is noteworthy, but itsconstancy was costly: This body was kept—and kept itself—so far out on themargins that its approach was not disseminated. It had no impact over andbeyond the committee itself, and it did not affect the central administration’saction principles or practices.

AND THE MINISTRY RECOGNIZED THE UNIVERSITIES…• 61

The third and last experiment, begun in 1983, most closely resembles the 1988contract initiative in that it introduced contracts based on four-year funding-needprojections—in this case, contracts for research. It is especially tempting to relatethe two measures since some of the individual actors implicated in the 1988policy frequently cite the 1983 policy, and, at first glance, the intentions behindthe two look similar. Research contracts were a response to three relatedconcerns: escaping the straitjacket of annual budget management; inducinguniversities to develop their own research policies; and allocating funding toresearch teams developed according to such policies rather than unconnectedresearch groups. While the various research projects in such contracts continuedto be examined by the relevant disciplinary experts, the policy stipulated that thefour-year contract itself was to be negotiated with the individual universityinstitutions.

Early in the implementation process, however, the policy was deflected off thepath to its initial goals. The focus on university institutions was abandoned, andnegotiations fell once more under the domination of the disciplines. These four-year research contracts failed to strengthen universities’ capacities to define andimplement research policies. This may have been because funding for universityresearch (i.e., made available by the ministry’s higher education departments) didnot amount to much compared to funding for individual projects that had beenproposed by national research organizations (Centre National de la RechercheScientifique or CNRS, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique or INRA,Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale or INSERM, and soforth) independently of any university policy. It was difficult for an individualuniversity to develop its own research policy when its research projects were inlarge degree a matter of isolated decisions made outside the university itself. Inany case, the centralizing, interventionist impulses quickly regained the upperhand and universities were shunted off to the sidelines. They could no longer useas they saw fit the research funding they received after negotiation with theministry; instead, funding was allotted to specified research teams. Theycontinued to sign fouryear research contracts, but because they could no longerdecide how to distribute the funding allocated them, each university could onlyput forward anything like a policy before the negotiation procedure, by choosingwhich research teams’ projects would be submitted to the ministry.11 Rather thanstrengthening the “university” echelon, these contracts ultimately weakened itonce again, by favoring an approach to proposals in terms of individual projectand discipline. The result was entirely contrary to the philosophy for actionbehind the initiative, and therefore to the later ministry-university contractspolicy.12

There was, then, little resonance between the earlier initiatives and the 1988policy. It is fair to say that the impact of these three experiments on theoverseeing ministry was nil. The first experiment had been given no time; thesecond survived but in complete isolation; and the third lost its initialcharacteristics, with centralized discipline-based expert evaluation once again


taking precedence over university research policies. Still, the lack of directimpact is not in itself sufficient cause to affirm that the 1988 contract policy ideadid not benefit from earlier experiments and that it was not the result of acumulative learning process.

We can only conclude this after determining whether or not the very existenceof these attempts allowed arguments and lines of reasoning to be developed,stances to be taken, rhetoric to be forged in favor of a university “culture,” andmade possible dissemination of such arguments, stances, and rhetoric among alarger public. There is no evidence of such a process. In the fifteen yearspreceding the contract policy, no increased interest was shown in argumentsfavoring university autonomy. Such arguments existed well before attempts to acton them;13 they continued to exist after those attempts; however, they were notstrengthened by them. The three experiments were based on an understandingand approach that favored greater university autonomy, but they did not helpdisseminate that understanding or approach, nor did they bring about theformation of a group of mediators in Pierre Muller’s sense of the word (1995),committed to defending a new vision of the university world.

Nor were the experiments used as a source of lessons that would enable policyimplementers not to make the same mistakes. There was no critical analysis ofthe prior failures of these policies; no assessments were commissioned or written;no one tried to find out in 1988 if similar measures had been implemented in thepast, either abroad, or in other sectors of the French administration, or to analyzewhat these might have produced.

Lastly, we cannot support the idea of a link between these differentexperiments and the 1988 contract policy by referring to any permanent core ofactors. The vast majority of crafters of the 1988 university contract policy had notparticipated in the earlier initiatives and had only limited knowledge of them.None had been involved in or knew of the brief contract policy venture of 1975.And though a few had been implicated in four-year research contracts andsupported the idea of contracts, they were no more a driving force in defining thenew contract policy than the others.

It therefore seems difficult to claim that the success of this policy was due tothe increased dissemination and power of a new way of conceiving ministryintervention modes, or that university contracts were legitimized and madesuccessful by past experiments.14

The contract policy, then, should be considered a singular experiment, onewith its own logic, a policy to be explained first and foremost in its own terms.15

More important, at the moment it was launched there was no reason to predictthat its fate would differ from that of the earlier experiments; no reason tosuppose it wouldn’t fail, be pulled off course, or, as was even more likely, getbroken off with the first changeover of political power. Nor was there any reasonto predict that it would be as significant as it was, that it would modify ministrysteering modes and give universities the opportunity and will to become more


autonomous. Moreover, announcing the policy was nothing compared to thework of realizing and implementing it.

Ministry-University Contracts: More a Viable PoliticalOption than an Efficient Solution

Another way of explaining the impact of the contract policy would be to showthat it was a good solution, that is, that the mere introduction of contracts withuniversities sufficed to modify ministry practices. In fact, though it can be shownthat the policy was a politically viable option, we cannot conclude from this thatit was an intrinsically efficient solution.16

The decision to orient ministry policy toward contracting with universities wasmade in emergency conditions. Expected to show how “creative” they could beafter Mitterrand’s second win, minister and cabinet were urgently seeking ideasand solutions. The new education minister had just taken up post andresponsibilities—generally a propitious moment for launching new programs—and prime minister Rocard had just announced that education would be a priorityfor his government. Moreover, the expected increase in student numbers for thecoming fall meant that the beginning of the academic year promised to be rough.For education minister Lionel Jospin and his cabinet, the pressure was on toannounce “something” to university presidents before their institutions reopenedin October. But what?

Finding an answer to this question was delicate business given thatpolicymakers already had to heed several no-entry signs. Classic solutions of thesort that had been applied several times in the past would not do. The time andenergy spent drafting the Loi Savary and the immense difficulties encountered inimplementing it between 1984 and 1986 had a highly dissuasive effect on anythoughts of proposing a new framework law; meanwhile, the failure of theproposed Loi Devaquet (see chap. 3) was there to dissuade ministry actors frommaking any changes that would affect university structures or statuses— no onewanted to reignite such conflicts in the university and student communities.Moreover, as this was a Socialist government, there was hardly a political orideological motive for revising such national principles as nonselectiveadmission, enrollment fees, or national degrees.17 Lastly, education ministrycabinet members knew of and/or shared Lionel Jospin’s hostility toward any planfor decentralizing higher education to the level of the régions.

In August 1988, then, under mounting pressure to act, the ministry knew whatit didn’t want to do but had no clear program of action. Jospin’s arrival at itshead had not been planned very far in advance, and he was not known as aneducation specialist.18 This was not true of his cabinet members, but none ofthem had any well-developed approach to university education; none was atheorist of the University. There was neither a Keynes (Hall 1989) nor a Malraux(Urfalino 1996a) in the lot to develop a new theory or put forwardone philosophy for action over another. The contract idea, then, was less an


ideological choice (in the noble sense of the term), or the translation of a newvision of the university world into modes of action than it was a satisfactorysolution to the problem at hand (March and Simon 1958).

To begin with, it could be put in place immediately. “Contractual solutions” ingeneral were attracting new interest.19 and this undoubtedly influenced the formeruniversity president turned cabinet member Daniel Bancel, if only indirectly,when he wrote the memorandum that would win cabinet support in August 1988.Moreover, several-year commitments on the basis of projected budgets were nota new thing in university education, even though they were not always called“contracts.” Four-year procedures bringing together university research teamswith national research organizations already existed, as did four-year decisionson accrediting study programs leading to national degrees and four-year researchcontracts of the sort presented above. In addition to length of time, thesearrangements had in common with the proposed ministry-university contracts thefact that they were based on agreements reached more or less through negotiationand that tied funding allocation to requests backed by reasoned, demonstrativearguments. University contracts understood simply as instruments for allocatingfunding for several years at a stretch were thus not a novelty for universities.

It should be added that contract practices were a politically satisfactorysolution, or to use Hall’s expression, a “politically viable” one (Hall 1989, 374).They went down well with both public opinion and university academics:announcing that university autonomy would be increased and that the ministrywas going to negotiate supplementary funding with universities would not bringanyone into the streets in protest. The solution was also acceptable for thegovernment: The contract idea was particularly consistent with Rocardian ideasfor state reform.20 More broadly, while the idea worked well with notions on howto bring about change then current in the CFDT and, for higher education, theSGEN-CFDT [see note 6], it was also consistent with Socialist Partyunderstanding. It should be remembered, for example (though this may seemanecdotal), that in an interview published in Le Monde, April 23, 1981,presidential candidate Mitterrand had affirmed that it was “more efficient andsatisfying in a democracy to change society by contract rather than decree.”21

And as the examples of four-year research contracts show, (introduced duringMitterrand’s first seven-year term), namely, explicit use of the notion of‘contractualization’ in the 1984 Loi Savary (title III, article 20), state-with-régionand state-with-medium-size-city contracts, and development of state-with-industry “environmental covenants” (Lascoumes 1994; Lascoumes and Valluy1996), the contract instrument had already been mobilized on several occasions(Gaudin 1996,1999).

A further advantage of the contract solution was that it would not provoke anegative reaction from the political opposition. Unlike nationalizationsand privatizations, contracts did not divide along political lines but ratherproduced consensus, even though that consensus was more superficial than realand was due in part to the ambiguities of the notion (Favereau, Lascoumes,


Musselin, and Berrivin 1996). In effect, the contract notion may be used in twocontradictory rhetorics of freedom. Contracts may be seen as either a means ofdelimiting mutual obligations or a space of negotiated security. Furthermore, thenotion can be supported either for its “social” virtues—as when it is presented asan agreement-building instrument—or, on the contrary, for its “economic” virtues,as when it is understood almost as a market instrument, an intermediary levelbetween the organization and the market (Williamson 1975; Laffont and Tirole1993).22

The contract, then, was all the more politically acceptable and generallycreditable a solution for being a rich conceptual jumble in which everyone couldsee what they chose.

The policy’s political viability explains why it did not elicit controversy. Italso explains why it was chosen. But this is not enough either to have guaranteedits success or to explain its impact. Adherence to a given reform principle doesnot guarantee success for the corresponding reform, as the example of the ThirdRepublic reforms clearly illustrates. Might the impact of the contract policy beattributed instead to the fact that “contracts” are simultaneously a viable andefficient political solution; that is, they are an instrument that in itself bringsabout change? There are several reasons for doubting this claim.

First, contracts were assigned an extremely wide range of goals. My analysisof internal ministry memoranda, official speeches, and directives from August1988 to the end of 198923 shows that contract practices were presented not as asolution, but the solution, the one capable of curing all ills.24 The most frequentline of argument may be summed up thus: Higher education is facing a particularset of challenges—“an increasing number of bac-holders, a high level of requiredknowledge, training of cadres and executive managers, the European Union levelin higher education, international research, playing a role in regionaldevelopment”25—and the only way to respond successfully to them is toimplement a contract policy. Contracts were considered an elixir, a miracle cure,and the patients were being asked to believe that that cure would fit the diagnosisof university education’s ills and the projected general developments. In fact, noone explained why contractual relations between the ministry and theuniversities would make it possible to respond effectively to the challengesidentified. Contract policy was justified by the repeated but never demonstratedclaim that there was a causal link between managing funding distribution throughcontracts and French universities’ chances of successfully meeting theannounced challenges.

Second, confidence in the effectiveness of contracts was based more onsystematic adherence to the principle than empirical evidence. Can it be said thatthe ministry was right to bet on contracts because contracts are indeed a“uni versal panacea”? Post-implementation evaluations of several public-sectorcontract policies give ample reason for doubt.26 Whereas these variousexperiments had highly comparable goals—to facilitate the strengthening ofintermediary levels and those responsible for “guiding” them, to modify the


content and nature of “center-periphery” relations,27 to revise fundingdistribution criteria28— the results were mixed, and in some cases contractingeven produced results that were diametrically opposed to those sought, namely,hardening of “center-periphery” relations, rigidifying of funding allocationprocesses, and so forth.29 As we concluded then (Berrivin and Musselin 1996),contracting is not at all an automatically efficient solution.

There are three reasons for this. First, contracting is a fragile procedure. Sinceit involves a rule-bound sequence of interdependent moves through time, it risksrunning out of steam; incentive must be renewed to keep the procedure going.30

Moreover, it is exposed to the overformalizing or standardizing moves thatoverseeing authorities are always tempted to use to stabilize it, and to dilution ofthe relations of mutual trust necessary to it, which are threatened by politicalinconstancy and not ensured by any third-party guarantor.31 Also, contractingdemands a great deal from those who initiate the procedure. Transformingrelations between overseeing authority and overseen units involves more thanchanging how the latter operate, it requires the authority to adapt to itsinstrument (develop new skills and functions, new modes of cooperation amongdepartments that had been highly compartmentalized, and so forth). Contractingthus has a boomerang effect on central departments, one that they themselves hadlargely underestimated and that they were not always able to handle very well.

Second, contract practices involve two contradictory steering modes: acentralizing, interventionist mode—overseeing authorities are the initiators ofsuch policies, and as such they are hardly following a dynamic of statedisengagement but instead aim to better control the situation; and adifferentiating mode whereby the ministry starts taking account more effectivelyof localcontext diversity. Both these steering modes are operative, and there istension between them. The issue raised by contracting practices is thus not somuch how to steer public action “with or without the law”32 as what type or levelof law (or rules) should be used so that diversity may be tolerated while acommon, center-determined framework is maintained.

Third, and consequent to the first two points, a contract is an “empty shell.” Itscontent and meaning depend above all on the way they are shaped andtransformed into operating principles by those who implement them. This is whyit is crucial to examine the process. It is not so much the instrument but how it isput to use that makes the difference. In other words, the question at this point isnot why the ministry chose to use contracts but why this policy, in this particularcase, brought about lasting changes in the ministry’s steering modes.33

Balance of Power and Production of Meaning Within theMinistry

As mentioned, one of the major effects of the contract policy on universityeducation was to introduce the “university” level into the ministry’s steeringmodes. This was facilitated by a voluntarist shift in the balance of power within


the central administration. From 1989 to 1991 the ministry’s discipline-focuseddepartment was moved aside and a new university-focused department broughtforward. But as we shall see, this shift is not in itself enough to explain theimpact of the contract policy.

In August 1988, Lionel Jospin met with his cabinet in a brain-storming sessionknown as a séminaire where Daniel Bancel’s idea for developing contractpractices was approved. Claude Allègre, special adviser to the ministry, thentook over the work of making ministry-with-university contracts reality. He firstcreated a task force which in turn prepared a directive outlining the contractpolicy: every university was to analyze its existing situation (this was termedanalyse de l’existant) and draw up a four-year development plan that would thenbe used as the basis for negotiations between the university president and theministry. Meanwhile, Allègre initiated collective reflection on reorganizing thecentral administration around the creation of a new structure, a new department,that would realize the ministry’s new projects: university contracts, theUniversité 2000 plan, and a general pay raise. In May 1989, this preparationphase came to an end; the directive was published, the central administration wasrestructured. Allègre had fulfilled his role of policy entrepreneur (Padioleau1982) and now left the ministry in charge. From that time onward, universitycontracts would be much more than a cabinet affair.

The ministry reorganization profoundly changed the internal balance ofpower. The new department was called the Direction de la Programmation et duDéveloppement Universitaire or DPDU. It was added to the three “classic”departments: the DESUP (Direction des Enseignements Supérieurs), the DPES(Direction des Personnels de l’Enseignement Supérieur), and the DRED(Direction de la Recherche et des Etudes Doctorales). The DPDU was put incharge of matters that had been the work of other departments, namely, budget,university premises construction, and the carte universitaire. It was also giventasks that had not existed before, namely the Université 2000 plan and ministry-university contracts. For the first time, a ministry department was devotedentirely to university steering.34 As a result, everything came to be structuredexplicitly around the DPDU, which, though it did not have the function or statusof a head department (direction générale),35 did contain most vital functions andwas therefore at the intersection of a number of different processes, which it wascalled upon to coordinate. The effect of this strong new department was toweaken the DESUP, which had been the heart of central administration of highereducation. To its great displeasure, the DESUP was now dethroned, amputatedof certain limbs:36

They had to overcome resistance, but…. All in all, énarques are goodservants of the state,37 and they put that before their ideology. Still, thisdepartment [the DESUP] used to be powerful. It had the windows[distributed some specific budget funding on a discretionary basis], and thatpower now went to the DPDU. So it seemed to people…you could feel it in


the air. Altègre was aware of it. There were gaping wounds in thisdepartment, and Allègre knew it. (a DESUP director)

The reorganization went together with thoroughgoing staff changes. Appointingnew department directors is standard practice,38 as is changing the organizationchart in a ministry as sensitive to political power changeovers as education.39

Nor need we dwell on the fact that, like most of their predecessors, the newdepartment directors all came from academic or research backgrounds. Otherinstitutional arrangements were more unusual and deserve greater attention.40

The creation of the DPDU and its new tasks was in fact an occasion for bringingin new blood. Of course some DPDU personnel came from dissolved mid-levelDESUP bureaus, but the new functions also meant new hiring. Armand Frémont,the first DPDU director, called on persons he had already worked with or knew asrector of the Académie of Grenoble. By September 1989 the first team was inplace and ready to steer the first wave of contracts. It was later expanded in thesame way: those already at work called on persons they knew. New personnelwere expected to believe in the new programs and share in the spirit behind them.

From its inception, then, the DPDU was in a strong position. Its membersquickly constituted a team, and they set themselves up as indefatigableproponents and spokespersons for the contract policy. Their cohesion had noequal in other departments. Moreover, the DPDU’s official powers put theDESUP in a dependent position. Vested with new, innovative programs, theDPDU was the hub, both look-out and pilot (as specified in personal notes on aninternal seminar that took place a few days after the department was officiallyopened in May 1989), a fact that further irritated the other departments:

The DPDU negotiated both the building concrete and the money. And theyhad the university advisers, who did the liaison, so the universities felt [theDPDU] was taking better care of them. Meanwhile, the DESUP’s role wasto get in the way, to prevent things from rolling along smoothly by meansof expert group and CNESER decision making [Conseil National del’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche]. They [the universities]would propose a course portfolio and our answer was “No, it doesn’t haveenough potential.” The DPDU had a clear will to hegemony over the otherdepartments…. It was clearly the department that orchestrated everything,while the other departments had their own areas to manage and theadvisers’ role was to be in the field.” (DESUP)

The DPDU-DESUP power reshuffle caused a great deal of tension between thetwo departments.41 The redistributing of official powers betweenconseillers pédagogiques (academic experts grouped by discipline and chargedwith examining accreditation applications) and conseillers d’université(university advisers, also academics but organized by geographic zone and incharge of moving the contract process along) brought with it numerous


adjustments, all of which benefited the DPDU.42 The sharpest clashes betweenthe two departments concerned the fit between discipline-based accreditation anduniversity contracts. First, with regard to work organization, the discipline-focused activity of expert evaluation for course accreditation had to be made tocoincide with contract negotiation, which concerned universities as a whole. Thisraised more technical problems for the DESUP than the DPDU. It was requiredto follow a number of regulated procedures for accreditation: submittingproposals to technical committees that check norm compliance, getting CNESERapproval, and so forth. No such constraints applied to DPDU contractingprocedures, which were not as formalized or as dependent on a fixed regulatoryframework. This was one source of tension: the DPDU dismissed the DESUP aspunctilious; in contrast, it could focus more on content than form.

Lastly, there was the problem of criteria ranking. As in the past, the DESUP wasresponsible for expert evaluation of the fundamental content of education—thetask of its conseillers pédagogiques and experts—and its conformity to thenational maquette, the task of department administrators. For the DPDU, on theother hand, a “good” contract was one that valorized the existence of a commonproject, a collective idea for and originating in the given university. Anaccreditation application might be rejected by the DESUP for not conforming tothe national maquette but supported by the DPDU because it fit well into thatuniversity’s project or met a local need. Since the DPDU was signatory to thecontract, it had the final say. This meant that it regularly managed to impose itsposition on the DESUP:

The DESUP went completely overboard with its insubstantial norms. So Isaid, “Look, we don’t give a damn about your accreditation.” We set up aliterature-and-languages licence degree because it was consistent with jobopenings and because the region needed junior high school teachers. Andit’s in the contract, even though it goes against the maquette texts. We saidit was an experimental project, and it passed—though it sat for threemonths at the DESUP. (a DPDU university adviser).

Clearly the changed balance of power within the central administration, thetransfer of official powers and resources from one department to another, orrather from one procedure (study program accreditation) to another (universitycontract negotiation) was what enabled the “university” level to penetrateministerial practices. And thanks to the longevity of the Jospin-Allègre tandem—four years, nearly a record for the Ministère de l’Education Nationale—theuniversity level established a firm foothold.

Still, the DPDU’s victory over the DESUP cannot be reduced to onedepartment taking over another’s power. It also has to do with the “doctrine”developed by promoters of the contract policy.43 During this period, the DESUPsuffered not only from its dependent position and a funding deficit but from adeficit of ideas, sense of purpose, and legitimacy. There was a sharp normative


imbalance between the two departments. Members of the DESUP acted in a sortof conceptual void, merely continuing as they had before without trying todemonstrate the soundness of their practices or win legitimacy for them. Theirefforts to oppose the DPDU therefore appear essentially utilitarian, aimed attempering the grip of the DPDU and reconquering their lost position, and fueledprimarily by self-interest. DPDU members criticized them for just this, accusingthem of not caring about what would be advisable for universities. And the factthat there was no DESUP counterdiscourse made it particularly easy to see themotives of that department’s members as purely instrumental. Rather thandeveloping a vision of university education contrary to the one taking shapewithin the DPDU, the DESUP resisted by mobilizing material, structural, andregulatory resources.44

The DPDU’s story during this period was of course entirely different. Here,too, department staff were engaged in defending their interests and new turf, andthe behaviors they adopted were just as strategic as the DESUP’s. But at thesame time they were intensely engaged in producing meaning, constructingreferents, defining and legitimizing practices and procedures, and, moregenerally, elaborating new representations about the place of universities in theeducation system. The DPDU maintained its centrality by making a considerableinvestment in developing what its members called “the contractualizationdoctrine.” And on that ground there was no competition from other departments.The DPDU-DESUP turf war was heated, but it was never an ideological battlebetween, to put it roughly, partisans of the disciplines and partisans of theinstitutions. The DPDU was in a monopoly situation simply because nosystematic counterarguments were being made.45

Two factors facilitated the development of a doctrine within the DPDU. First,the department had virtually virgin territory to work on—or rather, they had avacant lot to construct on. The contract policy was not the product of anypreexisting theory of university education; the “system of reference for action”here had yet to be invented. Second, when Claude Allègre handed over the reinsof the new department to the administration in 1989, the system still needed to beconstructed. The directive set only a very general schedule, and many questionsremained open. What was a universitywide project? What did a good projectconsist in? What attitude should be adopted regarding universities that prepared“bad” projects? Should set issues or themes be taken up in contracts? To answerthese questions, DPDU members had first to form an opinion, then specify touniversities what was expected of them, lay down the rules of the game. Thedoctrine was thus highly pragmatic: procedures had to be established, schedulesset, geographic zones drawn, responsibilities defined, and so forth. The work wasnot carried out in opposition to anything, but through an open-ended, trial-and-error, solution-seeking process that involved information dissemination andexchange.46 The DPDU took off from a few ideas, clarifying and developingthem as it went along:


When set off we had just a compass. In our seminars we’d identified a fewmajor directions. Modernizing university management was the first andmost pressing problem; also taking account of the university as a wholeand setting up a longer-term system, with commitment on number of jobsand funding for at least two years, maybe four. We had a few goals, and wehad to get a projected estimate on our activity…. For the first wave and theuniversities of the north and west, we did it any old way. Totalimprovisation. The concern was for it to work and for the presidents tosign. (DPDU)

The gradual work of developing policy practices gave rise to intermediateassessment, enabling ministry actors to find just the formula they wanted to useby capitalizing on acquired experience. Moreover, defining these practices wenthand in hand with ensuring that they were consistent with each other and seekinglegitimacy for them. For the very first contracts, the DPDU turned to formeruniversity presidents and vice-presidents to create a group of university advisers.This function had never before existed. Until that point, universities called uponto work with the ministry did so in the name of a discipline; they exercised theirexpertise by evaluating discipline-focused projects. This time advisers had tointervene in a given geographical zone, not a disciplinary sector, and they werecalled upon not to give an expert opinion on existing projects but rather to helpuniversities prepare contracts. Their tasks were not defined at the outset, butgradually refined: University advisors regularly met to think out and reflect ontheir practices, exchange experiences, present innovations discovered in “their”universities, determine where they stood and the progress yet to be made:47

Once every two weeks we met for a day-long work session. This wasexcellent for understanding each institution, since we were all different,and we were all from different disciplines. This was very important.(university adviser)

The purpose of these meetings was to define what was and was not “consistent”with the spirit of the contract policy, to specify university advisers’ “philosophyfor action” and how they should behave when dealing with universities, and tocirculate information and formalize procedures.

Yet the contractualization doctrine cannot be reduced to the formalizing ofoperational arrangements and principles of action. It also led to wider-rangingreflection on contracting itself. Far from being just a means of distributing thegreater part of funding on the basis of fixed criteria and allocating supplementaryfunding on the basis of negotiation and selection,48 contracts were invested byDPDU members with a vaster purpose, namely, making individual universitiesproceed in more collective, strategic fashion and with greater foresight. Theprocess of conceiving, preparing, and negotiating contracts that was taking placein universities was always considered more important than the contract itself or


its content. There is significant evidence of this. First, the DPDU establishedcontracts even with universities whose projects were not satisfactory accordingto its criteria; clearly it was more concerned with the learning aspect of theprocess. Second, relatively little emphasis was put on evaluating contractenactment: The first contracts contained no indication of how they would befollowed up on or implemented. It was not that DPDU members had forgottenthe matter of evaluation (indeed, it is regularly mentioned in service-levelmemoranda) but rather that this aspect seemed less important than promoting acollective dynamic within universities. For this reason it was necessary to avoiddoing anything that might transform the contract into a mere management tool,at least during the first years. Lastly, not much attention was paid to framingcontract content: The universities had great freedom in choosing the issues orthemes their project would address.49 For the DPDU, the crucial point was to geta collective dynamic going within individual universities that would enable themto ‘analyze the existing situation,’ identify priorities, and successfully draft acommon project that would not be the sum of university departments’ respectiveprojects:

When I arrived there were no indicators [to universities]. We tried once ortwice, but fairly quickly we rationalized, saying it wasn’t worth it. We’vebeen criticized for not checking that funds were in fact used for this or thatprojected action. But frankly, we didn’t care whether only 20,000 of the 50,000 [francs] we allocated were used for this or that action. This may seema shocking thing to say, but really, the contract didn’t matter much. Whatwas uppermost—and the necessary condition for getting started—wasestablishing a relationship of trust between the ministry and theuniversities. (DPDU)

There are thus several levels for apprehending the contract policy. It can be seenas a set of boxes that fit into rather than exclude each other, something like aRussian “matrioshka” doll. In its narrowest sense, it was a document thatformalized the results of a negotiation between the central administration and anindividual university. From a slightly broader perspective, it was an instrumentfor allocating supplementary funding to correct the mechanical effects of criteria-based allocation and rectify budgetary equilibrium among the variousuniversities. But it was also a means of pushing the universities to engage inmedium-term strategic thinking and introduce more foresight into universitysteering. Lastly, it was a driving force for strengthening the collective aspect ofuniversities, moving them to use the degree of autonomy they had, andstrengthening their identity.

The DPDU team that developed around Armand Frémont thus transformedwhat was a procedure, a formal arrangement, into principles for action and, muchmore broadly, a high ambition for universities. The doctrine ultimately“overflowed” contract policy. Rather than just a philosophy for the action of


establishing ministry-university contracts, it became the vector of a newrepresentation of universities, the idea that they should become self-developingactors, not only through the procedure of contract preparation but over the fouryears between contract signings. The extremely broad scope of the doctrine maybe perceived in the DPDU’s extended activities; it began to propose “services” touniversities that were no longer narrowly focused on contracts but on dailymanagement, services that would help universities develop technical skills andencourage them to invest in matters they usually considered beyond theircompetence.50

Such actions called into question prevailing representations not only ofuniversities but also of the overseeing ministry’s role. Rather than a means oftransmitting the ministry’s “good word” they were focused on existingexperiments being conducted by universities and presented by them in seminars.The ministry created these occasions for exchange and gave them the namemutualisation a word referring to the profitable sharing of useful experience. Itdid not dictate norms or solutions.

In sum, contract policy implementation and the work of defining, formalizing,and legitimating that implementation gave rise to a new system of reference foraction (Jobert and Muller 1987) that carried within it a new idea of the ministry’srole: more oriented toward negotiation and recognition of local norms, norms tobe made consistent with each other rather than brought to conform to an existingnational standard. The new system of reference also involved a new concept ofthe place and role of universities. Policies were to be defined within individualinstitutions; it was at this level that they were to be integrated and synthesized;they were no longer to be limited to education and research but also to pertain tobudgets, personnel management, university buildings and grounds, and so forth.In other words, it was at the level of the individual institutions that certain goalswould now be chosen over others and that the fit between ends and means wouldbe ensured.

The contract policy thus acquired a new dimension and weight. It was nolonger merely a procedure negotiated between center and periphery; it now borea new representation of balance between them, a shift from “national” to “local,”a transfer of synthesizing and integration capability from ministry to universities.Indeed, it attenuated the very notions of center and periphery, since what itbrought to the fore were negotiated relations between the ministry and actorswith recognized autonomy.51

After 1991: Adjustments within the Overseeing MinistryCombined with Dissemination and Extension of the

“Doctrine”

More than ten years later, university-level logic is still present within theministry and the understanding and approach produced by the doctrine arealive and well, and shared by increasing numbers of actors. To return to the story,


however, the DPDU’s golden age started coming to a end in 1992, and thedepartment itself disappeared in 1993. The “disciplines” took advantage of thissituation to regain lost ground, but they have not been able to dislodge universitylogic.

The DPDU began to weaken in November 1991, when DESUP and DPDUdirectors took their leave and central department tasks were redefined. DanielBloch replaced Frank Métras at the head of the DESUP; Armand Frémont wasreplaced by René Peylet at the head of the DPDU. Changes at the top providedthe occasion to redistribute official powers and responsibilities. The DESUPonce again became responsible for certain budgets and could once again insist on“pedagogical” choices that were not provided for in the contracts. Many of thebattles took place around the Instituts Universitaires Professionalisés or IUPs,three-year, selective-admission programs aimed directly at the job market thattook students after one year of post-bac study. This time the DPDU could not getthe cabinet to arbitrate in its favor:

One thing that shocked us was the IUPs and IUP funding. Without askingus our opinion, [the DESUP] created a special IUP funding window. Boom.There was one at [X]—not easy to set up, problems with the localChamber of Commerce and Industry. But one day they looked down andthere was manna at their feet, just like that! It distorted everything Thatwas really a hard period. (university adviser)

The DESUP could once again stand up to the DPDU, make decisions withoutgetting approval from the rival department, make itself attractive to theuniversities through such “service windows.” Moreover, its new director becamethe spokesman for an academic policy that, while it did not have the scope of theDPDU doctrine, was in any case a counterweight to it. The subordination ofaccreditation to contracts began to diminish in late 1991.

This continued during a new period of political cohabitation, 1993 to 1995,this time between Socialist president Mitterrrand and his Gaullist prime ministerEdouard Balladur. The DPDU was abolished and replaced with a service foruniversities with reduced powers and responsibilities, part of the new DirectionGénérale des Enseignements Supérieurs or DGES. The disciplines beganregaining broad swaths of lost ground. University department directors onceagain had access to the ministry (which had been reserved to universitypresidents after 1989 as a way of showing that priority was given to thoseinstitutions), and instead of a single ministry adviser for each university, severaladvisers were now assigned—to represent the different disciplinary sensibilities.

Adjustments between services in charge of contracts and services in charge ofaccreditation were not the only changes. The contract policy itself had fallen onhard times. Starting in 1991, the economic context changed, the crisis deepenedsignificantly, and ministry budgets became less favorable to universities than inthe preceding years. This undermined the contract policy. University presidents


began to express concern about whether the state was going to fulfill itscommitments. The situation worsened after the 1993 legislative elections, as thebudgetary belt-tightening announced by the Balladur government and thedramatic slowdown in budget growth rate for higher education intensified fearsthat the ministry’s commitments would indeed be revised downward. Confidencein contracts was shaken, as could readily be sensed in surveys conducted invarious universities in 1994 (Lipiansky and Musselin 1995). The prospect ofbudget-cutting was bitter. And then it happened: under pressure from the financeministry, it was decided that contracts would no longer include four-yearcommitments on posts. Now only 5 percent of the operating budget could benegotiated, making the policy much less attractive for universities.

Lastly, within the ministry, the contract policy lost a part of its essence.Qualitative goals became secondary, whereas the “management tool” feature ofcontracts was reinforced. The doctrine did not evolve in this period. After 1993,contracts no longer enjoyed the strong position of proposals to the ministry thatthey had had before. This led to a feeling, commonly expressed in 1994, that thesecond generation of contracts were more a standard administrative procedure;that contracts had become more a tool for budget negotiation than a means ofpromoting a collective university dynamic. The more standardized nature ofministry-to-university documents was cited.

It would be a mistake to conclude from this, however, that the contract policyhad undergone the same fate as the three experiments described above. It did loseground, but it did not disappear. It was no longer central, but it was notmarginalized; it evolved instead of going off track. That is, while it did notprevent the accreditation procedure from making a place for itself again withinthe ministry, it was not absorbed by that procedure. Disciplinary logic anduniversity institution logic now had to coexist, and this was a real change fromthe pre-1988 situation.

In fact, the scope of contracts has increased. Now up to 15 percent ofoperating budget is open to negotiation, and four-year research and universitycontracts are no longer managed separately but negotiated together in a singlecontract—this has been the case since the mid-1990s. Regularly, the variousaspects of life in a university—teaching approaches and methods, research,management, running the institution—are worked out in a set of simultaneousnegotiations. Contract preparation is of course still based on discipline-focusedevaluations for accrediting this or that course of study or research project, butthose evaluations are combined with other demands that take into accountoverall consistency within the university in question. The fact that this policy hasbeen maintained in one form or another for fifteen years, through many ups anddowns, and a recent move to relaunch a strong version of it,52 attest to theinstitutionalization of the practice.

But not only has this setup, at first glance innocuous, unspectacular, withnothing in it to attract media attention, become implanted in the ministry; it has alsofueled a profound change in the French university system and dealt a decisive


blow to faculty-dominant conceptions. The contract policy did not, of course,entirely supplant those ideas; we therefore cannot speak of a revolution. But thechange is undeniable. At the end of the 1990s the overseeing ministry is not theantithesis of what it was in 1988, but it is not the same ministry. Discourse andrepresentations, which until that time had remained outside centraladministration doors, have increased in legitimacy and been incorporated, even ifcurrent steering modes reflect the fact that the balance is forever renegotiatedbetween actions based on disciplinary criteria and actions that take account ofmore strictly institutional needs and demands. The story and history of thecontract policy are thus one of an internal struggle. Held in check for more thanthree years, from 1988 through most of 1991, disciplinary logic did regainground afterward, but it has never recovered its former monopoly position.

In the struggle between the “disciplines” and “university institutions” twoconceptions are opposed. One, disciplinary and synoptic, aims to guarantee theprimacy of national degrees throughout the land and maintain them as the basisfor allocating funds to universities; the other is more sensitive to universityspecificities and promotes a kind of management that is not as dependent onnational norms while tying funding distribution less directly to state degrees. Oneremains loyal to the principles of uniformity and equality; the other recognizesdiversity and accepts differences.53 Moreover, the trend toward recognition ofthe “university” level is indissociable from the shake-up of the centralized model.The contract policy benefited from that shake-up. Introduced during the secondwave of higher education massification, it readily appeared an alternativeinstrument, better able to register and respond to the changes under way. Andcontracting in turn worked to undermine the centralized, standardizing model, bypushing universities to put forward their specificities, develop their own policies,and define original four-year projects. Universities did not have extensivemaneuvering room; they had to fit themselves into the general policy frameworkdefined and legitimized by the ministry. But state steering too evolved, movingfrom a bureaucratic, rule-fixated regulation mode based on national norms andrules to a goal-based regulation mode, where the ministry sets primary goals thatdetermine general directions and principles but leaves it up to universities todetermine secondary goals and establish priorities among them. Universityheterogeneity has been recognized, and is even appreciated, despite the fact thatthe overseeing ministry also works to limit the spectrum of that heterogeneity bysetting endpoints to it.

This development was possible because the idea ripened within the DPDUthat universities should become more important actors, that it was at universitylevel that coherent policies and particularizing strategies should be defined andtranslated into action. This idea became embedded in that ministry department,but it also spread beyond it, which explains why it did not fade out with theelimination of the DPDU. In fact, as the idea was relayed by other groups, itoverflowed the contract policy and came to cover the whole set of initiativesreferred to by the term “university modernization.” The Délégation à la


Modernisation et à la Déconcentration became one of the most active vectors forspreading the conception within the ministry during the difficult period of themid-1990s. Contracts began regaining firmer footing in 1997. But approachesvery close to the DPDU’s were also supported and spread outside the ministry—in the GIGUE, for example (see chap. 4). Created by former members of theDPDU team (among them Josette Soulas and Alain Abecassis54), the GIGUE’spurpose was to get universities throughout France to start using computermanagement programs, but it functioned according to logic similar to theDPDU’s: the GIGUE simultaneously conceived its computer systems as atechnical instrument and a means of facilitating bigger, more ambitious changeswithin universities.55

Over the same period, and starting with Bernard Dizambourg’s election to atwo-year term as first vice-president in 1993,56 the Conference des Présidentsd’Université (CPU) became a support group for the new system of reference.Forging ahead on the path his predecessors had laid out, Dizambourg managed toget the CPU to switch from a “reactive” to a more “proactive” role and to makeit a relevant interlocutor for the ministry, one more concerned to argue in favorof university proposals. The CPU also projected an image of the universitypresident as more willing to play an attacking position, more a “director” than aprimus inter pares. This transformation of the CPU’s role (expanded ministrylobbying tasks, increased activities in favor of individual universities) explains inpart why the new Agence de Modernisation des Universités was attached to theCPU.57 The creation of this agency, which in turn expanded the GIGUE’s tasks,was fully in line with the doctrine that had developed out of the contract policy:the idea behind the agency was dear to and energetically defended by formermembers of the DPDU, and its tasks strengthened universities. The agency wasdesigned to offer services to universities that would enable them to develop self-management capabilities and to develop and implement university policies.Moreover, its actions were perfectly consistent with centerperiphery relations asthey had been redefined by contract policy implementation. Its job was to facilitatethe emergence of norms based on practices developed by the universities; that is,to get university initiatives known—to “mutualize” them, agency memberswould say—rather than impose norms and practices. The agency’s vocation wasthus consistent with the “doctrine” that had developed out of contracting, whileintensifying promotion of university education based on stronger, moreautonomous universities.

The examples just cited show that the elimination of the DPDU did not preventdissemination of the general understanding, ideas, and approaches the DPDU hadsupported. Those ideas, and approaches bounced back—in many forms, in otherplaces. In the way the contract policy was developed, but above all in its impact,it was therefore very different from the three experiments that preceded it.Whereas before 1989, when the ministry-university contract policy was launched,there was no trace of a firmly constituted system of reference or group ofdisseminating mediators, after 1993 we can, on the contrary, identify new


conceptions that took on consistency within the ministry and would bedisseminated beyond it. We can also identify the actors who propelled thoseconceptions and who, after the DPDU was abolished and they themselves hadleft the ministry, continued to bear, disseminate and transform them into otherforms of action. This policy approach was able to spread and expand not onlybecause it modified the overseeing ministry’s steering modes but because it cameto be disseminated well beyond the ministerial framework, mobilizing the centraladministration and coming to pervade the universities themselves—as we shallnow see.


6French Universities Emerge

Not only has the contract policy modified ministry steering modes but it has alsoinitiated and fueled a new dynamic within universities, whereby each nowdevelops its own policy, defines its own project, with the institution’s actorscollectively determining its particular directions and priorities. However,introducing the “university” component into ministry steering modes did notmechanically strengthen French university governance. The success andlongevity of the contract policy are also due to universities’ reactiveness, theirreadiness to seize the opportunity offered them.1 Ten years later, the effects areclearly visible.

A study conducted in 1998 in four universities (interview excerpts marked“University governance survey”2), and a study done three years earlier oncontract preparation and negotiation in three other universities (excerpts marked“Contractualization evaluation survey”3), produced convergent results showingtwo clear, related trends: rationalization and professionalization of universitymanagement on the one hand, stronger governance modes on the other.

The results indicate only overall trends, of course. But they are the fruit ofdetailed studies conducted in several universities, and thus have a more solid,sound empirical basis than most published statements, opinions, and generalstances on French universities.4 shall not discuss observable variations amonguniversities here. Such differences reflect the increased, complex heterogeneitythat characterizes university operating and governance modes, heterogeneity thatcannot be explained by traditional dependent variables such as size, geographiclocation, disciplines present, teacher-student ratio, and so forth. But beyond thisdiversity we do find convergent trends for the different universities studied in thetwo surveys mentioned above, and again in studies I have been co-conducting onacademic hiring in ten universities.5 What characterizes the organizationaldevelopment process in which French universities (most of them) are currentlyengaged?

Universities Take up the Work of Self-management

In an early 1960s work, Gusdorf wrote:

The university is a luxury, surely one of the most legitimate of all forms ofluxury…. [It] has no particular use or purpose, but is there instead to serveits own purposes, and however mediocre may be the persons who make itfunction, it calls man back to the order of man. (Gusdorf 1964, 83)

Those words might set some people dreaming—those who like to imagine alargely mythical time when the university was accountable to no one. Thecontemporary reality of universities is quite different. With the development ofmass university education, universities became active in training skilled workersfor the economic sector, and, as actors, universities are less and less in a positionto be indifferent to their “products” or the needs of society. It may be deemedunfair or illegitimate to demand that universities be accountable for what theydo, but it cannot be denied that the pressure on them to be so has increased, anduniversity academics and administrators have not remained indifferent tocriticism. On this point, there is a striking difference between the early 1980s andtoday. French universities are increasingly asking themselves such questions as“What do we produce?” and “What are we supposed to do and how?”

Specifically, universities are beginning to move into two areas that used to beministry responsibilities. The first of these is production of data and indicators.Universities have always had to provide such information, but the main purposeup until now was to inform the central administration, rather than generateconsistent data and increase university self-knowledge.6 Second, universitieshave been engaging in in-house thinking about how best to use their financialresources, whereas that question used to be put in terms of external book-checking, either by the education ministry, a representative of the financeministry (accountant), or another state oversight service (the revenue court[French equivalent of U.S. General Accounting Office] or the IGAEN[Inspection Générale de l’Administration de l’Education Nationale]).

External pressure on universities to be more accountable does not in itselfexplain their efforts over the last decade to produce reliable information onthemselves. Here contractualization has played a key role. In preparing their firstcontracts, most universities discovered that they lacked the rudimentary dataneeded to conduct the analyse de l’existant on which the next stage, that is,setting directions and priorities, depends. They had no clear, immediatelyavailable answers to apparently simple questions such as exact surface area, hownonacademic staff were distributed among university components (academicdepartments, shared facilities), administrative and course enrollments, and soforth. Contract preparation thus gave rise to a long labor of collecting andaggregating information:

We hadn’t inventoried our material patrimony for ages. It took a year and ahalf to do so, and since then we’ve put labels on everything. That’simportant. As the accountant explained, it enables us to calculate what

FRENCH UNIVERSITIES EMERGE • 81

obsolete equipment needs to be replaced (a UFR director, Contractevaluation survey).

As they became aware of how little information they had on themselves, the lackof data on which to base either retrospective evaluations or future projections,universities moved to develop internal indicators, introduce managementoversight methods, develop data bases (in part through student surveysconducted by campus research centers called Observatoires de la Vie étudiante),etc. In some cases, they hired project leaders to collect information and defineindicators.

This exercise also pointed up the difficulty of aggregating and comparingexisting data. Everyone had defined their own categories and used their owncalculation instruments, thus creating a certain opacity—either deliberately orsimply through practice diversity. Serious efforts were made to rationalize andharmonize procedures and technical instruments. This was in large part whatmotivated universities to acquire the computer management programs developedand sold by the GIGUE and later by the Agence de Modernisation (now Agencede Mutualisation), particularly Nabuco, for accounting and budget management,and Apogée, for student management.

These actions had three consequences. The first was increased harmony forpractices and instruments. Departments and research laboratories often had theirown methods for monitoring funding and expenses; Nabuco was designed toreplace them, and generate more numerous and precise data more quickly. Thisprogram could also aggregate data of various sorts and produce standardized,consolidated, comparable information.

Second, all were obliged to make their practices more transparent. Forexample, for Apogée to generate a model for calculating student grades, themodalities for testing student knowledge had to be reviewed clearly and defined.This new computer program thus required formalizing information that up untilthen had been informal and variable. The Nabuco program strictly follows publicaccounting rules, and certain operations cannot be registered by it unless a wholeseries of information has been entered. The program can be run only if everyonefollows the same rules, a constraint that precludes the type of in-grouparrangements used before. Lastly, requiring all university components to followthe same calculation rules limits the discrepancies caused by use of diversecalculation methods—methods that can be defined to show, or hide, whatever thecalculator wants.

As may be expected, not everyone in universities supports harmonization andgreater transparency. How these initiatives are received depends on whetheractors expect them to have positive or negative effects for them (Gueissaz 1999).The Apogée program may stand as an example here: administrators andacademics sharply differed in their reaction to it. Administrators in theuniversities we observed spoke very favorably of the program, activelyparticipated in getting it running, and saw it as a means of facilitating their work


and improving their relations with students. Teachers, on the other hand, spokecritically of it, for not taking into account the specificities of each disciplinaryspecialization, for fixing and rigidifying procedures,7 thereby increasing teacherworkloads,8 and for making teacher surveillance possible (by keeping track ofwhether teaching hour requirements were being met). Such resistance is notsurprising. In universities as in other organizations, collecting data andintroducing computer instruments requires people to reach agreement on aminimum number of common practices and surrender a degree of opacity.Actors perceive these demands as threatening, and they develop various types ofopposition in response: keeping parallel books, either by hand or with a separatecomputer program; incompletely filling out information tables;9 underusingcomputer programs.10 Still, university actors have come to accept establishingcommon practices and using identical calculation rules and similar calculationinstruments. This technical and “cultural” change is extremely important becauseit obliges actors to think of themselves as constituting a larger whole. The newways required by computerization will always encounter and have to overcomeresistance, but they have helped and are helping to improve university “self-knowledge” and keep track of budgets, funding and costs, and they have enableduniversities to produce information that up until now was simply not available.On balance, respondents deem that the introduction and generalization ofcomputerization has been useful.

The third consequence of this change involves how the new data is used. It isfar too early to measure the power of these efforts to change in-house attitudesand behaviors. But clearly they have had an impact on criteria for distributingfinancial resources within universities. The comprehensive review of existingdata brought to light differences among UFRs, and this has changed the argumentson the basis of which university policy is determined (Merrien and Musselin1999). Making discrepancies within a single university visible, translating theminto hard figures, has in many cases affected how priorities are defined incontract preparation. Moreover, explicit use is made of this information in laterdecisions:

Contract policy required a comprehensive review of many things andenabled us to gain knowledge of our components in an unbiased way. Wenow know that there are components with deficits: law, and us. So forevery academic post created, it’s either law or us. And the contractrequired us to do this, and publish it. (a UFR director, Contractualizationevaluation survey, 1994)

These actions go hand in hand with efforts to use resources “better.” Again,before contracts, university were preoccupied only with external verification offunding use. Verification was the exclusive business of the central administration,which allocated budget funding and checked its use afterward. But for someyears now, universities have taken over this work in their own ways. Questions


may now be asked, studies done, and actions taken on subjects that used to beconsidered taboo. It is no longer sacrilege to say that universities might be bettermanaged, or to acknowledge that resources have not always been used in thebest possible way. A number of university actors with responsibilities at variouslevels have come to believe it is up to them to intervene on such issues, not theministry.

On this point, academics’ and administrators’ discourses have changedconsiderably. Academics have moved away from the complacent or resignedattitude they adopted in the early 1980s, when they claimed that in cases of abuseno one intervened. In the four universities studied in 1998, UFR directors werechecking that their teachers met teaching hour requirements, and no one found thisscandalous or intolerable. Moreover, measures for controlling and keeping trackof overtime teaching hours were being applied in all four universities. The resultsdo not always meet expectations, but progress has been made. Above all, theideas that overtime hours should be kept track of, that funding requests forovertime hours must be backed up with demonstrations of need, and thatexceeding the limited number of hours must be justified are now nearlyunanimously accepted. These conclusions confirm observations made in the1994 survey on contract negotiation in three universities:

The contract has brought about considerable changes in managing theuniversity and its components. Having a single budget for the wholeinstitution forces us to pay close attention to overtime. This amounts to asmall cultural revolution. It’s a completely different way of thinking aboutbudget funding and running the institution. (a vice president,Contractualization evaluation survey, 1994)

Broadly speaking, people in universities have become more sensitive to costs andmore aware of possibilities for meeting new spending needs. University decision-making bodies now often take this aspect into account when examining newstudy program accreditation requests. The intrinsic quality of a project is nolonger enough to win it CEVU approval [Conseil des Etudes et de la VieUniversitaire*; Council for Studies and University Life]. Project proposers mustalso show, in advance, that the necessary funds are already available, that theproject requires no increased funding or that complementary funding has beenfound, and so forth.

The most interesting aspect of this development is that university personnelhave taken on university management problems; they no longer leave thementirely up to the ministry. Some UFR directors call in teachers who have notfulfilled their workloads or a department member who has exceeded thedepartment’s allotted budget. Likewise, cost has become a decision-makingcriterion in the CEVU. A process of internalizing constraints and oversight isunder way, whereas before these concerns and function were pushed “outside”(to the ministry, the university administration, etc.)


Lastly, not only do such rationalization efforts lead to “healthier”management, that is, concern to make the best possible use of resources; theyalso work to strengthen the university level. Collecting data, computerizing,reflecting on how best or better to distribute and use funding is harmonizingbehaviors: Norms are emerging out of university practices. The variousresistances developed in response to rationalization operations are proof of this:Resisters tend to argue in terms that underscore and valorize the specificity of thediscipline, field, or UFR in question, expressing regret that such specificity isbeing neglected in favor of practices common to the institution as a whole.

Stronger Self-governing Capabilities

It is important not to overestimate the practical impact of this new preoccupationwith management or conclude that universities have become shining examples ofgood public enterprise management. Still, the contrast between how things usedto be done—or not done—and how they are done now is enough in itself tojustify my optimistic view. The same is true of French university government.The distance traveled from the situation I described for universities in the 1980sto their situation today deserves to be underscored, and sharp contrasts onspecific points noted.

The first of these involves the university dynamic created by contract policy:Components of the same university think of themselves as constituting a wholeand decide together on directions and priorities for the following four years.Contracts have thus encouraged and legitimized the development of collectiveprojects, or rather they have catalyzed this development, causing universityactors to mobilize the potential for autonomy latent in each institution.11

The collective dynamic is strengthened by the fact that individual projects areofficially registered in the contracts. While such projects represent circumscribedinitiatives, in the sense that they can be realized only by the small group of actorswho conceive them, the fact that they are registered in the contract drawn up forthe university as a whole, itself a collective document, has changed their status.They are explicitly recognized as priorities for the institution; they are“university projects,” and actors involved in them can refer to them as such.Moreover, most contracts include transversal goals involving severalcomponents. Examples are improving student reception, reducing failure or drop-out levels among first-cycle students, and building a student center. Devising andworking to implement projects common to the university as a whole tends toestablish strong ties among parts, accentuating their cohesion.

Furthermore, preparing contracts has enabled universities to strengthen theirrespective identities, display their differences, and put forward their specificity.12

It is not insignificant that several universities have departed recently from theanonymity of the standard formula “city name+number,” adopting instead thename of a renowned scientist or scholar, or a name that underscores their regional


location. More and more universities are using a logo to designate and identifythe institution. These are visible symbols of a new reality.

The emergence of the collective dimension is also visible in the almostparadoxical transformation of the role of university councils. The Loi Savaryrequired the establishment of an additional university council, the Conseil desEtudes et de la Vie Universitaire—and was promptly criticized on the groundsthat this new body, and the size of universities councils overall, would makecouncil work even more inefficient than it already was. This did not happen.More than ten years after complete application of the law, we observe insteadthat the councils are functioning more professionally, and that their decision-making capability has increased. The most striking example of this change is theannual exercise of ranking post creation requests in order of priority. It will berecalled that in the 1980s, universities transmitted lists to the ministry withoutranking their needs. Now requests are ranked, and the exercise is taken quiteseriously, especially since the ministry usually follows university preferences.Some object that the rankings are timid, don’t change disciplinary balancessignificantly, that they are, in sum, a dissimulated, more subtle way of notmaking decisions, involving mere turn-taking and reproduction of pastdisciplinary balances. Still, our surveys on academic hiring suggest these claimsare not accurate. First, all respondents emphasized the fact that post creationrequests must now be legitimized by demonstrating need. The “each in turn” rulecannot be relied on to get a strong ranking. Respondents also underlined the“political” nature of the ranking process—the fact that negotiations involvemanaging conflictual, contradictory interests—and the importance of havinggood spokespersons on the university councils. No one thinks the game is won inadvance, or that the same groups always get more, or that all they have to do is waittheir turn. The game they describe is much more open. At the outset, all is yet tobe won or lost; to win, players must show much greater tactical skill; and whilehaving won in the past is a strong point, it is not a guarantee of success.

University bodies’ newfound capacity for making decisions on posts is veryreal, and members of disciplinary commissions such as those on CNU sectionsinterviewed in 1996 all note that the 1990s were marked by a strengthening ofthe universities’ role in these matters, even by increased intervention fromuniversity councils (and presidential teams). Councils do not hesitate to differwith UFRs on UFR-indicated priorities, and several components have had theexperience of having their wishes modified, with posts they put at the top beingplaced below those they listed last. The order of post requests on the list sent tothe ministry is thus more the choice of universities than the UFRs.

This highly sensitive issue is not the only evidence of the change. We also seestronger involvement of university governments in decisions on study programprojects sent on to the ministry (Simmonet 1999) and funding distribution. Hereagain, university bodies function less anomically than a decade ago, and thecouncils’ decision-making capabilities, their capacity to choose, reject, andrequest changes, is much greater than before.


Meanwhile, university councils have become professionalized. In theuniversities studied, decision making in plenary sessions of the Conseild’Administration*, the Conseil Scientifique*, and the Conseil des Etudes et de laVie Universitaire is always prepared for in advance by small work groups and/orpreliminary negotiations, and in the vast majority of cases, projects that made itto plenary sessions had been fully prepared beforehand and could be worked ondirectly.

Predecision activity involves delegating the work of expert evaluation(Urfalino and Vilkas 1995) to limited groups of persons whose evaluationgenerally pertains more to form than content. Select committees in charge ofaccreditation preliminaries do not debate the scientific or pedagogical value of aproject, trusting the department or UFR council to have ensured that beforepassing it on to them. What they are interested in is whether projects conform tonational maquettes, projected teaching hours and how to pay for them, and thematerial requirements of the new degree program (namely, physical premises andequipment):

When we examine proposals for creating new degree programs, we takeinto account financial means, and fairly rigid constraints like teachinghours. (professor and elected CEVU member, Governance survey of fouruniversities, 1998)

But the preliminary process also involves, and is sometimes exclusively basedon, a series of consultations, discussions, and negotiations, that occur either atthe very beginning of the process, when project initiators are looking to knowwhether their request has a chance of being well received and how to present itso it will be, or before the project is examined in plenary session, to anticipateand iron out problems.

The preparation group, like the persons who lead the consulting process, neednot be elected members of the relevant body. In the universities studied, selectcommittees doing preliminary work for Conseil d’Administration decisionmaking rarely contain members of that council because this job is generally leftto the responsibility of the university executive office. When university councilsinvolve this kind of transfer from deliberative bodies to the executive, it maybring about a feeling of dispossession. Members of bodies not activelyparticipating in the preliminary work often feel doubly dispossessed: they are noton the select committee, and they feel forced to vote in favor of what the selectcommittee proposes because they haven’t had a chance to propose an alternative.Delegating expert evaluation to a preliminary work group, “entrusting” that workto them, can thus also amount to delegating judgment.13

Must we conclude from this that the new decision-making capacity ofuniversity bodies in fact hides the fact that they have been weakened, shunted offto the sidelines? I do not believe so. First, not all respondents felt dispossessed.This point greatly depends on the implicit content of the mandate agreed with


select committee members. When criteria for preparing dossiers are clear, ex plicit,known in advance and “approved” by plenary committee members,14 members’commitment and sense of participation is not adversely affected, even for thosewho acknowledge that they follow select committee recommendations to theletter. They maintain and may even mobilize their judgment capacity by means ofthe plenary session, where they check that the select committee has followed itsmandate and the terms on which expert evaluation rights were delegated to it.Council members question the select committee reporter, request complementaryinformation from the person submitting the project, and the like. The plenarysession thus works to ensure that the preliminary work group has followed therules of the game.

In cases where there is a feeling of dispossession, elected university councilmembers are not completely passive. If what the select committee proposes seemsentirely unacceptable, they react with a blocking vote, which can lead in turn toreviewing select committee composition or procedure.15

Behind this relation between university councils and preliminary work groupsit is of course the functioning of university democracy and democracy’s differentfaces that are at issue. I have deliberately avoided giving details of themechanisms reviewed above, for though greater decision-making capability,professionalization of university council work, and the guarantor role played byplenary sessions are common to all universities studied, they operate verydifferently from one university to another (in terms of select committeecomposition, delegation of expert evaluation versus consultation, electedmembers’ sense of dispossession versus sense of commitment, and so forth).Many arrangements are possible, ranging from presidential team’s tightmanagement of university councils, which are in turn confined to rubber-stamping executive office directional choices, to council members doing thepreliminary work themselves, defining the rules, and being the primary locus ofchoice formulation and validation. But over and beyond the variety of localarrangements, the conclusion remains the same: Avoidance of decision making isno longer university councils’ preferred option.

A further commonly acknowledged change observed within Frenchuniversities has to do with the exercise of leadership, above all through the role ofpresident. First, the content of the office has changed: It has become distinctlymore professional. A president can no longer be merely an enlightened amateurwho knows how to reconcile diverse internal interests. As certain responsibilityareas have been “deconcentrated” out of the ministry into the universities, thepresident’s tasks have become vaster and more diverse—a trend that should getstronger if patrimony and post management become the work of universities. Thejob has also expanded because major new tasks have developed within theuniversity: contract preparation, developing relations with local communities,and so forth. A president is now expected to have more and different skills. It isnot enough to be a good manager (or to have a team that can ensure this aspect


of the office). President and team must now know how to realize projects, andelicit, design, and implement policies.16

Indeed, another major government change to occur over the past decade is thestrengthening of the presidential office. Contract policy was critical in thischange: The president became the favored interlocutor of the ministry andlegitimate representative of his/her university. Clearly, current universitypresidents no longer consider themselves mere primus inter pares, recipients andproponents of requests originating in the UFRs. They now consider it legitimateto have their own projects, and to make choices, even nonconsensual ones—insum, to be interventionist. President-initiated policies and actions in theuniversities studied confirm that this understanding goes beyond declarationsmade in speeches. Presidents take measures that strengthen the “university” leveland impose rules on components that apply to all. One president negotiated away of harmonizing nonacademic staff work-hour and paid vacation timepractices. Another, concerned to allocate academic positions more effectively,required from the UFRs that every academic post appointment be subject toapproval from the president”s office. In other universities this same rule appliesto all vacant IATOS [Ingénieurs, Administratifs, Techniciens, et Ouvriers deService; i.e, nonacademic] posts. Yet another president has insisted on groupingindividual research laboratories together into larger, coherent institutes, and thereare other examples. In most cases these are not disconnected measures, butintegral parts of a broader policy vision—a research policy approach, apersonnel management or budget policy. It is clear that executives are new atformulating such measures, and implementing them is not without itsdifficulties. They don’t always succeed, and I could cite cases of strongresistance. But once again, a table of successes and failures is less to the pointthan the simple observation that there are now actions to be noted on such a table.University presidents have become significantly involved in making policy fortheir institutions.

In fact, it is more accurate to speak of “presidents’ teams,” whileacknowledging that the meaning of that term can vary; it refers to at least thepresident and vice-president, and it can include administrators, UFR directors,and project leaders. The team notion, denoting a more collective governingmode, where responsibilities are taken on by and shared out in a group, is arecent one in French universities.

The trend toward stronger university leadership does not go beyond thepresident’s team. There has been no like transformation of the role and place ofUFR directors, the vast majority of whom remain first and foremostrepresentatives of their components rather than “head managers” or, to use aword with less entrepreneurial connotations, steerers. Many accept to surveyteaching hours more closely, but often express their unease at having to intervenewith a teacher who hasn’t taught the required number of hours or decide how toproceed when the overtime hours budget has been exceeded. Most say they haveno role to play or maneuvering room with regard to research activities within


their component. In sum, the UFR director’s function is experienced as a delicate,time-consuming, and not particularly status-enhancing exercise. No one covets itor really seeks election to the job.

While UFR directors adopt rather passive behavior within their component(merely accepting their situation and doing what is expected of them by theirelectors), they often express the feeling that they cannot really participate inuniversity government and criticize the president’s team. There are even acts ofsymbolic rebellion: the term “dean” (doyen) has reappeared in UFRs in place ofthe statutory term directeur d’UFR, a fairly clear sign of resistance and strategyfor defending disciplinary territory against the emergence of a firmer universityechelon.

UFR directors often have a hard time finding a role for themselves in runningthe university. They are not members of decision-making bodies unless electedto them (not often the case); they can attend plenary sessions but have no say inwhat happens at them, especially since, in most cases, they are not on selectcommittees. Moreover, they rarely have a place in the president’s office. Indeed,two different types of meetings are held by the president’s office: weeklymeetings with office staff to expedite current business and monthly informativeand/or consultative meetings with UFR directors, where no decisions are made.

It would be wrong to suggest there is one, identifiable type of relation betweenuniversity president and UFR directors in French universities. Relations varyconsiderably, even from one UFR to another in the same university.17 It doesseem crystal clear, however, that there is a major discrepancy between presidentsand UFR directors, the former often more sensitive to the “managerial” aspects oftheir function, the latter still in favor of the primus inter pares idea within theircomponent while not feeling sufficiently included in university government.

University presidents’ leadership has thus grown stronger, while not much haschanged in the ways of UFR directors, who continue to run their componentswith a light hand, in some cases even timorously. This situation can be quiteconflictual, and reminds us that one of the difficulties of French universitygovernance is the coexistence within universities of two types of legitimacy: oneis, for lack of a better term, ‘hierarchical’ and emphasizes the “subordination/cooperation” ties among different elected officers (department heads, UFRdirectors, presidents); the other is “representative,” the idea being that decision-making bodies can and should make choices in the name of the wholecommunity. From this perspective it is clear that the increased decision-makingcapacity acquired by university councils has not made UFR directors’ work anyeasier, as it places them in the delicate position of having to manage relationsbetween university executive and legislative “branches.”

From the University Idea to the Emergence of Universities

If we compare most French universities today with the French universities Istudied in the 1980s, it is clear that two major changes have occurred. First, their


heterogeneity and complexity have increased. Their student populations arehighly diversified; they offer a much more diverse range of curricula thanbefore; they have imported pedagogical principles from the nonuniversity sectorwhile generally maintaining traditional study programs; and they have, each intheir own way, cultivated their local identities. Each university is thus moreinternally differentiated than fifteen years ago, and this of course accentuatesdiversification of the university sector as a whole. Second, over the same perioduniversities have gained institutional substance and weight. The development ofprojects of more collective character, university councils’ greater decision-making capability, and the strengthening of presidential leadership attest inconvergent fashion to the fact that in the last decade an intermediary level hasmade itself felt between the overseeing ministry and the academic corporation.18

As I have sought to show, the collective space of French universities has beenstrengthened in primarily two ways.

On the one hand, due to increased use of technology in universities there isincreased cohesion among the different parts of each institution. In the 1960s, thepresident of an American university joked that universities were composed ofindividuals linked to each other by the same central heating system. We can nowbring his world-famous remark up to date: academics in the same university arealso linked by the computer system, harmonization of procedures amongcomponents, and one and the same Internet site. This is the equivalent of whatDodier (1995) showed for business companies—the development of technicalnetworks and “technical solidarity.” The major difference is that in universities itdoesn’t lead to dilution of the organization, but rather the development of pointsof concentration, high-density loci where ties among individuals intersect andthose same individuals develop the institution-specific rules of the game.

On the other hand, universities’ greater cohesion has involved constructingminimal agreements on distribution modes, selection criteria, points to besubmitted for expert evaluation, and so forth, without which elected councilmembers and university executives could not make and legimate decisions.These agreements lead to arbitration among scholarly-scientific and pedagogy-related options; however, they are not based on scientific or pedagogicevaluation of requests. In other words, decision-making bodies are rarely placesfor applying “professional” norms, but rather for translating external constraintsinto “objective university norms.” When university councils require thataccreditation applications indicate what job opportunities a given degree programcan offer, or how to pay for new study programs, they are taking into accountwhat they perceive to be ministry expectations of them.

These two processes, which increase university cohesion, clearly call intoquestion traditional explanations for the weakness of French universities,explanations that often were accompanied with statements of the necessarycon ditions of French universities’ emergence. The nonexistence of Frenchuniversity institutions has generally been attributed to the absence of a sharedmodel, idea, or approach that would unify and integrate universities around the


same undertakings, principles, stabilized relations among the various types ofknowledge. In fact, universities have emerged at a time when it is particularlydifficult to identify any idea of the University. Is there a contemporaryequivalent to the scientistic ideal (or positivism) that spurred nineteenthcenturyrepublican reformers, or the more pragmatic approach of the Loi Faure, based onmultidisciplinarity and participation? The answer is no. On the contrary, thereseems to be great confusion about the University’s purposes.

In my analysis of the failure of Third Republic reforms, I showed that despitethe quality of debates and thinking developed by those reformers, having aUniversity idea was not a sufficient condition for the emergence of universities. Ican now add that it is not a necessary condition. Universities can develop, takeon substance, without any preexisting agreement on what idea of the Universityshould be realized. I would go further. Not only do the recent changes justpresented show that the emergence of universities as a phenomenon isindependent of the existence of any renewed idea of the University shared by theuniversity community and in harmony with an active project for the developmentof French society but also that any such idea is an illusion. All currentdevelopments conspire to make universities more complex and heterogeneous,and the dynamics of increasing disciplinary diversification and specialization areintensifying the diversity of the “university community.” The debate that AlainRenaut calls for at the end of his 1995 work, suggesting that a commission ofmajor figures should be organized, similar to the one called upon in 1987 toreflect on the French code de la nationalité; or the ARESER’s call for theconstitution of a “parliament of universities” (1997),19 seem to me as chimericalas they are unlikely to happen.20 Universities and the University are objects ofunending controversy. Among the things that make them so are the cohabitationin them of disciplines with extremely different practices and paradigms; themultiple purposes and tasks universities can pursue; the contradictorycomplementarities characterizing ties between teaching and research;universities’ complex relations with the state and society at large—to name a few.The University question is inherently riddled with contradictions, antagonisms,divergences. This is a fundamental characteristic of the university sector, onewhich sharply differentiates it from other sectors of activities, and which takes theform of multiple bodies, associations, and loci of representation that make theexpression of different opinions, approaches, and preferences possible.21

Given that there can be no single University idea, is the emergence ofuniversities with stronger institutional identities and governance, universities thatfunction more autonomously, going to produce several ideas of the University?Are universities going to be able to accomplish “local” syntheses, develop typesof integration that will enable them to overcome their heterogeneity, find anapproach for guiding their actions and development, give rise and shape to whatB.R.Clark (1972) called “organizational sagas”?

It is surely too early to answer this question. The transformations underway inFrench universities are long-term ones. This is, however, precisely the challenge


that has been thrown down to French universities, and for the first time in post-Revolutionary history, they now have the opportunity and the means to meet it.


III

From One University Configuration toAnother

The history of French universities since their refounding by Napoleon after theRevolution through the late twentieth century attests to remarkable stability, eventhough the last decade proves that that stability can be called into question. Themany successive reforms of the French university system from the creation of theImperial University until very recently did not actually change its fundamentalcharacteristics. Those characteristics are by now familiar: (1) the concomitantexistence of state and corporatist centers, with, on one hand the educationministry, whose steering modes are centralized, aimed at standardization ofuniversity education, and guided by criteria that give priority to disciplinarypreferences, and, on the other, the academic profession, organized into vertical,hierarchical, centralized disciplinary fields; (2) close relations between these twocenters, which led to joint management of the system as a whole; (3) institutionalweakness of universities, due to the perfect fit between organizational and“professional” structures; that is, the faculties and the disciplines, respectively.

The particular structure of French university education as just described ischaracterized by remarkable stability of internal operating modes in theoverseeing ministry, universities, and the profession; meanwhile, interactionamong these three poles is characterized by highly institutionalized policy logic.This means that French university history cannot be examined and analyzed interms of universities alone; attention must be paid to developments in ministryintervention modes, the university profession, and the kinds of relationsobtaining among them. The dependence of university institutions with regard tosuch exogenous mechanisms is precisely what Erhard Friedberg and I observedin comparative studies of contemporary French and German universities(Musselin 1987; Friedberg and Musselin 1989). Specifically, we concluded thatoperating modes, decision-making processes, and types of governance in auniversity cannot be explained solely by endogenous regulations, that is, by anunderstanding of the contingent “local order” (Friedberg 1993) produced byactors through their interactions. Two exogenous explanatory factors play acrucial role namely, state intervention modes and interactions between theuniversity and the academic profession.

Our synchronic comparisons of contemporary universities in differentcountries, together with the present longitudinal study of the French

system, clearly show that universities cannot be apprehended withoutunderstanding the more general framework within which they develop, that is,the interdependences that, in a given national territory, link universities to anoverseeing body and to the academic profession. Bringing to light such aframework, which I call a university configuration, is important preciselybecause such frameworks are highly stable, as is shown by the French case. Themany attempts to reform the French system over the past two centuries were allaimed at changing universities by strengthening them—and all failed, because,though each and every reform summoned universities to exist, thecontemporaneous ministry steering modes, ways of managing the universitycorporation, and joint relations between state and profession were all themselvescontradictory to the development of strong universities, and these modes andways remained unchanged.

The problem of how to bring to light stable university configurations and theireffects on the possibilities of change in system components requires elucidation,and this is the purpose of Part III. It is unusual to focus on interdependencesamong universities, academics, and oversight structures. As will be seen, moststudies of university systems have divided them into three heterogeneous,autonomous, and disconnected worlds. I would like to demonstrate, therefore,that thinking in terms of university configurations and making suchconfigurations an object of research in their own right will enable us to renewour theoretical and methodological approaches to university systems (chapter 7).

Once the notion of “university configuration” has been explored and itsanalytic properties defined, I look into what “university configuration” stabilityis due to, as well as what makes change in such configurations possible(chapter 8). I then draw a few conclusions on the basis of the changes that haverecently occurred in the French system.

95

7From Universities to University

Configurations

What is a “university configuration,” and what is to be gained by using anapproach in these terms? What questions can the concept help answer and whatjustifies its use as an analytic and methodological instrument? To answer thesequestions, I shall first present the three “worlds” that have been explored andconstructed, separately, in research on higher education, then try to understandhow they fit and function together.

Academics, Universities, and National Models

At the first level of analysis, we discover the working world of academics, ormore exactly, university researchers, since most studies concern researchers’rather than teachers’ activities.1 In the very numerous studies of this world, twoopposed conceptions dominate and clash: on the one hand that of Mertoniansociologists of science or those working in this tradition; on the other the “strongprogram in the sociology of science” and related approaches.2

The first conception is structured around fields or disciplines that themselvescorrespond to cognitive, epistemological, and social “territories” (Becher 1989);that is, what are understood at a given moment to be the disciplines or thespecialized fields composing the disciplines. Each of these may be associatedwith particular research practices, professional norms, relational networks, andeach has its own relation to knowledge. These fields, composed of research areas,are not fixed; their contours are continually being called into question throughthe dynamics of “invisible college” development (Crane 1972) and constantdifferentiation (B.R.Clark 1997b), which cause each field to divide up and formothers. At first the dominant idea was that a unified scientific community(Hagstrom 1965) transcended this fragmentation by means of a common ethos,whose function was to preserve the autonomy of science and protect it from thedanger of becoming “the handmaiden of theology or economy or state” (Merton1962b, 543).3

This founding conception, focused on a single community sharing the sameethos (Merton 1962a), was gradually amended to a representation of science thatemphasized the aggregation or juxtaposition of several communities (or “tribes”or “clusters”4) who were still all understood to share two essential

characteristics. First, they exist above and beyond institutionalboundaries. Sociologists working in this current did refer to the existence ofuniversities or research centers, but they believed these structures did not andshould not have any autonomy with regard to professional norms.5 Second, suchcommunities exist above and beyond territorial borders. Phenomena pertaining tothe nation were discussed only as examples of structures—social, political, oreconomic—that hinder the development of “pure” science.6 This first conceptionof the academic world was very close to the notion of a cellular body.

Over the 1970s, this conception was successfully combated by the “strongprogram,” as developed essentially by Barnes (1974) and Bloor (1976),7 and its“descendants…brothers, sisters, and close relatives,” to use Lynch’s expresssion(1993) that is, the relativist program, observation of laboratories at work, andethnomethodological studies of scientific work. These works called into questionthe idea that there was any community or communities that carried out thetwofold function of socialization and social control, and focused instead onknowledge production processes. The social construction of scientific factsbecame a special object of study, and observation of scientific work was used to“[demonstrate] unambiguously the social determination of all scientific content,however technical” (Lynch 1993, 91). Now scientists were seen to beinterpreting scientific facts. Karin Knorr-Cetina’s fine 1996 article, with itscomparative “ethnographie de l’empirie,” is a perfect illustration of thisapproach. It shows the profound differences between the experimental work ofhigh energy physicists on the one hand and molecular biologists on the other.The objects studied by the first group are signs:

[Particles] move in a world of objects that are separate from theenvironment, a world that has been entirely reconstructed from within adefined field by means of a technology of representation…. A detector isthe ultimate viewing instrument, a sort of microscope that furnishes thefirst level of these representations. The representations themselves bear allthe ambiguities that characterize worlds made up of signs. (1996, 313)

In molecular biology, by contrast, scientists are in close contact with theirobjects and have a completely different relation to theory, one which favors theuse of analogy and a “trial and error” strategy.

These “translator-interpreter” scientists were also described as networkconstructors (Callon 1989)—the representation of scientists’ and thereforeacademics’ world shifted from cellular to reticulate. Rather than closingthemselves away in ivory towers to protect themselves from society, researcherswere now seen to strive to enlist political, administrative, and economic actors insupport of their work, to look for allies that would enable them to mobilize andstabilize resources while disseminating the scientific facts they constructed, withthe aim of transforming them into so many uncontested statements.8 Despite themany points of contrast between these scientists “in action” (Latour 1989) and

FROM UNIVERSITIES TO UNIVERSITY CONFIGURATIONS • 97

Mertonian scientists, they have in common the fact that they ignore national,insti tutional, and even temporal boundaries.9 Sociotechnical networks get wovenand extend beyond all organizational or territorial constraints or limits.

If we now zoom backward from scientific work and the actors who perform itin “laboratory life” (Latour and Woolgar 1979), we discover a completelydifferent landscape. We see that our academics are parts of the organizationswithin which they practice their activities, namely, universities. Studies of thisintermediate level have generally apprehended it in terms of decision-makingand governance modes. We have moved from the world of the sciences to aworld of organization and management.

Works on university functioning began to be published in the United States inthe early 1960s.10 Up until the mid-1970s, the battle raged around four models(see Table 7.1), each one claiming to characterize the university decision-makingprocess. The first works (Goodman 1962; Millett 1962), which concluded thatuniversities followed a collegial model of decision making, gave rise tocompeting models developed by other researchers. Some emphasized thebureaucratic character of university functioning (Blau 1973) while othersaffirmed that decisions were the result of political processes (Baldridge 1971).Cohen, March, and Olsen (1972) rejected these competing claims, affirminginstead that universities were instances of organized anarchy and seats ofdecision making that followed what they called the “garbage can” model.

In the mid- 1970s, specialists of university organization abandoned the idea offinding a universal model, turning instead in two different directions. Someargued that universities could follow any and all of the four models, and theysought to qualify the university institutions they studied by means of thistypology, gradually refining and complexifying it.11 Others, keeping theirdistance from an approach in terms of individual institutions, focused ondecision-making processes themselves, showing that whether they were collegial,bureaucratic-rational, political, or anarchic depended primarily on the areaconsidered (funding, teaching, research, etc.). In this scheme, several modelscoexist within each university, depending on the question studied.12 Lastly, andmore recently, in an approach that tries to assess trends in university governancemodes over time and their dynamics, some authors (e.g., Braun and Merrien1999) have suggested a gradual change pattern in which the first stage ischaracterized by collegiality, the second by bureaucracy, and the next two,distinct from both the political and “garbage can” models, are the corporationand the enterprise.

Clearly, in organizational studies of universities (see Table 7.1) the university“world” is understood as a grouping of autonomous entities. Universities are ofcourse shown as part of an environment with which they interact, but theirdecision-making processes and governing modes are always described asendogenous mechanisms resulting from the structure of internal interaction andaccountable for by that structure. Morever, these mechanisms do not seem muchaffected by either the cellular or the reticulate character of the academic


Table 7.1 Four organizational models and how they were further developed

The collegial modelIn this model, as the name suggests, decision making is concentrated in the hands ofpeers (academics), but the term refers above all to the idea that shared values andnorms make consensual decision making possible (Goodman 1962; Millett 1962).General agreement on purposes, goals, and priorities is what makes it possible to reachspecific agreements, above and beyond the many diverse interests of discipline andfield, individual preferences, and antagonisms between or among academics. B.R.Clarklater developed the notion of “organizational saga” (1971, 1972), which was used toshow the importance of each university’s institutional history in constituting common,shared references (Satow 1975). Clark thus broadened the notion of collegiality,underscoring that this kind of consensus went beyond general agreement among peersto reflect the existence of shared beliefs and values among different types of membersof a given university (academics, administrators, president, students, alumni, and soforth). This in turn led to a shift in the 1980s from the collegial model to the idea ofindividual university “cultures’ (Chaffee 1984; Tierney 1988).The bureaucratic modelIn contrast to the other three, this model does not so much describe a unique characteristicof universities as show that universities also have bureaucratic features. The first studybased on this understanding was done by Stroup (1966), but it was Blau’s 1973 surveythat demonstrated beyond a doubt that universities are a decentralized type ofbureaucracy and that these characteristics are more relevant to the organization ofteaching than research. The conception of universities as organizations that combine“academic” and “bureaucratic” features was later taken up by Mintzberg (1979), whoreferred to them as examples of “professional bureaucracies.” He emphasized thestandardizing of skills and procedures in academic work, the existence ofpreestablished programs for dealing with identified situations, and the fact that the“pigeon holes” that academics find themselves in, while managed by the disciplines,also correspond to sets of standardized procedures (see Hardy 1990, 21, 22).The political modelThis model, first developed by Baldridge (1971), directly refutes what appears to theauthor as the misguided idyllism of the collegial model and its idea that particular,antagonistic interests could be fused and shared consensus reached through commonnorms and values. Universities are also run through with conflict and oppositions,namely, because multiple goals are pursued in them. The conception of universities as“political” was adopted by Pfeffer and Salancik in their studies of the importance ofpower in resource allocation processes, conducted in the framework of “resourcedependence” theory (Pfeffer and Salancik 1974; Salancik and Pfeffer 1974).Organized anarchy and the “garbage can” modelThis model identifies three features that distinguish universities from most otherorganizations and characterize them as instances of “organized anarchy”: multiplegoals, unclear technology, fluid participation. It also describes the type of decisionmaking characteristic of such organizations. Rejecting rational and political models,Cohen, March, and Olsen (1972; see also Cohen and March 1974) proposed they bereplaced by the “garbage can” model, wherein decision making results from theintersection of four “streams”: “participants, problems, choice opportunities andsolutions.” This contradicts the rational model, in which participants identify problems,look for solutions and make decisions which address the problems, for here solutions mayexist before problems, they may not respond directly to problems, and so forth.*


*For a discussion of this model see Musselin (1996, 1997c) and Friedberg (1993).

world as described above, in the sense that they are not produced by theseproperties and cannot be explained by them.

The more closely and frequently universities are studied, the more they arepresented as complex organizations displaying an extraordinary variety ofoperating modes (Friedberg and Musselin 1992; Dubois 1997b).13 This leads usfurther and further away from the idea or conviction that universities represent aspecific, exceptional type of organization. The “exceptionality” notion seemsnever to have been as strong in the United States as in France, judging from theease with which models developed from empirical studies of universities weregeneralized in American studies to all other organized situations.14 But thepositive-normative conceptions associated with collegial models (whereuniversities are presented as spaces for the production of shared values andconsensual functioning), and the less reverential notions of “organized anarchy”(Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972) or “loosely coupled system” (Weick 1976),clearly—intentionally?—conferred specificity on universities and gave credenceto the idea that they are not ordinary organizations. More recent approaches,however, seem to be explicitly calling into question the particularity ofuniversities, as underscored by increasing references to the entrepreneurialmodel (B.R.Clark 1998), on the one hand, and on the other the fact that certainAmerican studies make the mistake of analyzing universities almost exclusivelyin terms of leadership and management theories, ultimately leaving aside theoriginality of university systems of production, modes for exercising authority,and hierarchical arrangements.15

If we now take another backward zoom away from these heterogeneous,dispersed intermediate structures, we discover the third level—the nationalsystem. We see that universities are part of a bigger system, a system ofmacrostructures whose purpose is to steer the higher education system as awhole. The landscape this time is strictly national, and all studies from thisperspective, whether comparative, as most are, or case studies of individualcountries, emphasize convergences and divergences between and amongcountries. The number of works using this approach is considerable (cf. Altbachet al. 1979 and Altbach et al. 1989). Of these we may cite Eurich 1981, Clark andNeave 1992, and Altbach 1998.

Comparative analysis of national structuration of higher education systems hasfocused on three dimensions. The first of these is the state’s role in systemsteering (see for example Premfors 1980). Countries in which the state hasextensive prerogatives can be called interventionist and stand in contrast to thosein which the state plays a secondary role. Ministry steering modes are alsocategorized, with centralized systems (France) distinguished from decentralizedfederal and national systems, and systems with “buffer bodies’ (Great Britain,with its University Grants Committee, for example, replaced in the late 1980s by


the University Funding Council, then by the Higher Education Funding Council)from those that function under direct oversight. More recently, the focus hasshifted somewhat from state policy structure to state intervention ‘style’; that is,rational planning versus self-regulation; a priori control versus a posteriorievaluation and how it has evolved over the last decades, namely, in Europeancountries (van Vught 1989, 1995; Neave and van Vught 1991, 1994; Fussel andNeave 1996; Braun and Merrien 1999).

The second area of focus is the organization of higher education into differentinstitutional sectors. Here the point is to assess the relative weight and respectivepowers of universities compared to other postsecondary institutions, and tospecify by country which purposes and activities are considered to characterizeand belong to “universities” and which are not.16 These studies are concernedabove all with developments in the content of higher education supply and inwhat sectors new supply is being developed in or attached to, a question which wasput on the research agenda as the number of students acceding to highereducation increased. The point here is to assess the capacity of postsecondarysystems to adapt to the inflow of student populations that are both denser and moreheterogeneous than before, and to meet the needs of the labor market bydeveloping more diversified and flexible education and training supply.17

The third area being explored is organization of the academic profession (cf.Van de Graaf et al. 1978; B.R.Clark 1987; Boyer et al. 1994; Altbach 1996; andothers). These studies, which are often highly descriptive, compare unionizationprocesses and union roles, hiring and promotion procedures, chair systems whenthey exist, teaching obligations, mobility incentives, and so forth.18

While these works do make us aware of the variety of national systems, theyoften do not fulfill their comparative purpose. Many are superficial, often goingno further than comparison of formal structures. As is often the case insynchronic studies of a number of countries, real practices and their meaningsare often neglected. France, for example, is invariably presented as a centralizedsystem, but these studies do not explore the effective reality or properties ofFrench centralization. Moreover, not enough attention is given to the specificallynational meaning of terms that look similar from one language or system toanother.19 Above all, these works are not really analytical. They cannot explainthe variety of country situations because they do not shed sufficient light on thedynamics specific to each country, namely, the forms of interdependence thatexist among a given national system, the universities in that system, and itsacademics. By failing to be analytical they bolster what is in fact a conception ofuniversity education as being disjointed and fragmented, and they give credenceto the idea that the three worlds are as separate as they are different. Actually, thedivision into three worlds, which is also a division into three disciplinary fields—sociology or anthropology for the study of academics, organization and decision-making studies for universities, and comparative higher education for the study ofnational systems—amounts to cutting apart three facettes of the same sharedreality, and neglecting how each fits with the others, neglecting to inquire into


their parallel development or to analyze the coherence of how they worktogether.

The first author to become interested in these questions and to pose them inthis way was Burton R.Clark, in a 1983 work whose fifth chapter is devoted tothe regulation modes that structure coordination between the three differentlevels in each country:

Yet in each case, some order emerges in various parts: disciplines linkmembers from far and wide, universities symbolically tie together theirmany specialists, bureaucratic structures, local and national, provideuniform codes and regulations. And the bureaucratic, political, andoligarchical forms of national authority contribute to the integration of thewhole. (1983, 136)

After adding that the order observable in relations within a given highereducation system may be due to market-type interactions, Clark has all he needsto construct his renowned “triangle of coordination” (143). Each of the threevertexes represents an ideal type of integration: state authority, which can be eitherpolitical or bureaucratic; academic oligarchy, and the market. He can then situateeach country within the triangle according to how close or far it is to each idealtype. He situates France halfway between state authority and academicoligarchy, and as far away as possible from the market. Twenty years later,Clark’s triangle is still the uncontested reference in works seeking to account forthe “systemic” aspect of national models of higher education, that is, theirintegration mechanisms and internal dynamics. There has not been much debatearound the model, though other typologies have been proposed (cf. Becher andKogan 1992; McDaniel 1996; and Clark 1997a).

It seems to me that Clark’s coordination triangle is based on a representation ofthe three “worlds” that is (1) overly hierarchical and (2) too narrow. First, themacro level, which the author calls the “top” of academic systems, is his highestprinciple and is understood to organize the intermediate level, universityinstitutions. This means that the coordination modes represented by the trianglealso structure the “organizational” level: when a system is integrated by themarket, its universities are autonomous and competitive; when it is integrated bythe professional oligarchy, its universities are merely the reflection of thatoligarchy and have no institutional existence; and when the state does theintegrating, universities are mere bureaucratic appendages of the centraladministration. Second, the triangle cannot account for the effects of the top ofthe academic system on the base-level world of “academics.” That world can beregulated by state coordination of one type or another (as when promotionmodalities and the mechanisms of scholarship recognition are political orbureaucratic), or, on the contrary, it can follow essentially professional, andtherefore discipline-related, criteria, or it can follow market laws (teacher valuecan be a function of teacher scarcity or teacher social utility, for example).


Clark’s model does not enable us to account for the fact that the princi plesintegrating the intermediate level (universities) are not necessarily the same asthose integrating the base level (academics). We might draw two triangles, onefor each intervention level, but how could they be synthesized? While Clark’striangle enables us to overcome separations between the three worlds, it does notmake it possible to grasp the impact that coordination modalities may have oneach of them. The model posits the existence of ties between the different levelsbut does not permit us to examine and analyze the empirical reality of those ties.We therefore have yet to explore how each type of integration acts on and limitsthe other modes.

University Configurations

I propose that the stabilized interdependences that circumscribe and characterizeties between and among the three different levels or worlds, and affect thecoordination modes specific to each within a coordinated territory, be understoodto form a university configuration.20 It should be clarified immediately that whilethe interdependences that make up a university configuration have a framingfunction, they do not constitute a determinist structure that closely controlsindividual actors’ behavior or their cognitive and normative frameworks.Moreover, speaking of a university configuration in no way implies anyassumptions about the substantive content of interdependences. That contentvaries from country to country and must be discovered in each.

“University configuration,” then, designates a frame within which the type ofgovernance developed by universities, the steering style of the overseeingministry, and the internal regulation modes of the disciplines are inscribed, makesense, and relate to each other. In other words, the term is a means of describinghow three types of collective action—those of universities, the overseeingauthorities, and the academic profession—fit and function together.

This definition reflects the incompleteness of those three types of collectiveaction taken separately, and it recalls that none can be analyzed independently ofthe others. Neither universities, the ministry, nor the academic profession arespaces of autonomous interaction. Each constitutes an “incomplete local order”that makes sense only in the wider framework of the interdependences by whichthe three are connected.

The definition also suggests that these interdependences can be seen in boththe way the three poles are linked—when one is modified, the other two are inturn affected—and the consistencies or compatibilities among the types ofcollective action particular to each pole. Correspondences exist among universitygovernance styles, ministry operating modes, and the organization andmanagement principles of the academic profession.

Lastly, it should be clarified that in describing and characterizing the tiesbetween the three poles that constitute a university configuration, I am notmaking any claims about the specific nature of relations obtaining between or


among the individual actors associated with the different poles (a ministrydi rector and a university president, for example), but rather trying to identify thelogic of action that “frames” such relations between or among individuals (theprevalence of discipline-focused logic over university-focused logic in the sameexample). Consequently, university configurations are not a simplifiedrepresentation of the “map” of actors involved in this sector and theirinteractions;21 they are not concrete systems of action as defined by Crozier andFriedberg (1980).22 They do not account for the diverse, multiple actors involvedin the three constitutive poles. The interdependences that link those three polesare not simplified representations of power relations among actors; and thetriangle formed by interactions between the three poles is not the modeledreflection of “a diagram of power relations,” as was, for example, the model of“intersecting regulation” representing the local political-administrative system inFrance before the decentralization law (Crozier and Thoenig 1975; Grémion1976). In other words, the notion of university configuration is valid and relevantonly if we understand it as a frame within which interpersonal interactions,different systems of concrete actions, and various local orders develop—all ofwhich are particular situations, though they share the feature of being compatiblewith that particular frame. The notion accounts for the existence of a generalarrangement that does indeed impose constraints, produce meaning, and delimitthe possible, but that also tolerates a certain flexibility, autonomy, and variety,that is, that does not determine actors’ behavior or impose a standard cognitiveframework on them.

A configuration defines no more than the limits within which implicatedindividual and collective actors determine their behaviors and constructrelations. It establishes a frame of all that is possible, a frame, then, for multiple,if not unlimited possibilities. A configuration can therefore include the fact ordevelopment of functioning that varies from one university, one discipline, evenone “incarnation” of the overseeing ministry, to another. Its existence does notstandardize forms of collective action. Some universities can have governancemodes that are more collegial than others, or on the contrary more conflictualthan others. But the range of possibility remains limited because the styles ofuniversity government that can develop must be compatible with the types ofinterdependence ties existing between the ministry and universities. Theinterdependences that structure and define a configuration therefore nevercompletely determine actors’ behaviors, but they are strong enough that theirinfluence is felt above and beyond disciplinary differences or the heterogeneouscharacteristics of individual universities and stable enough not to be“mechanically” modified when actors, rules, laws, and/or political approacheschange.23

These features are indissociable from the way a university configuration maybe reconstructed. Methodologically, bringing to light the consistent, regulated setof interdependences in a given country, and knowing about its particular“properties,” involves a process of moving gradually from individual interactions


toward broader-scope regulation modes. With a configuration we cannot move inthe opposite direction; that is, we cannot use knowledge of universityconfiguration characteristics to predict the content, nature, properties ofinterpersonal relations at the micro level. The framing that a universityconfiguration does, does not function as a mechanism for determining individualbehaviors. While circumscribing the range of actors” possible behaviors, it doesnot prescribe those behaviors.24 We cannot deduce from configuration propertiesthe concrete modalities and arrangements around which each “local order will bestructured. Knowledge of the frame does not mean we don’t need to explore thecontingency of organized situations that develop within it.

What I have just said about actors’ behaviors and their (relative) autonomywith regard to the university configuration applies equally to their perceptions,representations, beliefs, and values. Specifically, knowing about thecharacteristics of a given university configuration means knowing the principlesthat are made legitimate by it, the values and beliefs it runs on and uses (equalityand uniformity in France, for example), the ‘University’ idea it may bear, and soforth. A university configuration is thus a space for producing meaning, meaningthat may be associated with a cognitive and normative framework that impactson actors’ perceptions, representations, and principles.25 The fact that aconfiguration “produces” meaning does not imply that such meaning is explicitfor individual actors, or that they adhere to a given cognitive and normativeframework and thus all share one and the same vision of things, apprehend andconstruct problems in the same ways, and agree on how to solve them. On thecontrary, a university configuration tolerates—or is subject to!—stronglyheterogeneous discourses on the role of the University, its purposes, the role thestate should play, academics’ functions and tasks, and so forth.26 It is onlyexceptionally a homogeneous field in which individuals engage in identicalpractices supported by uniform representations, cognitive frameworks, values,and norms.

In this property, university configurations are different from what Meyer andhis coauthors called the institutional environment of the educational field,27

because the educational field so conceived requires perfect, holistic consistencyamong practices, attitudes, and modes of action, and a stable set of beliefs,values, norms, and symbols. This is also how they differ from what Hall and Taylor(1996, 1997) have called “historical neo-institutionalism.” Economic, political,and social organizations as analyzed by American historical neoinstitutionalistsare granted too much ability to shape individuals’ behaviors, make visible tothem certain problems and obscure others, provide models for interpreting theworld, define how they will understand such problems, how significant they willdeem them, and the range of solutions they will envisage. What I am referring toas a configuration is not as narrow or constraining as this, has a much moremoderate effect, and is generally much more compatible with actor autonomy.28

In other words, the interdependences that make up a university configurationare not inscribed in the actors. They do not allow us to predict the way


individual actors (in this case, academics), at their different levels, will constructtheir disciplinary and institutional memberships and their relations to the ministry—in sum, the particular way each individual actor will construct his or herprofessional identity.

The notion of configuration reconciles structuration and autonomy,crystallization and flexibility. The nature and content of the interdependences bywhich the state, universities, and the academic profession are linked constitutethe deep structure within which university education develops in a givencountry, but granting this does not require us to hypothesize that actors’behaviors and cognitive frames are wholly subjected to, dependent on, enslavedto this structure.

In methodological terms, then, university configurations are objects ofresearch. They do not correspond to a model that describes state-university-academic profession relations substantively as if they were always andeverywhere the same. To speak in terms of configuration is simply to postulatethe existence and importance of interdependences between and among three poles— the state, universities, the academic profession—and the structuring role theseinterdependences play with regard to the collective action and regulation modesinternal to each pole. In each case these actions and modes, and the nature,quality, and content of these interdependences, remain to be explored, examined,and defined, together with the underlying principles of legitimation. Describingand qualifying university configuration interdependences is a full-fledgedresearch project in itself, because such interdependences are not spontaneouslyperceptible or apprehendable; on the contrary, they have to be reconstructed byintegrating the different interaction levels.29

With this instrument, defining and constructing the relevant collective actorsalso becomes a research project. In the configurations I have studied (those ofFrance and Germany) or studied by Brisset (public universities in the UnitedStates30), the state, universities, and the academic profession were clearly theindispensable and sufficient actors. It was they and they alone who broughtpublic intervention modes, university governance, and professional regulationtogether and made them work in particular ways. However, I do not exclude thepossibility of other poles emerging and being integrated into the analysis.31

Methodologically, then, reasoning in terms of university configurationpresupposes that this frame is discovered through empirical reconstitution of theactive ties and relations between the local arrangements produced by individualinteractions and a more general “order.” In other words, the characteristics of theinterdependences within a configuration are never already given and cannot beconstructed before empirical study. We cannot begin with a predeterminednational model; we have instead to gradually “unveil” it, to reconstitute it as theanalysis of local interactions advances.32 Nor is it a matter of choosing a generalinterpretive model within which to rank and order facts, behaviors, and relations,


contrary, a structure of interdependences whose nature and content are yet to bediscovered.


relating them to a preestablished analytic framework. A configuration is, on the

8University Configurations and Change

Bringing to light the particular characteristics of the French universityconfiguration involves observing that its constitutive elements were establishedby the Napoleonic reforms and that they remained nearly unaltered until the lastquarter of the twentieth century. This longevity, which can also be calledstability, requires explanation. On the other hand, recent developments show thatchange is indeed possible, in this case changes that amount to no less than amove from one configuration to another; changes that called into question,without eradicating, the policy logic underlying ministry steering modes untilthen. Considering these changes in light of Silvestre’s three categories of change,we can say that they are structural, that is, that they “[engender] new types ofbehavior and social relations,” and thus that they are greater than a “mechanicalresponse molded on to the existing structure”1 or an “organic response, throughwhich the structure [changes] but in a way compatible with the basic principlesgoverning its operations”2 (Silvestre 1998).3

In this chapter I will look at why it was possible for options that seemincompatible with the ministry’s traditional operating modes to be introducedinto the administration and acquire legitimacy. Following Kingdon on howpublic problems get put on the policy agenda (1984), I will try to explain notwhere the seed came from but what made the soil fertile, examining first thestability of university configurations, so as to better identify the particularconditions that enabled the contract policy to survive; then making a few moregeneral comments on processes of structural change.

Why Are Configurations Stable?

It would seem on the one hand likely that attempts will be made to move fromone university configuration to another, on the other, unlikely that such attemptswill succeed. The chances of success are low because a university configurationis composed of three interdependent parts; any change in one is likely to belimited by inertia in the other two. The weak impact of the “little revolution”effected by the Loi Faure in creating autonomous universities is a clearillustration of this. The law affected only a small part of the whole and did notmodify the factors that would have had to be modified for university governance

to be strengthened; that is, it did not touch ministry steering modes, whichremained focused on the disciplines, or the centralized joint management bywhich ministry and corporation were linked, or the fact that universities wereexcluded from playing a role in personnel management. The universityconfiguration that preexisted the Loi Faure was therefore able to remain in placeseveral years after it.

However, because configurations are “moderate” institutional arrangements,there are also frequent opportunities for change. As explained in the precedingchapter, configurations “delimit” behaviors but do not determine them; theyproduce meaning and give legitimacy to certain principles over others, but theydo not impose any one cognitive framework, or values, or shared normsrecognized by all. There have always been proponents of the idea ofstrengthening university autonomy; that idea arose long before the late 1980s. Late-nineteenth-century liberal republicans had already pushed it forcefully in callingfor universities that would be responsible for funding, personnel, and studyprograms. In sum, we did not have to wait until the end of the second millenniumfor “a new image of the university world” to appear. We could of course showthat nineteenth-century liberals” notion of autonomy does not correspond exactlyto what we mean when we use the term today; Simoulin (1997, 1999) haselegantly demonstrated how ideas, representations, and concepts are themselvesreformulated, changed, integrated. We can, however, acknowledge the proximityamong the conceptions advocated successively by Third Republic republicans,Maurice Caullery in his 1920 report, participants to the Colloques de Caen,Edgar Faure in 1968 speeches in support of his law, Philippe Lucas inL’Université Captive (1987), and so forth. Contrary to claims made in works thatunderscore the heavy weight of institutional mechanisms on actors’ cognitiveframeworks, or actors’ incapacity—in anything other than periods of paradigmcrisis (Jobert 1992; Hall 1993; Surel 1995)—to reformulate problems andinaptitude for inventing new types and categories of solutions, the “universitysolution” has always been close to hand, and it has always been visible becauseopenly debated and closely covered by the media. Moreover, education ministrydoors were repeatedly opened to proponents of autonomous universities; somesuch proponents even served as directors of the central administration: LouisLiard, of course, but also Gaston Berger, who was close to the Colloque de Caenorganizers (Bourricaud 1982, 40, 41), and JeanLouis Quermonne. The stabilityof the pre-1980s French university configuration thus cannot be explained by anabsence of competing visions or alternative propositions, or by institutionalarrangements of a sort that prevented people with new ideas from acceding toimportant positions.

Discipline-focused logic was thus not deep or resonant enough to prevent thedevelopment of innovations that didn’t follow it. This is due to the fact that whilesuch logic did of course constitute a “dominant system of reference,” such asystem is, in my view, and contrary to Muller’s use of the notion (1995), more aproduct of action than a guide to it. Rather than first and foremost defining and

UNIVERSITY CONFIGURATIONS AND CHANGE • 109

legitimating sets of institutionalized practices, systems of refer ence would seemto emerge from such practices, which, it should be remembered, areinterdependent and come together to produce meaning. The disconnect betweenaction and meaning caused by aggregation of distinct actions explains why wemay see strong consistency and coherence after the fact, but also why suchcoherence need not mean that actors firmly adhered to the system when theyacted, or that the system had a marked influence on their cognitive and normativeframeworks, or that there was controversy when other actors denigrated thesystem. This means that the ability of university actors, administrators, andpoliticians to imagine “innovative” solutions (that is, solutions that do not fit intothe range of solutions considered legitimate) or to develop divergent argumentshas always been strong in the area of French university education. The examplescited in chapter 5 of projects conceived and developed outside the model ofdiscipline-focused ministry steering, projects that promoted university-focusedlogic instead—the 1975 contract policy, the Comité National d’Evaluation desUniversités, and four-year research contracts—are proof of actors’ cognitiveautonomy with regard to the “dominant” configuration.

Still, despite this potential for change, university configurations have shownthemselves to be extremely robust, and this confirms neoinstitutionalist claimsabout the resistance of institutional frameworks. How can the discrepancybetween numerous opportunities for change and the weak impact of thoseopportunities be explained? My analysis of the three failed experiments thatpreceded the successful contract policy suggests that in each case these werefragile processes threatened by multiple and ultimately mortal “dangers.” Thefirst attempt at contractualization was swept away by a ministerial changeover,with Alice Saunier-Seïté succeeding Jean-Pierre Soisson. The four-year researchcontract experiment was reshaped in the classical terms of discipline-focusedcentralizing policy and targeted immature, insubstantial universities. As for theCNE, it was left to pursue its purpose and goal, but it did not have the expectedimpact—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was able to continueprecisely because it had no impact.

The life cycle of such innovations is generally short; most are quickly“buried.” And when they are not snuffed out, they are deflected, reformulated, orabsorbed by “legitimate” action logic, or else they continue to function but aremarginalized. The obstacles that these innovations meet are either organizational(“learning” difficulties, resistance to power redistributions, etc.) or due to timing(political changeover, for example). However, the limited impact of the threecases mentioned, like that of the late-nineteenth-century reforms or the Loi Faure,can in no way be imputed to opposition to their content or ideological conflictaround their conception of university education. In this case, then, practices seemstronger than ideas.

That the 1989 ministry-university contractualization policy did not end up onthe list of failed innovations is due to the fact that it was not exposed to


the dangers that threaten this type of attempt. On the contrary, it benefited froman exceptional set of favorable circumstances.

In contrast to the 1975 contractualization experiment, this innovation wasbuoyed by four years without political changeover, four years during which theproject’s policy entrepreneur, Claude Allègre, remained on the job and continuedto promote contractualization, though also moving into other areas. In contrast tothe CNE, university contracts directly affected the universities, and involved oneof the central administration’s main functions: allocating budget funds,specifically supplementary resources. When contracts were launched they boreon only 5 percent of the operating budget, but that 5 percent was in a way moreimportant than the other ninety-five, because it represented the portion on whichthere was some maneuvering room. Lastly, in contrast to research contracts,university contracts benefited from a reorganization of ministry services in theirfavor. The contract policy thus benefited from the fact that it was conceived soonafter the arrival of Lionel Jospin at the ministry and that it affected the traditionalexercise of reorganizing the central administration and renewing cadres thatmost education ministers engage in after a political changeover.

These three features of the situation enabled the contract policy to escape thefate of the three earlier experiments. But there were other favorablecircumstances: the priority given to education by the Rocard government and abright economic context. It is always easier to negotiate how to allocate surplusresources and supplementary posts than budget cuts.

Moreover, the contract policy benefited from the fact that it seemed likenothing more than a modification of internal procedures for allocating a residualpart of university operating budgets. It could be established by means of a mereministry directive. It did not at all modify the framework law, did not affect civilservice rules, and had no constitutional implications; it could be put into effectwithout going through parliament, and was not in danger of being annulled bythe Conseil d’Etat, which checks legislative consistency, or the ConseilConstitutionnel, which checks constitutionality. This explains how the “doctrine”could be defined and developed within the ministry and why it was not fueledby, or opposed by, political or public debate. It also explains why there was nothreat of legal recourse against the contractualization policy and how it escapedthe institutional oversight instruments of the Fifth Republic.4

All these conditions were favorable to the introduction and integration of thisinnovation into ministry practices.

Rethinking the Influence of Ideas on Change

The contract policy was not merely an innovation that “took.” It was also theorigin of changes that affected the whole of the French university configuration.I have shown that in order to understand the breadth of this change, universitycontracts must be understood as more than a particular arrangement for handlinga feature of university budgets. They are indeed the origin of the gradual


construction of a completely new system of references for policy action. Notonly did they make possible the shift from one university configuration to another,but in this case the shift also corresponded to a structural change process thatdoes not follow the model developed by authors studying this type of change,whether they qualify it as paradigm change, as B.Jobert (1992), P.Hall (1993) orY.Surel (1995), or a switch from one system of reference to another (Muller1995). The model proposed by these authors is generally based on threepostulates: a tight link between practices and “ideas” (Bleich 1998);5 the ideathat changes in ideas are a prerequisite condition for changes in practice, action,and procedure (Hall 1989; Jobert and Muller 1987; Muller and Surel 1998); andchange through revolution, with the shift from one paradigm or system ofreference to another occurring in a crisis situation that leads actors to abandonthe operative framework and replace it with another.

Though we cannot deny the importance of ideas for the changes in Frenchhigher education, this case nonetheless is far from confirming those threepostulates (Musselin 2000). I have discussed the first of them in several otherplaces. But it is useful to discuss the second and third in more detail.

The preceding analysis of the development and implementation of the contractpolicy calls into question the primacy of “idea” change for it shows that the“university modernization” system of reference was not at the origin ofcontractualization. Instead, that system of reference was clarified, developed, andformalized after the contract policy had been implemented, through a repeatedback-and-forth process between practices and practice meaning that becameincreasingly broad in scope. The introduction of new practices precededdissemination of a discourse on those practices, but actors playing thecontractualization game took hold of both practices and discourse. This iterativeprocess led to a gradual broadening of the scope of both the doctrine and thecontract procedure that in turn led to a renewed conception of the role ofuniversities and their relation to the overseeing ministry. The notion ofautonomous individual universities gradually became associated with those ofmodernization and management rationalization, active leadership, anddevelopment of budget and education supply policies.

University contract implementation was the starting point for an iterativeprocess in which practices and practice meaning mutually enriched each other,and this process gradually grew, overflowing the framework of the contractpolicy and becoming the foundation for a conception of university educationbased on more autonomous universities where university-specific policies couldbe developed and integrated. The mechanism of enlargement and reinforcementthat contract policy underwent closely resembles that presented in the definitionof path dependency that is the focus of Pierson’s recent work (2000). Whereasthis notion is generally used to account for the impact of past events, existinginstitutions, and history in general on the possibility of change in the present,Pierson here suggests using it to analyze the cumulative effects of taking one


path over another.6 He identifies the characteristics of situations favorable tocumulative mechanisms thus:

In settings in which increasing returns or path dependence processes are atwork, political life is likely to be marked by four features: 1) Multipleequilibria. Under a set of initial conditions conducive to increasing returns,a number of outcomes…are generally possible; 2) Contingency. Relativelysmall events, if they occur at the right moment, can have large andenduring consequences; 3) A critical role for timing and sequencing…; 4)Inertia. Once an increasing returns process is established, positivefeedback may lead to a single equilibrium. This equilibrium will in turn beresistant to change. (263)

The contract policy would seem to meet all these different conditions: (1) othersolutions could have emerged; (2) the policy had greater effects than might havebeen expected from the “mere” introduction of a new procedure; (3) it occurredat a favorable moment; (4) once the movement had begun, it accelerated andspread, making a return to the preceding balance less likely. Once it had beenlaunched, the contract policy indicated a new path, and the way traced by thefirst contracts was gradually lengthened, enlarged, arranged, and consolidated,while being taken by increasing numbers of “users.”

It should be added, however, that this cumulative process was not producedsolely by a growing number of identical behaviors, along the lines of whatoccurs when a given technological development is adopted by users who thenimprove its performance and thus move increasing numbers of other users to optfor it over another. It owed much to the labor of argument, justification, andlegitimation which went hand in hand with the contract policy and brought about“adherence” to it, enabling contracts to become part of the panoply of steeringinstruments used by the ministry. The formal development of ‘the doctrine’meant that actors came to adhere to the contract policy more quickly, and itbecame stronger faster, than it would have without the doctrine. Through thedevelopment of this body of normative guidelines and the conception ofuniversities and the ministry that it carried within it, the “university contract”could become a legitimate practice within the central administration and beyond,that is, a practice understood to serve a useful purpose, respond to problems,provide solutions. In sum, it was not solely a tool; it became itself a “project,”took on meaning, and became institutionalized (Selznick 1957; Powell andDiMaggio 1991). Contract policy is thus both an instrument whose developinguse legitimated new practices, new representations, and a new philosophy ofpublic action in the area of higher education, and, simultaneously, the instrumentthat made it possible to reach or advance toward those goals. Through itsimplementation, a competing cognitive matrix was formulated and promoted.That matrix came into existence after in novative practices were introduced, butit also played a decisive role in the institutionalization of those practices.


The structural change process observable in the contract policy calls intoquestion not only the causal link between “ideas” and action but also the modeltraditionally associated with such fundamental change—revolution. In the caseof French universities the new matrix did not replace the preceding one, but itwas added to it. “Universities” did not vanquish “the disciplines”; instead, theyrelativized the weight of the disciplines and became a supplementary componentin French higher education steering.

There was, therefore, no paradigm revolution in the sense of one system ofreference being replaced during a crisis situation by a new and totally differentone. Instead, there was aggregation (Lascoumes 1994); a new system was graftedonto the preceding one. The occasionally conflictual combination of the twoworked to orient French universities in a new direction and modified the terms inwhich the ministry oversees and steers. This does not mean the change wasincremental (Lindblom 1959; Marsh and Rhodes 1992, 261) or a path-shiftingprocess (Pierson 1996; Palier 1999); transformation of the overall picture did notoccur through a succession of small touches or strokes. Introducing universitycontracts was a forceful act, and even though it took several years for that act totake full effect, it did indeed constitute a break, a shift from state A to state B.But in the case of French universities, state B is not totally different from stateA. And in this the French case runs contrary to the notion of paradigm shiftoperative in analyses of other changes: for farming, a large farming populationworking small areas of land, followed by change, represented by rural exodus,then extensive farming by a small number (Muller 1984); the switch fromarsenal to market logic in civil aviation (Muller 1989); or the shift fromneoclassical economics to Keynesian theory (Hall 1989).

My analysis of the contract policy thus brings new material to the ongoinginquiry into institutional framework stability and the possibility of institutionalframework change. It brings to light not only both the role of innovations and theirfragility but also the importance of ideas in the institutionalization of innovations.Rather than suggesting that actors are locked up in normative and cognitivespaces from which they act blindly, it pushes us to recognize their autonomy,their capacity to think differently and promote new or different representations,while pointing up the various dangers—contextual (political reordering) orstructural (due to structural rigidities)—that threaten innovations. Rather thanlimit the possibilities of institutional framework change to the development ofnew systems of reference, new theories, or new ideas, my analysis emphasizes theimportant role of such systems, theories, or ideas in institutionalizing newpractices, and shows that major change may occur through aggregation ratherthan revolution.


Conclusion

French press articles and special newspaper and magazine reports on universitieshave proffered the same diagnosis since the 1960s: Universities are in crisis andmust be reformed. Significantly, little has changed in this assessment since themid-1980s. Taken all together, press coverage of the issue almost suggests thatcrisis is the permanent, natural state of French university education. There is ofcourse cause for criticism. Student drop-out rates (Yahou and Raulin 1997),degree-holder unemployment (Vergnies 1997; Sigot and Vergnies 1998),students’ sense of disorientation and disenchantment in a world whose rules theydo not understand (Lapeyronnie and Marie 1992), overcrowded classes and theirdetrimental effect on teachers, and the many ineffective reforms can hardly leaveobservers indifferent. However, these real problems should not hide the equallyreal, profound changes that have occurred, if only because they contradict the oft-repeated discourse on university inertia in general, the inertia of Frenchuniversities in particular, and the impossibility of reforming the universitysystem. Simple diachronic comparison between my 1980s studies of Frenchuniversities and studies being done today show that major changes have occurred,changes that have once more given universities a place in French highereducation.

Toward a New Configuration

The shift to more autonomous, strongly governed institutions is only the visibleside of a much greater change that affects the French university configuration inits entirety; that is, the way relations among the ministry, universities, and theacademic profession fit and work together and the relative weight of these threecollective actors. The last ten years constitute a decisive turning point, as theyhave profoundly shaken up the relations by which these three entities were linkedsince the Napoleonic reforms. By strengthening state centralization and thestandardization of university education, re-creating the faculties and refusing andpreventing the development of individual university institutions, and instituting anational, centralized corporation, the Imperial University of the early nineteenthcentury laid the foundations for a configuration structured around three axes:concomitant existence of two centers, one state, the other corporatist; joint

management relations between them; the disappearance of universities andresulting strength of the faculties. This combination led to the development ofextremely standardized university education, built around disciplinary differencebut based on principles of equality, uniformity, and the national territory as theonly relevant reference.

None of the reforms introduced in the following one hundred and fifty yearsmanaged to modify this configuration, not even the ambitious efforts of the ThirdRepublic republican-spirited reformers, because while these gave universities anadministrative status, they actually reinforced both state and corporatist centersand the relations between them, and made the monodisciplinary faculties thepillars of the system. It was not until 1968 and the Loi Faure that the facultieswere abolished and the French university system endowed with universities withthe potential for creating an intermediary level between the overseeing ministryand academics and for detaching organizational from academic careermanagement structures. Still, this law did not affect the system’s twofoldcentralization or state-corporatist joint management, and the new universitiesremained the system’s weak link for the next twenty years. Faced at first withpoliticization of their decision-making bodies, they later were able to makeeffective use of what little autonomy the central administration left them, anadministration that had meanwhile changed nothing in its steering modes. Thistime, however, the discipline component was itself in a weakened position andcould not take advantage of universities’ difficulties to move into what littlespace they had. Before 1968, collegial functioning among peers and the figure ofthe dean had given the former faculty structures a certain self-organizing andsteering capacity; those structures represented coherent entities that academicsidentified with and within which a strong feeling of membership developed. After1968, UERs rarely managed to re-create the cohesion characteristic of thefaculties, and UER directors, elected by different colleagues, were extremelyunlikely to stand as scientific and moral authority figures in the way deans had.The two decades that followed on the Loi Faure were characterized by weakened“professional” (i.e. discipline-based) and “institutional” (i.e., university)regulation modes, and this allowed for greater individual university autonomy.The effects could at times be undesirable, for example, toleration of excessivelaissez-faire, which did occur, since there was virtually no means ofcounteracting it. They could also be beneficial, as when universities used theirindividual autonomy to develop projects. The success of selective professionaldegree programs; the increased links with the CNRS, INSERM, INRA, and soforth (and the resultant complex, close connections between researchorganizations and universities); the development in some cases of direct tiesbetween universities and businesses or local communities were largely due to thecapacity of some universities to make and maintain contacts, present competitiveresearch bids, respond effectively to ministerial incentives, and so forth. Theweakening of the faculty straitjacket left more room to individual initiatives, but


also weakened university governance and accentuated both internalfragmentation and external differentiation.

The introduction of university contracts in the late 1980s profoundly affectedthis situation, and it changed the French university configuration by establishinga new equilibrium, itself produced through two developments. The first of thesewas a sliding from national to local levels, from the state center to the individualuniversity institutions. Contractualization not only involved introducing a morenegotiative procedure but also modified the overseeing ministry’s role.Moreover, it presupposed universities’ taking up questions that up until then hadbeen “the ministry’s affair,” and becoming a level at which their own-policieswere defined and made consistent with each other. The second was a weakeningof the corporatist center. The clearest manifestation of this is the end of themonopoly of discipline-focused logic in the ministry. Such logic now had to“accommodate” university-focused logic. The collapse of faculty-fixatedthinking in the ministry went hand in hand with a weakening of the central careermanagement body, the CNU. This development was brought about directly by1992 decrees restricting the role of the CNU to candidate qualification andleaving final hiring decisions up to local specialist commissions and universitybodies. These changes cannot be directly linked to the contract policy since themeasures were not taken with the purpose of strengthening universities orconsolidating contracts by giving universities more autonomy in academic hiring.Nonetheless, those were precisely the effects they had, as shown by our studies offour national CNU sections and ten local hiring committees (Blanchet andMusselin 1996; Hanin 1996; Blangy and Musselin 1996; de Oliveira 1998).

The new configuration that has resulted from these changes is thus much morebalanced. Its universities are stronger, better able to engage in collective action,have impact in two-against-one alliance games (Caplow 1968), and furtherweaken the role of the disciplines.

Whither the French University?

Should we be glad of these changes, or worried by them? What type ofUniversity are they going to “produce”? In seeking to answer these questions it istempting to look at the experience of other countries. Many specialists haveobserved that higher education in European countries is currently undergoingtwo changes1: the move from university as “cultural institution” (also called thecollegial or research university model) to university as “public service” (alsocalled the managerial and even entrepreneurial model);2 and the transition fromstate intervention based on ex ante regulation and oversight toward an overseeingbody that regulates and evaluates ex post. The path taken by France seemscongruent with that followed by neighboring nations. The vocabulary used bycontract policy actors in France, the notion of “modernization,” the investment incomputerized management programs, the will to strengthen universitypresidents’ teams, the devolution of new tasks to the university level, the

CONCLUSION • 117

delegation of “local” policy development to the individual universities, togetherwith the work of making such policies consistent with one another—thesedevelopments taken together would seem to suggest that France is moving in thisdirection. And since France began changing late in the day relative toneighboring countries, it seems logical to use their experience to assess possiblegood and ill effects of the new directions in France.

Still, we must be extremely careful about affirming that what is happening inFrance does indeed correspond to any new “European model” and beforeassessing possible effects in France on the basis of longer experience elsewhere.I am reluctant to proceed that way because of what I see as intrinsic weaknessesin the model of a shift from “collegial university+interventionist state” to“managerial university+regulator state.”3 First, this model assumes the existenceof a past ideal-typical European university—an idea that does not hold up tohistorical analysis. Above all, the paired characteristics understood to describethe past seem incompatible with each other: a collegial university and a closelyoverseeing interventionist state simply do not go together; “professionally”-controlled university governance is by definition contradictory to that type ofministry. Close state oversight and strong state intervention can characterize onlytwo situations: no professional regulation+purely bureaucratic or state-controlledsteering (similar to the situation in the former Eastern-bloc countries), or the typeof bureaucratic-oligarchic collusion I described for France, which coincided withabsent universities. If the collegial model was indeed the model of the past, itnecessarily went together with regulatory intervention by the state, interventionthat could be either corrective or protective.4 As for the managerial model, whichsupposedly represents the present and near future, on close examination it doesnot seem to me any more convincing.5 The paired characteristics that make upthis model are ill-assorted and incomplete. A managerial-type university, moreattentive to its “clients” and in competition with other institutions, can beassociated not only with a corrector-regulator state, but also with statewithdrawal, since interuniversity regulation could be accomplished mainly bymarket adjustment mechanisms. In sum, the managerial model can function withmore or less intense state regulatory action. The possible combinations aretherefore much more numerous than the simple pair proposed in these studies. Toaccount for real past and present changes, a less simplistic, looser analyticframework is needed.

I would also point out that this “model” creates a false impression ofconvergence in an area in which distinctions are still sharp and reform processesare still marked by national institution constraints. We should not hastilyconclude that universities are following a clearly laid out path that inevitablyleads to one and the same model—for one thing because this could lead us toconsider real, tangible differences among university systems to be negligeablevariables. The developments underway today in France are first and foremostthose of France’s university system. The path those developments take, thesolutions proposed, the consequences produced may resonate with paths and


policies followed elsewhere, but this should not mask the internal cohesion of theFrench university configuration or of change in that configuration.These comments should not be read as nationalist sentiment; rather, they amountto the simple observation that no European University model exists, that anysuch University is yet to be constructed, and that European Union universitysystems are still first and foremost national. Even though the directions being takenin France do not seem incompatible with those being taken elsewhere, they areleading to a result that, because it is being constructed in a different institutionalframework from those in other countries, remains for the moment distinct,specific, national.

There is surely no one way to qualify current developments. It can be said,however, that all of them strengthen university governance. This may beobserved in France and in other European countries, and it means that todaymore than yesterday, universities are having to manage at their level the issue ofstriking a balance between “science for science’s sake” and “a university forsociety” imperatives. We are not in a position to say how they will manage thatissue, where they will situate themselves on the imaginary line between thosetwo extreme positions. The tension between the two positions is not new; on thecontrary, it is inherent in each and every university system. However, it can behandled at different levels. Until recently, in the French case, it was managed intwo ways: at the national level, by the ministry working jointly with thecorporation and functioning as mediator, reformulating society’s demands andpushing universities to integrate them;6 and at the level of the individual actor,through relations developed by each academic with his or her environment. Therecent changes are pushing universities to become the locus of this synthesis andmanagement. And in the future much more than in the past it will be up touniversities to determine how far they will support a given “professional”direction, that is, purely scientific or pedagogic; how fully they will integrateexternal demands; how they will translate those demands for use. We cannotentirely rule out the possibility of French universities becoming education ortraining “businesses” that follow no law but the market. That risk seems to memore imaginary than real, however. First—and regardless of whether this isdeplored or applauded—French universities’ stronger autonomy andstrengthened governance have not brought them much closer to what is an idealfor some, a diabolic threat for others, namely, private American universities;7i.e., those institutions often presented as the archetype of the managerialuniversity (though they are hardly education “businesses”).8

Second, the changes in the ministry’s role in France amount not so much to“less state” as “state in a different way.” The shift from national to local has notbeen accompanied by any disappearance of the state center, but by a change inits powers and practices. Increasingly, state practices are becoming a matter ofevening out, realigning, finding balances, avoiding excess, preventingundesirable veering, or drifting off the road.

CONCLUSION • 119

Third, changes in French state intervention in the direction of modes that areless national and centralized in character, and more focused on evaluation thanoversight, are compatible with more than one model of university governance. Itseems to me that, despite the rationalizations it has given rise to, the change thathas occurred in France is to be met with satisfaction, because it consists aboveall in granting French universities more responsibility for managing the balancebetween the disciplines’ purely “professional” exigencies and external demandsand expectations. Until now, this work belonged to the ministry, and was jointlymanaged with representatives of the corporation who had access to the center.The size and heterogeneity of French universities make it highly relevant to shiftthis responsibility from the center toward the universities and their academics.Change will now depend as much on them as on the ministry. Is this such a badthing?

Future Challenges

The path taken by French university education over the last decade shouldtherefore be pursued, but there is still a long way to go before the process isaccomplished. The changes are new, and they presuppose both organizationaland technical learning, which in turn requires modifying behaviors and attitudesand disseminating and consolidating new representations. These are long-termdevelopments. What are some of the difficulties that will have to be overcome inthe future?

It seems to me that the emergence of French universities and theirtransformation into more autonomous institutions brings organizationalmechanisms into play that directly affect their internal functioning andgovernance, presenting them with three major challenges.

The first challenge is to integrate UFR directors into university governance.Presidents’ teams need their support if chosen policies are to be successfullyimplemented. At present, UFR directors are not fulfilling this function: eitherthey refuse to play the role of go-between, or they are willing to do so but do nothave the legitimacy or the means (in terms of time, abilities, or leverage foraction). Their situation is especially uncomfortable because they are asked toimplement decisions they did not help make and that, while they may well satisfyexecutive office demands, risk alienating members of their own UFRs. One wayof improving this delicate situation would be to strengthen UFR directors’position by rethinking how to distribute powers between them and the universitydirectorate, and inventing governance modes that would allow them a moreactive role. Integrating UFR directors in decision-making processes, broadeningpresidents’ teams, more systematically including UFR directors on decision-making bodies would surely give them a greater governing role. But thispresupposes modifying their function. It seems to me that the job of UFRdirector needs to become a full-time, more professional activity, to be exercisedfor longer periods (making holders of that position less dependent on their


electors). Indeed, if universities are to become yet stronger institutions, thisprocess seems inevitable.9

The second challenge facing universities concerns their position with regard toeducation supply. Study programs are much more diversified in Frenchuniversities than in most foreign universities. It does not seem possible to bothmaintain this level of heterogeneity and develop policies consistent with minimalnational norms and requirements. A single policy cannot cover all thesedifferences at once. Universities may therefore be expected to announce moreclearly their own particular pedagogic and scientific approaches. This is alreadyperceptible in some universities, and development projects prepared in theframework of the Université du Illè Millénaire confirm the trend.10 Everyregional university or set of universities is ready to pursue priorities that willdistinguish it from the others. But actually implementing this approach, theinternal redistribution it presupposes in terms of budget and posts, theimplications it has for academic hiring, together with the problem of managingtension among the different goals—all these are new exercises for Frenchuniversities, which, while they have learned to “speak” have not necessarilylearned how to “do” because for so many years they left the responsibility of“doing” to the ministry, which, far from refusing to make such choices, willinglygrasped the opportunity to impose its views.

The last challenge, and it is no small one, involves an area that in France is notusually included in university autonomy, though it is a fundamental condition forit: administrative and academic personnel management. Presidents’ teams anduniversity councils should become more involved in hiring decisions. How canuniversity-specific policies be implemented if the university does not havepersonnel willing and able to do this? How can a policy for improving studentreception be developed without ensuring that academics are hired who are not onlystrong in their field but also have strong teaching skills, appreciate and valorizetheir relations with students, and are willing to invest some of their time in such areception policy? Likewise, how can a research pole be created withoutincentives for attracting high quality candidates? Universities’ current reluctanceto interfere in specialist commission rankings should not be superceded bypresident’s discretionary choice, but between the two extremes there is room formore careful examination by university officers or bodies, and this would limitthe danger of making questionable choices that will commit the University formany years down the line. There is also room for collectively developinginternal rules of the game that would prevent universities from implementing ill-considered policies or veering off track.11 Nearly all the academics weinterviewed see the CNU as playing a role of scientific guarantor, and thisexplains in large part why they are so attached to maintaining this central body.But that role too could be transferred from the national to the local level.12 Themost radical means of facilitating this change would of course be to abolish theCNU. It must be acknowledged that at present such a reform would not beaccepted. Nonetheless, it would relieve the central administration of the

CONCLUSION • 121

enormous quantity of work involved in organizing section meetings, handlingand distributing massive candidate files, organizing elections, and so forth—andregularly devising new procedures for circumventing the perverse effectsproduced by the rules of the game. Surely the ministry has better things to do.

Indeed, above and beyond the issue of individual universities’ internalfunctioning, the emergence of more diversified universities is testing theministry’s ability to define a new role for itself, develop new practices, inventdifferent ways of keeping the system consistent than the regulatory apparatus andnational norms it has used in the past (and continues to apply). Up until now, theministry had to ensure that situations were comparable. Now, university diversityand the particular, situated identity that each university will be trying to definefor itself, will force the ministry to modify its action and policies. The famoustransformation of the ‘mammoth’;13 that is, the central administration, is going tohave to be more qualitative than quantitative. The ministry can only change ifministry personnel’s tasks and skills change.14 New operating modes will alsohave to be developed that will make it possible to resolve the growingcontradiction between national, egalitarian principles on the one hand,diversification of the university system as a whole on the other. Moving out of therole of rule-generator and rule-application overseer will not be easy.

Lastly, transforming the ministry’s role will have to include redefining of theplace and role of expert evaluation in it. I am confident in the high quality ofexperts’ work. Writing of his recent experience at the ministry, the sociologistFrançois Dubet (1999) pointed up strong convergence in expert recommendations—a clear indication of their impartiality and scientific rigor. And I would agreethat partial or partisan behavior is the exception rather than the rule amongexperts. The problem lies not so much in the intrinsic quality of expert evaluationas the perverse effects it creates, which include the following: a few expertschosen by the central administration jointly managing university affairs with it;administrators with little or no independence with regard to expert opinions; theverticality and centralization of discipline management caused thereby; the lackof a sense of responsiblity in universities themselves. Unlike Dubet, I think thesefunctioning modes must be called into question and changed. Expert evaluationis necessary, but it should not be practiced within the ministry and in closeinteraction with the central administration. And that evaluation should no longertake the form of a “committee of the wise” commissioned to produce a report forthe minister. At present, members of such commissions are called upon toassemble reports in record time on data that doesn’t exist; they have no otherway of performing this feat than calling in and hearing relevant actors,designating other experts, agreeing on a synthesis of the hearings and a series ofpropositions which in turn must be circulated to the press before the report issubmitted to the ministry if the experts are to get any publicity for conclusionsthat will surely be buried unless they are what the minister was waiting for in thefirst place or if he deems they could roil the waves of public opinion. Theproliferation of such commissions and reports for the higher education sector;


their weak impact, however interesting report content may be; the limitedlegitimacy accorded them, whatever the quality of the experts on the commission,show the limited effectiveness of this method. New modalities must beconceived, so that expert evaluation may be more independent of the overseeingministry and the minister freer from experts. Whatever the modalities chosen—and they may range from a buffer body such as the former British UniversityGrants Committee to specialized agencies of the type highly valued in Sweden—the point is to further upset vertical management by and of the disciplines,precisely that kind of management that the history of the French University hasshown to be a natural and structural factor for inertia.

This partial (in both senses of the term) overview of the project areas to betackled in the future is not, despite appearances, a list of disconnected items.Indeed, the main difficulty of the undertaking is not so much dealing with eachof the points mentioned as controlling their collective dynamic. Theinterdependences by which ministry, universities, and academic corporation arelinked mean that a late start in one will slow down attempts to move forward inthe others. French universities need still more time to distance themselvesdefinitively from the Napoleonic system. But this time the French University hastruly moved onto that path.

CONCLUSION • 123

Glossary

academic personnel: The general term is enseignant-chercheur: teacher-researcher. All teacher-researchers are national civil servants. There arecurrently two main, hierarchically ordered groups: maîtres de conferences andprofesseurs (full professors). Maîtres de conferences are required to have adoctoral degree; full professors have passed either the accreditationprocedure called habilitation à diriger des recherches, or, in certaindisciplines, the agrégation du supérieur. Nearly all teacher-researchers arequalified by the Conseil National des Universités.

académie. education district. There are 36 académies, each headed by a recteur,the local representative of the state in the domain of education, necessarily offull professor status. Each académie is responsible for overseeing and managingimplementation of national government policy for primary, secondary, anduniversity education. The role of académies in higher education has always beenlimited.

agrégation du supérieur. highly competitive national examination by whichdoctorate holders, primarily maîtres de conférences, in the disciplines of law,political science, economics, business administration, and medicine attain thestatus of professeur. The number of successful agrégation candidates isidentical to, or lower than, the number of new professorships open in thediscipline throughout the country for the year the exam is held. Successfulcandidates choose from among available posts according to their rank, thehighest-ranking candidate choosing first, and so forth.

agrégation du secondaire. the more selective and prestigious of two nationalcompetitive examinations for attaining the status of permanent secondaryschool teacher in most letters and sciences disciplines. There are agrégationsfor most lycée subjects, (foreign languages, social sciences, history, philosophy,the natural sciences, etc.).

baccalauréat (bac): national high school leaving degree conferred after passingthe examination of the same name; uniform throughout French nationalterritory. The baccalauréat is officially the first university degree; as such itgives automatic access to university studies.

carte scolaire: instrument used since 1963 for planning and managing primaryand secondary schooling supply and facilities throughout France (carte: map).Decisions regarding creation or extension of schools and distribution ofpersonnel and resources are made on the basis of the carte scolaire.

carte universitaire: instrument similar to the carte scolaire for determining thegeographic distribution of university education supply and facilities. Since1965, it has been one of the ministry’s official tasks to ensure that universityeducation supply and corresponding facilities are efficiently and fairlydistributed throughout France.

commissions de spécialistes: academic commissions internal to universities, onefor each discipline or subdiscipline, elected for four years and composed halfof full professors or assimilated, half of maîtres de conferences or assimilated(who make decisions only on issues concerning maîtres de conferences).Commissions make hiring and some promotion decisions for their respectivedisciplines or subdisciplines on the basis of CNU-qualified candidate lists.

CNU, Conseil National des Universités: national council made up of fifty-fivesections, each corresponding to a discipline or subdiscipline, whose main roleis to determine whether candidates for the two groups of academic personnelare “qualified,” that is, to verify that they have met the minimum statutoryrequirements (see academic personnel) and determine whether their scientificor scholarly activity is qualitatively and quantitatively satisfactory. Each CNUsection is made up of eighteen professors and eighteen maîtres deconferences, two-thirds elected by their respective groups, the other thirdappointed by the ministry. Members serve for four years.

conseil d’administration, see university councilsconseil des études et de la vie étudiante, CEVU, see university councilsconseil scientifique, see university councilsDEA, Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies see organization of university studiesDESS, Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures Spécialisées see organization of

university studiesDEUG, Diplôme d’Etudes Universitaires Générales, see organization of

university studiesgrandes écoles: public or private higher education institutions distinct from

universities, characterized by highly selective admission proceduresand awarding degrees after five or six years of post-baccalauréat study inengineering, business administration, and other specializations. Examples ofgrandes écoles are the Ecole Polytechnique, the Ecole Normale Supérieure,which trains an elite of teachers and researchers in the letters and sciences, andthe Ecole Nationale d’Administration, which trains senior administrative civilservants. Grandes écoles have their own accreditation system and educationalprojects, and in general enjoy great autonomy. They are usually small-scaleestablishments, with 300 yearly graduates at most.

habilitation à diriger des recherches: accreditation to supervise research,required for attaining the status of full professor in all letters and sciencedisciplines where there is no agrégation du supérieur and requisite for takingthe agrégation du supérieur in other disciplines. Candidates for thehabilitation write an extensive report of their research and defend it to a jury ofprofessors or research directors. Comparable to the German Habilitationschrift.

IUTs, Instituts Universitaires de Technologie. Technical institutes withinuniversities offering professional training and degree (Diplôme Universitairede Technologie) after two years of post-baccalauréat study. IUT directors areappointed by the ministry rather than elected like UFR directors.

licence, see organization of university studieslycée: high school conferring the baccalauréat degree after a three-year study

cycle and leaving examination.maître de conferences, see academic personnelmaîtrise, see organization of university studies

GLOSSARY • 125

Mission Scientifique: generic term referring to the group of academics requestedby the ministry to evaluate accreditation applications for graduate studyprograms and give expert opinions on scientific projects submitted in theframework of negotiation of the “research” section of four-year contracts or toassist universities in preparing the “development” section of the contract.

organization of university studies: At present, university studies have beenorganized into three cycles. The premier cycle, two years of study, culminatesin obtention of a DEUG (Diplôme d’Etudes Universitaires Générales) orDEUST (Diplôme d’Etudes Universitaires Scientifiques et Techniques) or aDiplôme d’IUT. Theoretically, the DEUST and the DIUT are final degrees,whereas the DEUG provides access to the second cycle, two years of study, thefirst leading to the licence degree and the second to the maîtrise. The secondcycle includes a selective professional branch leading to such degrees as theLicence Professionnelle (bac+3 years of study) and maîtrises in appliedsubjects, such as the Maîtrise des Sciences et Techniques or MST, the Maîtrisedes Sciences de Gestion [management science] or MSG, and so forth. Thetroisième cycle is accessible to all maîtrise holders. It consists either in aprofessional program leading to the Diplôme d’Etudes SupérieuresSpécialisées or DESS (bac+5 years) or a yearlong pre-doctoral program oftraining “by and for research,” leading to the Diplôme d’EtudesApprofondies or DEA. DEA holders may then prepare a doctoral thesis.However, in the framework of the European Union higher education processknown as the Bologna process, this system is now being reorganized. Alluniversity degrees will now fit into a three-level system: Licence (bac+3 years),Masters, either professional or in research (bac+5) and Doctorate (bac+8).

personnalités extérieures: see university councilspremier cycle, see organization of university studiesprofesseurs, see academic personnelsecond cycle, see organization of university studiestroisième cycle, see organization of university studiesUER, Unité d’Enseignement et de Recherche, see UFRUFR, Unité de Formation et de Recherche: “Education and research unit.” From

the Loi Faure of 1968 to the Loi Savary of 1984, the term was Unitéd’Enseignement et de Recherche, UER: Teaching and research unit. UFRs arethe basic structural academic component of universities. A UFR can bemonodisciplinary, as history may be, or bring together several relateddisciplines, as is often the case for the sciences (the science UFR is made up ofthe departments of physics, chemistry, mathematics). Each UFR has a director,elected by the UFR council for a five-year term. Some institutions have recentlystarted using the former faculty term “dean” to designate this position.

university councils. Since the 1984 Loi Savary, there have been three deliberativecouncils: the Conseil Scientifique, which makes proposals regarding researchand budget; the Conseil des Etudes de la Vie Universitaire or CEVU, focusedon curricula and student life on campus, and the Conseil d’Administration,which makes decisions on the basis of proposals and recommenda tions fromthe other two while concerned primarily with resource issues such as budgetand post allocation. Each council is composed of elected representatives ofacademics, students, administrative staff. The Conseil d’Administration also

126 • GLOSSARY

includes personnalités extérieures, such as local elected officials andprominent business persons, understood to represent the society at large. Eachcouncil elects a leader whose title is university vice-president.

GLOSSARY • 127

Endnotes

Introduction

1. Terms followed by an asterisk are defined in the Glossary.2. Figures for academics are from information memo 98.33 of the Direction

d’Evaluation et de la Prospective (DEP). Figures for nonacademic personnel arefrom the Education Ministry website and break down thus: 30,180 ITARFs(engineers and technical and administrative personnel), 3,482 library and museumworkers, 242 head administrative assistants and accountants, 21,275 ATOS(administrative, technical, and manual service personnel).

3. Figures are from decree 98–1282 of December 1998, published in the JournalOfficiel of December 31.

4. Figure is for the “Operating subsidies” expenditures category and does not include“Equipment and service operation” (47,600,000 FF or € 7,256,098) or“Miscellaneous expenditures” (51,674,511 FF or €7,877,212).

5. University with a capital u’ refers to the notion or idea.6. In the interest of simplicity, faculty will hereafter replace faculté. It should be

remembered, however, that in the French context the term refers to aninstitutionalized academic discipline or order of disciplines, as well as to thecorresponding local single-discipline institutions and their academic personnel. Itdoes not refer to all academic personnel of a given university. The facultés werelegislatively abolished in 1968.

7. Play on words: “en quête de” is looking for; “enquête de”: survey of.8. I insist on this point because French universities are rarely made an object of

research; they are much more likely to be the subject of essays, open letters, andcritical diagnoses, all based more on personal experience than research studies.Indeed, researchers at times seem ill at ease themselves examining universities with“scientific instruments.” We need only think of Pierre Bourdieu’s long chapter inHomo Academicus (1984) specifying the methodological precautions he followedin order to feel he could produce a valid study of academics; he only published theresults nineteen years after the surveys were done! Is there really any reason tobelieve that the risk of being too close to one’s object is greater for an academicstudying his or her colleagues than an academic studying the middle classes (towhich he or she just as fully belongs) or a woman sociologist studying the situationof working women?

9. While historical studies are numerous, and rich in detail and analysis, taken togetherthey cover some periods fully (the Third Republic, for example), others not at all.Furthermore, there are extremely few studies on the history of university institutions(with the exception of the Sorbonne, but these are mostly concerned with theMedieval period; cf. Guénée 1978). Indeed, French historical studies tend to reflectthe “faculty” slant of French university education; that is, its structuration aroundthe disciplines rather than multidisciplinary universities. It is to be hoped thatuniversity history will become an object of study, in the same way business firmhistory is (Chandler 1962; Fridenson 1972).

Chapter 1

1. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, for example, French universities turned to thepublic authorities for protection against the Roman Catholic Church. Thephilosopher Alain Renaut (1995) views this moment as one of the first“revolutions” in the history of the French University. Contesting Minot’sconclusions (1991) as well as analyses by Gusdorf (1964) and, more recently,Allègre (1993), he affirms that the history of university institutions in France is notthat of an enduring, continuous model, first developed in Paris at the end of thethirteenth century, but rather a series of “revolutions,” and that the modern Frenchuniversity is decidedly no longer comparable to its medieval ancestor.

2. See also Filâtre 1993. 3. Charles VII sought to limit university privileges to “real students,” but also to

exclude students from decision-making bodies and reinforce hierarchical structures(Verger and Vulliez 1986,124).

4. Louis XI intervened directly in matters of course content, namely to prohibitnominalist teachings (Verger and Vulliez, 1986).

5. The Imperial University comprised all institutions of secondary and highereducation; it thus did not correspond either in spirit or in composition to what istoday called a university.

6. The Consulate had ‘painstakingly’ determined “rules for examinations and howthey were to be given, down to the smallest details,” and engaged in “statecentralization and standardization of education throughout the country: in the nameof equality, all examinations everywhere had to be of equal difficulty” (Schriewer1972, 42–43).

7. Degree conferment was an extremely heavy task for the faculties. According toCharle, participation in the baccalauréat jury occupied all professors’ time. Hecites the following 1928 declaration by Dean Brunot of the Paris faculty of letters:“The baccalauréat alone takes up all faculty members from June on, and the wholeof its administrative staff from as early as April” (Charle 1994, 403).

8. Because the baccalauréat is the first university degree, every baccalauréat holdercan accede to university education. Blangy has shown how the baccalauréatchanged from a degree whose value “to society was approximately what gold is tothe currency market: an uncontested standard whose strength and legitimacy aredue to its scarcity” to “a piece of parchment that seemed to be losing its ‘intrinsic’value and legitimacy” (Blangy 1994, 2 and 3).

ENDNOTES • 129

9. According to Eicher, the proportion of students with a general studies baccalauréatwho enroll in higher education remained for a long time at 80 percent. It beganrising in 1970, reaching 96.8 percent in 1985–1986 and nearly 100 percent in 2001,according to the National Education Ministry’s Direction de l’Evaluation et de laPerspective department. For technical studies baccalauréat holders, the proportionwas under 60 percent before 1960, 76 percent in 1985, and 83 percent in 1994.Only 10 percent of vocational baccalauréat holders pursue higher education (Eicher1997, 192).

10. I say theoretically, because while students’ results on state examinations were validthroughout the nation, education and certifying procedure supply were notequitably distributed. “Nearly all fixed university programs of study were actuallytaught in lycées…the remaining academic degrees were conferred by the EcoleNormale Supérieure. This meant that the Ecole in the rue d’Ulm [the EcoleNormale Supérieure] had disproportionate functional weight… Not only was it theonly place (other than the Grandes Ecoles) where highest level university programswere taught, it also directly prepared students for the agrégation… For most of thenineteenth century, then, university elites were not only trained but also certifiedoutside university faculties’ (Karady 1985, 31).

11. This situation subsisted until 1836. The ordinance of August 9 of that year clearedup the legal confusion between secondary and higher education (Karady 1986a,272).

12. Teachers were supposed to have themselves obtained the degrees corresponding totheir functions, but as the profession had serious hiring difficulties due to its poorreputation in the society at large and the austere living conditions of its practitioners—members of the teaching corps were advised to remain unmarried and obliged tolive in collective housing—this regulation was often disregarded (Gerbod 1965).

13. It may seem inappropriate to compare Napoleon’s Conseil d’Instruction Civiquewith the present-day Conseil National des Universités : two-thirds of CNUmembers are elected by their academic colleagues (the other third are appointed bythe state); members have relatively narrow prerogatives and much looser ties to thecentral state; they have no hierarchical function. However, today’s centralacademic management body is clearly by nature a corporatist center.

14. This title was soon changed to Ministre de l’Instruction Publique.15. “The corporations of the ancien regime were spontaneous creations formed at the

base. They were an effect of social necessity, not the result of a regulationgenerated by a constituant authority. On the contrary, with the Napoleonic text, the[academic] corporation was constituted at the national scale through a decisionmade at the very top” (Chevallier, Grosperrin, and Maillet 1968,46 and 47).

16. “From the mid-seventeenth century there had been unbelievable scandals. Thefaculty of canon law in Paris no longer had a single professor: to hold on to itsrevenues, it had refused to take on colleagues” (Liard 1888, 70–71).

17. The name of this committee was modified several times over the nineteenthcentury, as was its makeup. In the interests of clarity I have chosen to call allversions of this body “Conseil de l’Instruction Publique.”

18. In the disciplines of law, economics, management, and political science, the mainand most prestigious way of acceding to the professorial corps is to pass the highlyselective agrégation du supérieur competitive examination. In letters and sciences,on the other hand, this exam does not exist at the higher education supérieur level,

130 • ENDNOTES

and candidates for the title of professor much first obtain a special accreditation tosupervise research called the habilitation à diriger des recherches, then bequalified by the relevant section of the Conseil National des Universités, only thencan they apply for a vacant professorship. A candidate for the habilitation writes upan extensive summary of his/her research, explaining how it holds together and fitsinto the field; this is then defended before a jury of professors or research directors.

19. Following Nerrien’s terms (1994).20. Weisz (1977) points out that of the twenty-four founding members of the Société

de l’Enseignement Supérieur, created in 1878, seventeen were members of theInstitut de France or the Académie Française. Louis Liard, minister of publicinstruction from 1884 to 1902 and theorist and implementer of the 1896 reform,was “one of the most promising French philosophers of his generation” (Renaut1995, 159).

21. Weisz (1977) also indicates the active role played after 1860 by intellectualreviews such as the Revue des Deux Mondes, the Revue Bleue, and the RevueScientifique in circulating ideas of reform within educated public opinion.

22. French academics also envied their German counterparts’ social position andmaterial conditions.

23. Charle (1983, 55) analyzed texts written by Charles Seignobos, Maxime Collignon,Gabriel Séailles, Camille Jullian, Georges Blondel, Emile Durkheim, Abel Lefranc,Maurice Caullery, Célestin Bouglé, Emmanuel De Martonne, and Jean Brunhesafter spending time in German universities.

24. Kant (1798) distinguished the higher faculties—law, medicine, and theology—fromthe lower one—philosophy. But as Renaut has remarked (1995), this vocabulary isdeceptive, since in Kant’s scheme, letters, as the lower faculty, was independent ofthe state and could therefore pursue truth, which actually put it in a higher positionthan the other three.

25. Data provided by Prost (1968, 243) from the Annuaire Statistique retrospective,vol. 55, 1939.

26. Paris was already imposing its full weight on the French university system. Morethan half of faculty students were enrolled in Paris, and “three-quarters of alldoctors of medicine, sciences, and letters were trained in Paris, as were half of alllicencies of law and science” (Weisz 1983, 23).

27. This is also Renaut’s interpretation (1995). Analyzing the dispute around the newSorbonne, he claims that the scientistic ideal did not win out because it ran intostructured, active opposition from actors who did not share it.

28. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was created in 1915,on the initiative of the American Sociology Association, the American EconomicsAssociation, and the American Political Science Association. At first it was badlyreceived by American academics, who saw it as a kind of union, but it acquiredlegitimacy by its defense of academic freedom and recommendation that thepractice of tenure be generalized (Lucas 1994).

29. Johns Hopkins University, founded in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1876, symbolizesthe development of American research universities. According to Daniel CoitGilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins, the institution’s main purpose was“the acquisition, conservation, refinement, and distribution of knowledge” (quotedin Lucas 1996, 172).

ENDNOTES • 131

30. The law of July 1896 made it legal to develop university-specific degrees, and thisright began to be used at the turn of the century, notably in the sciences. However,such degrees have never offered any real competition to national degrees.

31. The state and French academics found themselves objective allies. On the one hand,national degrees enabled the political and administrative powers to overseeeducational content and knowledge-testing modes. On the other, it was inacademics’ interest to develop national degrees since faculty funding wasdistributed mainly on the basis of student enrollments and students more readilyenrolled in study programs leading to state examinations.

32. At the time, professors received fixed salaries which could only be supplementedwith examination fees.

33. My presentation of Charle’s conclusion is much more cynical than his own. He putit thus: “The Republic wanted science, but also democracy. Its scholars wanted toameliorate their status, as their German colleagues had, but to do so collectively,not by increasing already existing gaps among them and reinforcing the strongest”(Charle 1994, 59).

34. According to Weisz, the oldest university professors were reluctant to agree to notrequiring a long period of secondary school teaching before accession to universityposts, and, in the fields of law and medicine, any moves to abolish their right topractice their profession while teaching (1983, p. 80).

35. I say inadvertently because in Renaut’s view, the development of Germanuniversities was fueled by ideas and debate rather than the concrete proposals thesegave rise to.

36. Renaut’s interpretation stands in contrast to Passeron’s affirmation that theuniversity created by “the saving law of 1896” was “first and foremost universityideology made institution” (Antoine and Passeron 1966, 152–153; Passeron’semphasis).

37. The liberal camp favored importing the German model virtually unchanged.38. “The desire to introduce a certain degree of competition coexisted with a desire to

put an end to the existing rivalry and regroup professors into vast, powerfulcorporatist organizations. The beauty and seductive power of the university notionlay precisely in its capacity to incorporate these contradictory purposes” (Weisz1977, 226).

39. Like Prost (1986), Weisz (1983) speaks of Albert Dumont and Louis Liard using“tactics” or “strategies” to implement the reform.

40. In 1885 there was a series of decrees, including one making faculties into legalentities. The year 1896 was the crowning year of reform, with the law of July 10.

41. This body was in charge of managing enrollment and study fees.42. This held back the development of research centers that might have competed with

Paris’s scientific institutions.43. These fears were clearly expressed during a comprehensive faculty survey in 1887,

commissioned by Jules Ferry. Weisz explains that while forty-four facultiesdeclared themselves in favor of developing universities, those that responded “tookcare to ensure that the new university organs would remain rubber-stamps forfaculty decision” (1983, 140).

44. Weisz (1983) cites efforts to encourage contacts and cooperation between facultiesin the same city.

132 • ENDNOTES

45. This suggests that the real innovation of the 1896 law lay in decrees for itsimplementation that permitted universities to collect tuition fees directly fromstudents (state examination fees excepted) and the law’s incentives to look fornonstate funding, which increased the proportion of independent resources (Weisz[1983] estimates the proportion of such resources in university budgets at 25percent in 1900). These incentives strangely resemble the instructions being givento French universities today.

Chapter2

1. Aside from the creation of university institutes in July 1920 (Schriewer 1972),there were no important reforms of French higher education between 1896 and1968 (Ewert and Lullies 1985). Chevallier, Grosperrin, and Maillet (1968) pointout, however, that following the July 1920 text, the notion of University expandedto include not only the faculties but also libraries, institutes, laboratories, and soforth.

2. Cf. Weisz 1983, chap. 9. On the founding of these associations cf. Charle 1994, 76and 77.

3. Differentiated management of French academic careers by discipline, still the ruletoday, stands in strong contrast to the uniform career advancement current in othercountries, namely, Germany, where modes of access to the professorial corps arestrictly identical for all institutions and disciplines.

4. To have a chance at a university post in history, for example, it is practicallyindispensable to have passed the agrégation du secondaire exam, and havingtaught in secondary school when applying for a higher education post is oftenconsidered an asset (Blangy and Musselin 1996).

5. Still, as Charle (1994) has shown, the relation between Paris and outside Pariscannot be understood if we do not take into account the particular nature of thatrelation for each major family of disciplines. In letters, Paris was preeminent; aprofessor at a provincial university who applied directly for a post at the Sorbonnesimply had no chance of being chosen. It was in letters that the system of patronsand clusters described by Terry Clark (1971, 1973) was most effective. The pull ofParis was not as strong in the sciences. A number of provincial universitiesacquired good reputations by investing in applied research, and the career gamewas not as exclusively Parisian.

6. By 1961, when the distinction between departmental and Paris faculties wasformally abolished, Paris’s dominant position in career management had alreadybegun to weaken. Paris academics were already less likely to make up the majorityin the disciplinary sections of the Conseil National des Universités (CNU), andefforts had been made to spread the student population more evenly over Frenchterritory and avoid concentrating research centers in the Paris region.

7. In letters, most assistants were secondary school level agrégés on temporaryassignment in universities; they were permanent civil servants but did not have apermanent function at the higher education level.

8. The 1981 Quermonne report on higher education academics clearly underlined thisdiversity.

ENDNOTES • 133

9. Charle attributes the state’s disengagement on matters involving individuals to thespecialization and increasing professionalization of university academics.

10. This system is quite similar to the one used today except that whereas a personcould remain on the aptitude list for an indeterminate amount of time (dependingon number of positions available each year), now one remains “qualified” only forfour years.

11. Gusdorf thought that it was an abuse of power for the rector even to be present atthe deans’ assembly (1964,160). “The rector as agent of the supreme authority wasclearly an obstacle to the existence of a full-fledged university under Napoleon”(ibid., 150).

12. Collégial may have two meanings. One is objective, and designates any structurewhere colleagues of the same rank make decisions collectively, in contrast tohierarchical situations. The other meaning is more normative; it refers to the qualityof the decision-making process. That process is called collegial when decisions aremade by consensus and/or compromise reached through discussion regardless ofwhether the actors involved are status peers. For Taylor (1983, p. 18), collegialdescribes a “community of individuals and groups all of whom may have differentroles and special ties but who share common goals and objectives for theorganization” (1983, 18). There the word “collegial” stands in contrast to“political.” Here I am concerned with the first meaning, which does not excludeconflict or the play of influence or presuppose that actors share the same values.

Chapter 3

1. This type of higher education expansion is observable in many other countries. InGermany higher education comprises Universitäten, Fachhochschulen, andspecialized schools of music, architecture, and so forth. In the United States itincludes both research universities and establishments that do not offer doctoralprograms, not to mention community and land grant colleges, and so forth. InEngland it made sense prior to 1992 to distinguish between universities andpolytechnics. The specificity of the French case resides in the fact that thedifferentiation process concerns both education and research—research in France isthe province of specific institutions (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifiqueor CNRS, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale or INSERM,Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique or INRA, etc.)—and has led to thedevelopment of the grandes écoles sector, whereas in other countries, theinstitutions that developed outside the university institution have never attained thesame level of prestige as universities, which remain the model of reference andexcellence. In these countries, other institutions were not created to make up foruniversity deficiencies but rather to meet needs that it is not universities’ purpose tosatisfy (cf., for example, American community colleges as presented in Brint andKarabel 1991).

2. Incomplete in contrast to “complete” universities with programs in all the majordisciplines, on the model of German universities or American research universities.

3. These two colloquia were the initiative of several renowned French scholars andbrought together political as well as academic figures to reflect on a desirable

134 • ENDNOTES

future for education and research. Participants’ recommendations were published(cf. Colloque de Caen 1966).

4. The mission of the new universities as conceived by Gusdorf (1964), for example,has little in common with the the ideas of the Colloques de Caen organizers, but allwere united in decrying the fragmentation of universities into faculties and thenonexistence of a French University.

5. The system by which the education ministry managed professorships, linking eachpost to a specific discipline and person.

6. While recommending the creation of a university assembly made up of allacademics and students, the 1966 Caen colloquium also called for a decision-making body to be called the university “senate” made up exclusively ofacademics.

7. The cited accounts pertain to highly particular establishments, however. TheUniversity of Parix X-Nanterre, created in the early 1960s in a suburb just west ofParis, was where the events of May began. The University of Paris VIII-Vincenneswas founded late in 1968 as an experimental project and installed initially in the Boisde Vincennes. The idea was to open up the university to society and transformstudent-teacher relations and how people related to knowledge. In the 1970s it wasa well-known place of protest.

8. For a more detailed presentation, see my 1987 work and Friedberg and Musselin1989. It should be specified that these empirical studies were conducted in 1984and 1985, respectively, before effective implementation of the Loi Savary.

9. In the mid-1970s, the ministry decided to make the process of allocating budgetedfunds among the different universities more transparent. A set of distributioncriteria were developed called GARACES (with reference to the Groupe d’Analyseet de Recherche sur les Activités et les Coûts des Enseignements Supérieurs [Groupfor analysis and research on higher education activities and costs]). Universitieswere under no obligation to adopt the same criteria in distributing funds amongtheir UERs, but most of them did.

10. Cohabitation refers to periods when the political camps of the parliamentarymajority and president are not the same. In this case the president is obliged tochoose a prime minister and constitute a government that is politically opposed tohim. From 1986 to the presidential elections of 1988, the Socialist presidentMitterrand governed (‘cohabited’) with the Gaullist prime minister Chirac.

11. On December 6,1986, during demonstrations against the proposed Loi Devaquet, ayoung student, Malik Oussekine, died after he was beaten up by police.

12. Figures calculated from National Education Ministry SEIS (Service des EtudesInforma tiques et Statistiques) documents and Millot and Orivel 1976.

13. Even if this measure had not been scrapped, it would have arrived “after thebattle”: the number of university students had already increased dramatically.

14. “It must first of all be made clear that each university shall have the right to createits own degrees (i.e., not accredited by the ministry) and to organize them as it seesfit, as long as they are not national degrees giving access to certain careers oraffecting nationwide competitive career entrance examinations” (Faure 1969,92).

15. In 1965 the Service de Plan Scolaire et Universitaire [Service for school anduniversity planning] was created; this was the first occurrence of the notion of carteuniversitaire in the administrative directory.

ENDNOTES • 135

16. This task area had been developed later than the other three; it was only in 1968that a bureau for university research was created.

17. From 1994 to 1997 the central administration was organized into a number ofoverarching departments known as directions générales. The Direction Généraledes Enseignements Supérieurs (DGS) was in charge of study programs andinstitutions (four-year contracts between the ministry and individual universities,and building construction). The Direction Générale de l’Administration desRessources Humaines et des Affaires Financières (DAG) was in charge ofpersonnel and budgetary means. The education ministry had been put in charge ofall public research, so university research was integrated into the DirectionGénérale de la Recherche et de la Technologie (DGRT).

18. This state of affairs was made particularly clear by the similar study I wasconducting at the same time at the German ministry of education, where Idiscovered the existence of Hochschul-referente and the crucial interfacing rolethis type of actor played between “his/her” university and ministerial colleagues.For a more detailed presentation of survey results see Friedberg and Musselin1993.

19. In deciding whether or not to allocate funds to a university research team, forexample, it was not necessary to be familiar with operating budgets; conversely,allocating funding for a research team had no effect on the overall sum allotted forthe operating budget.

20. I insist here on the absence of criteria relative to the situation of the universitiesoffering these study programs. It should be added that career opportunitiespresented by these programs were not a discriminating factor.

21. In fact, central administration directors were often themselves academics. This wasalready common in the late nineteenth century: “After several unsuccessfulcandidacies for academic posts, their career advancement blocked, certainprofessors from the provinces sought openings in the higher echelons of theInstruction Publique.… This explains at least in part the inordinate proportion offormer higher education literature teachers (essentially from faculties outside Paris)within the higher administration of that institution. Most higher and secondaryeducation directors, even some primary school directors, came from this pool”(Charle 1994, 237). Karady demonstrated another type of joint management,explaining that after the departure of Jules Ferry [minister for civic instruction from1879 to 1883], “the administration regularly consulted teachers by means ofcommissions and even surveys, which made it possible to include them in allimportant decisions affecting them” (1986b, 331). The corporation’s pervasiveinfluence on the state was also stressed by Girod de l’Ain (1989).

22. The various research scholarship posts (for doctoral students) and ATER positions(Attaches Temporaires d’Enseignement et de Recherche, mainly for doctoralstudents in the last year of thesis writing and young PhDs) are now temporary andonly renewable once. This clause introduced in France the “up or out” situationthat characterizes American and German junior academic job markets. On “up orout,” see Kahn and Huberman 1988; O’Flaherty and Siow 1995; and Siow 1995.

23. During this period, the only area in which universities and their presidentsintervened significantly was negotiations on opening positions. When universitycouncils refused (or couldn’t manage) to provide a priority ranking of post creation

136 • ENDNOTES

requests, the president could indicate his or her own preferences during annualnegotiations with the ministry.

24. After long and impassioned debate, the proposal to create a single body made up ofpermanent teachers of all statuses was abandoned. Since 1984, then, the professionhas been composed of two corps, maîtres de conferences and professeurs. A third,assistants, is dying out.

25. Candidate applications for all vacant posts were sent to the national-level council,which then established a list of three candidates and sent it to the university-levelCommission de Spécialistes, which could then choose from among the three. Localcommissions therefore had a kind of “limited autonomy.”

26. This term refers to hiring practices that favor “in-house” candidates over externalones.

27. It should be noted that elected members (particularly maîtres de conférences) werenot—and are still not—mandated on purely academic bases either. Elections to theCNU are conducted on a platform basis (not “research and publications”) or on thebasis of teachers’ union lists. This creates ambiguities about the nature of CNUmembers’ mandates, a characteristic that has also been pointed up for members ofCNRS national commissions (Vilkas, 1996).

Chapter 4

1. This phenomenon occurred in many countries. Windolf (1997) presents threedifferent types of explanation: a functionalist one, based on the concept of humancapital; individual strategies for acquiring improved socio-occupational status(Boudon 1973), and competition for social mobility.

2. Salmon (1982) estimated there were 586,466 students enrolled in university in1968–1969. The education ministry’s DEP (Direction de l’Evaluation et de laProspective) figure for 1985–1986 was 967,778, including engineering and IUTstudents (department information

3. memorandum 97.39). For an assessment of growth effects see Fave-Bonnet 1997.University enrollment (engi neering and IUT programs included but not InstitutsUniversitaires de Formation des Maîtres) increased by slightly more than half in1985–1986 and 1995–1996, from 967,778 to 1,485,583. Starting in 1994–1995, theannual growth rate decreased again to 2 to 3 percent. Since 1996–1997, enrollmentrates have decreased by about 1 percent a year, despite the increase in number ofbaccalauréat holders (DEP information memoranda 97.39 and 99.02)

4. It should be noted, for example, that of 1,048 French university academicssurveyed in 1991, 67.2 percent said they were in favor of a policy of concentratingfunding in institutions that have clearly demonstrated excellence (Crespo, Fave-Bonnet, von Kopp, and Weiss 1999). This does not, however, allow us to infer thatactually implementing such a policy would not elicit a strong negative reaction.

5. In 1993, when then higher education and research minister François Fillonproposed a law authorizing universities to organize themselves autonomously(going against the 1984 Loi Savary), not only did he encounter internal resistancebut also the proposed law was declared unconstitutional by the ConseilConstitutionnel in July of that year, after Socialist MPs submitted it for judgment(Merrien and Monsigny 1996; Merrien and Musselin 1999).

ENDNOTES • 137

6. The largest French administrative unit. Since 1964 France has been divided into 22régions, each made up of départements, the units instituted under the Revolution.

7. In June 1997 the GIGUE became the Agence de Modernisation des Universités.Universities contract with the agency on a strictly voluntary basis—all have done so—and may choose not to use its programs.

8. It could rightly be objected that giving universities the means to enroll and followtheir students as they see fit does not amount to granting them autonomy. But it issomething. And why not consider using a variety of technical tools to processinformation on the same object, for example, students? Universities in the UnitedStates do not all use the same enrollment and record-keeping programs;nonetheless, federal statistics are available.

9. It is possible to use Apogée only to enroll students, but that would not be a cost-effective use of the program.

10. It is, moreover, unlikely that it will be felt necessary to change this conceptualframework, since, as everyone knows, general principles get adapted, reformulated,and adjusted in various ways when applied.

11. We need only consider de Gaulle’s attempts to do so or the doomed Loi Devaquet(see chap. 3).

12. Procedures for accrediting troisième cycle graduate programs have recently beenmodified. They are now approved at the same time the contract between the stateand individual university is negotiated.

13. Contemporary university students are heterogeneous in social background,practices, initial education, and attitudes toward education (see Lapeyronnie andMarie 1992; Dubet 1994; Galland 1995; Erlich 1998).

14. It is now often possible to enter a grande école at a point other than at thebeginning of a given degree program or study cycle, and by other admission pathsthan the traditional ones of year-long preparatory classes and standardizedcompetitive entrance exams. Many grandes écoles have their own procedures.

15. It should be clarified that there was no explicit ministry policy behind thesemeasures; the ministry did not “choose” to develop education supply withinuniversities rather than count on institutional creation outside them. The new typesof study programs all aimed to make university “products” that would be betteradapted to labor market demands, but each of them has its own history anddynamic. The word “policy,” if it should be used at all, should not be understood asa program but rather an “emerging strategy” (Mintzberg and MacHugh 1985).

16. Figures calculated on the basis of data in Eicher 1997. MSB: Maîtrise de Scienceset Techniques [Masters in sciences and technology]; MIAGE: Maîtrised’Informatique Appliquée à la Gestion des Entreprises [computer technologyapplied to business administration]; MSG: Maîtrise de Sciences de Gestion[management sciences]; MSBM: Maîtrise de Sciences Biologiques et Médicales.Magistères are professional training degrees (bac+5 years).

17. At first, the Instituts Universitaires de Technologie ou IUTs attracted few students,and not the type they were designed for. In the 1980s this situation wasspectacularly reversed; the number of applicants for admission took off and IUTsbecame of major interest for local development; many towns volunteered to set upone. Decisions on this point were not always free from political maneuvering. Foranalyses of IUTs see among others Quermonne 1973; Van de Graaf 1976; Boudon1979, Cerych and Sabatier 1986; and Rhoades 1990.

138 • ENDNOTES

18. Raymond Boudon (1979) showed that the students that short IUT programs weredesigned to reach in fact reckoned on succeeding in long university educationprograms.

19. The Brevet du Technicien du Supérieur or BTS (Higher education technicalcertification), created in 1959, is obtained in lycées.

20. Institutes and schools situated within universities have a different status fromUFRs. The Loi Savary stipulated that IUT directors were to be appointed ratherthan elected and could make their own hiring decisions, and that the ministry couldgrant university funding and positions directly to IUTs, which were to befinancially autonomous.

21. A number of Instituts d’Administration des Entreprises (Business administrationinstitutes) did develop within the university sector. They initially had the status of“faculty institutes” (see Actes de Colloque 1997).

22. The Commission des 18 developed in the mid 1960s within the ministry’s highereducation department. It drafted proposals for the creation of IUTs and a reform ofpremier et deuxième cycles in letters and sciences faculties.

23. When the system of four-year contracts between the ministry and the universities wasbeing set up in 1998, there was clear disagreement between IUTs that wanted toestablish the contract in their own names and proponents of a single contract for allcomponents of a given university.

24. In 1999 vocational licences and masters were introduced (the latter a level rather thana degree), but they are too recent to have been included in this study and it is too earlyto predict their future.

25. That is, the internal differentiation process of subdividing disciplines intospecializations that then develop their own programs and thus vary the curricularange on offer. This process has been described and analyzed by Burton Clark, whoaffirms that “higher education is a differentiating society par excellence” (Clark1997b, 24).

26. The virtues associated with differentiation have been called into question, however(Teichler 1996, 78).

27. Proponents of the academic drift thesis do not all identify the same causes. ForReisman (1956), the process is due to governmental policy with a homogenizingthrust, whereas Birnbaum (1983) stresses the active role of “small” institutions andtheir tendency to imitate prestigious ones. For Rhoades (1990), academics’“natural” tendency is to dedifferentiate, but this can be counteracted if the state hasthe means and if the legislative power is stronger than the executive andadministrative ones. Van Vught (1997) proposes two explanatory systems withoutdistinguishing between them. Taking up notions used by population ecologists(Hannan and Freeman 1989), he suggests that organizations competing for scarceresources tend to become similar; then, on the basis of neo-institutionalist thought(notably Powell and DiMaggio 1991), he suggests that higher education is subjectto three types of institutional isomorphism: coercive, when a government imposes asingle model (Meek 1991); mimetic, leading institutions to copy successful ones;and normative, developing within a professional network (here, academics).

28. Goedegebuure et al. reach the same conclusion: “The unplanned flow of IUT orBrevet de Technicien du Supérieur (BTS) degree holders into universities and theincreased openness of universities and grandes écoles to the needs of societyfollowing implementation of the contract policy may blur what has been the clearly

ENDNOTES • 139

segmented structure of French higher education” (1993, 384). See chaps. 5 and 6for analysis of the ministry’s contract policy.

29. In business schools, for example, a doctorate did not use to be compulsory fortenured professor status, whereas now this is increasingly the norm.

30. “Students” figure is from 2001–2002 DEP count of university enrollments,including IUTs but not IUFMs (information memorandum 02–58). “Universitiesand academics’ figures, including IUTs but not ENSIs, are from 2000–2001 DEPcount (information memorandum 02–42).

31. “The 1999 budget for the “Higher education’ section, including universityresearch, will come to 51 billion 114 million francs [€ 8 billion 249 million] inordinary expenses and payment credits (Alain Clayes, “Education nationale, larecherche et la technologie,” appendix 18 of a general report by Didier Migaud ofthe Commission des Finances, de l’Economie, et du Plan on the proposed financelaw pour 1996).

32. Student enrollment fees are absurdly low in two respects: they are out of allproportion both to the real cost of education and to the return on investment ofhaving obtained a university degree.

33. It can rightly be objected here that the poor material situation of French universitiesis greatly aggravated by the fact that higher education budget breakdowns arehighly favorable to grandes écoles, to the detriment of universities.

34. This solution is novel with regard to the prevailing system; it is less so with regardto the one operative at the very end of the nineteenth century. The budget provisionsthat went with the law of 1896 encouraged diversification of funding sources. Atthe turn of the century, two-thirds of university budgets were covered by the state,whereas one-third came from external funding, part of which was from localcommunities (Weisz 1983; Verger 1986, 333).

35. Cassier (1996) has shown that academics manage this type of relation in such away as to meet the needs of the businesses they contract with while satisfying theirown research demands and scientific standards.

36. As reflected in the increasing proportion of self-raised funding in many universitybudgets.

37. Filâtre showed that cities were the first to get mobilized and that they used threearguments: democratization of higher education (if they had an extension, theycould offer university studies to students who could not afford housing in theparent-university city), and opportunities for local economic and urbandevelopment (Filâtre, 1993, 188).

38. For first assessments of the plan and this new example of contractual policy, seeBaraize 1996.

39. Etienne Minvielle’s title for a paper delivered at a seminar on hospital management(1997).

40. This applies to professors and maîtres de conférences only.41. This was the approach being used at the time of my 1987 survey of higher

education ministry departments.42. Education minister Claude Allègre was applying this policy in 1992 when he

reduced the number of deuxième cycle maquettes (Allègre 1993).43. Cf. for example, “L’originalité de Paris IX-Dauphine est remise en cause par le

justice” [Université de Paris IX-Dauphine’s original ways called into question bythe justice department], Le Monde, August 2, 1997, and a brief article on the same

140 • ENDNOTES

page, “Des formations sélectives sans fondement juridique” [Legally unfoundedselective study programs].

44. Cf. the following three articles in Le Monde: “La pratique des droits d’inscription‘sauvages’ s’étend,” [The practice of charging unauthorized enrollment feesspreads], July 25, 1995; “Le tribunal administratif annule le budget de l’universitéParis IX-Dauphine: les redevances complémentaires aux droits d’inscription sontremises en causes,” [Administrative court annuls University of Paris IX-Dauphine’s budget: charging complementary fees is not acceptable] December 8–9, 1997; “Les universités multiplient les suppléments aux droits d’inscription”[Universities multiply enrollment fee supplements], July 11, 1997.

45. The fees remained minimal: while 56 out of 64 universities used such practices, in50 percent of cases the amounts requested did not exceed 100 francs (€15.25)(study by the Fédération des Associations Générales d’Etudiants, cited in LeMonde, July 11, 1997).

Chapter 5

1. I will therefore not discuss the Université 2000 plan, though it fully follows thecontractual approach. Indeed, the change inheres not so much in the use of ministry-university contracts itself as in the fact that, through the implementation of suchcontracts, the ministry’s approach became for the first time focused on universitiesrather than disciplines. Université 2000 contracts brought the central administration,académie rectors, and territorial units into play, rather than university presidents;they therefore played a lesser role in changing ministry focus, although, as AntoineProst has pointed out to me, the building construction that resulted from theUniversité 2000 plan gave physical, material consistency to university existence.

2. According to Cohen, the ministry “denied” the existence of this law: “thecommitment to autonomy [for universities] was vitiated by ministerial decrees thatslowly drained away the autonomy granted by the 1968 law"(1978, 164).

3. This model is reminiscent of the thinking of certain American neo-institutionalistpolitical scientists on the state as autonomous from interest groups, and publicauthorities’ ability to conceive and develop new types of public action themselves(cf. Evans, Rueschemayer, and Skocpol 1985).

4. The only regulatory basis for it at first was ministerial directive 89–079 of March24,1989, published in the Bulletin Officiel 13 (March 30): 761–765.

5. It should be noted that the political initiators of this action did not themselvesanticipate the scope it would acquire. In his 1993 account of his experience asspecial adviser to the education ministry, Claude Allègre devotes only four pages tothe contract policy.

6. Cf. the chapter entitled “L’espace contractuel” in Lucas 1987; the author waspresident of the Université de Lyon II from 1979 to 1986. He clearly refers tocontractual relations between universities and the ministry, but only asmanifestations of an overall “contract phenomenon”; that is, first and foremost thedevelopment of multiple types of partnerships between individual universities andsurrounding actors. It should also be noted that the idea of contracting betweenstate and universities was often defended by the SGEN-CFDT [Syndicat Général

ENDNOTES • 141

de l’Education Nationale union, affiliated with the Confédération FrançaiseDémocratique du Travail, the major center-left labor union].

7. I first learned of this experiment in December 1995 at a colloquium in Parisorganized by the Association des Administrateurs Civils et Inspecteurs Générauxde l’Education Nationale, made up of former students of the Ecole Nationaled’Administration or ENA [grande école for training the French administrativeelite], when a member of the audience explained how he had participated in acontract negotiation with the ministry back in the mid-1970s.

8. The CNE did devote a few reports to disciplinary evaluations.9. And particularly remarkable given that other European countries had chosen

disciplined-focused evaluation systems.10. Interestingly, the CNE’s influence on universities was also weak. Few universities

knew how to use CNE documents to develop their own thinking process.11. In the 1980s the BQR (bonus for quality research) was established, allowing

universities to allocate as they saw fit up to 15 percent of research funding from theministry—not insignificant but still not much.

12. It should be noted that the contract policy for research was still being implementedin centralized, discipline-focused fashion, perhaps even more pointedly so, at thevery time that university contracts, which helped strengthen the “university” level,were introduced.

13. We need only recall the Third Republic reformers’ texts, and the declarations thatcame out of the Colloques de Caen.

14. In this respect, the change process in French higher education that I studied isdifferent from the cooperative process in northern European countries as analyzedby Simoulin (1997, 1999). In northern Europe various groups pushed their ownstance, which was more or less contradictory to the others though all wereinterdependent; the different approaches to reform ultimately gave rise to a newtype of action, a kind of synthesis of all positions, a resultant. The French contractpolicy, in contrast, was not the culmination of past initiatives.

15. This was, moreover, how promoters of the policy themselves seem to haveunderstood their action. They presented themselves as innovators or pioneers, notas recipients of past experience.

16. In this connection it should be remembered that the policy for four-year researchcontracts had gone off track.

17. The Socialist Party has always been opposed to selective admission.18. Though some liked to point to his brief teaching career.19. This term, or the expression “voluntary public agreements” used by Lascoumes and

Valluy (1996), are less ambiguous that the word “contract” because the contractsestablished between the ministry and universities were middle-term negotiatedcommitments rather than legally binding contracts. They had no legal existence.

20. As Bezes explains (2001), Michel Rocard supported the idea of contractual relations:“Fewer laws, more contracts; fewer oversight and control arrangements, moreresponsibilities—this is the balance that must be reached if we are to combinemodernization and solidarity” (Rocard [1985] in a speech to the 1984 SocialistParty congress in Toulouse; quoted in Bezes).

21. Mitterrand was referring to Michel Crozier’s 1979 work, On ne change pas lasociété par décret

142 • ENDNOTES

22. Pierre Muller has often said that the education ministry’s contract policy reflectedadjustment of the “higher education” sectorial system of reference to the all-encompassing “market economy” system of reference. I disagree. It is true that“contract” is part of economic vocabulary, but the contract “doctrine” developed inthe university sector does not involve or reflect market logic. This point of debatereflects the problematic nature of Jobert and Muller’s notion of overall system ofreference (1987), which can become a nondiscriminating, catchall, term. While itmay indeed be argued that efforts to rationalize university budgeting are additionalevidence of the impact of market logic, we could also say that the samephenomenon occurring twenty years earlier would have been cited as consistentwith the “modernization” system of reference. Conversely, the switch inagricultural policy direction in the 1960s is not incompatible with the “market”system of reference. Might not promoting large farms and developing moreextensive agriculture be understood to fit more readily into the “market economy”system of reference than the “state-driven modernization” one?

23. Documents made available to me by interviewees.24. The contract solution was also mobilized in implementing the Université 2000

project (cf. Baraize 1996). 25. Excerpt from a November 1989 memorandum for “university advisers” (conseillers

d’université); that is, university academics each appointed by the ministry to help aset of individual universities prepare their contracts [see“Balance of power andproduction of meaning within the ministry”].

26. Cf. Berrivin’s detailed comparative analysis of the Ministry of Public Works andEDF-GDF [Electricité de France-Gaz de France, the state-owned public utilitiescompany] (1995) and his and my comparison of Public Works and HigherEducation (Berrivin and Musselin, 1996). Results of a briefer study of two FranceTélécom operating departments (Musselin 1992) confirm conclusions from thethree more detailed case studies.

27. On this point as it pertains to higher education, see Chevaillier 1998.28. The aim of the university contract policy was to enable universities receiving less

funding to catch up to those with more, with an eye to reducing structuralimbalances among various French regions. The latter concern was emphasizedwhen the contractual policy was launched: it was decided that the first wave ofcontracts would be for universities in the north and west, regions where the rate ofaccess to higher education was relatively low and universities tended to beunderfunded.

29. For a more detailed presentation, see Berrivin 1995.30. Speaking at a recent colloquium, a former university president suggested the

difficulty of galvinizing actors and structures to prepare a third four-year contract,wondering aloud what could fuel the process. His question reminds us that themajor point of such contracts is not so much the document ultimately produced asthe collective, participatory process of producing it. Contracts were not so much(management) instruments as means of internal leverage.

31. Who, for example, could be in a position to compel the ministry to honor itscommitments?

32. The title of Patrice Duran’s 1993 article: “Piloter l’action publique, avec ou sans ledroit.”

ENDNOTES • 143

33. I shall therefore not address the extremely interesting question of how contractualpolicy came to be favored in France as an instrument for modernizing public actiongiven that the country, if we follow d’Iribarne (1989), is characterized by anoncontractual tradition.

34. The central administration has been reorganized several times since, and the DPDUhas disappeared. Still, since that date the organization chart has always included aservice or department for universities.

35. In fact, there was no head department. As cabinet member and special adviser tothe minister, Claude Allègre, saw to interdepartment cooperation.

36. The DESUP’s official power of accrediting troisième cycle programs wastransferred to the DRED; carte universitaire planning tasks went to the DPDU;accreditation decisions now had to be integrated into contracts, which the DPDUcontrolled; certain budget line segments that had been in the hands of DESUPbureaus—a practice that Claude Allègre criticized as making the DESUP theequivalent of a welfare service window—were abolished so as to concentrate allbudget decision-making power with the DPDU.

37. Enarques: term referring to graduates of the elite ENA, Ecole Nationaled’Administration.

38. Franck Métras, former president of the Université de Pau, became director of theDESUP; Armand Frémont, former rector of the Académie de Grenoble, becamedirector of the DPDU; Bernard Gasol, former cabinet director for educationminister Savary, took over the DPES, and Vincent Courtillot, a colleague of ClaudeAllègre’s from the Institut du Physique du Globe, took over the DRED. With theexception of Courtillot, Allègre had never worked with any of the new directors,and they did not know each other.

39. After the 1981,1986, and 1988 elections, personnel changeover amongadministrative cadres in ministries such as industry and public works was fairlylimited, while in culture and education it was extensive (Lochak 1986,1992).

40. “Institutional arrangements” is the generic term used by Weir to refer to “patterns ofrecruitment to administrative posts and procedures governing advancement” aswell as a “hierarchical pattern of authority reflected in a tightly controlledinformation flow…and in the relationship between political and administrativeofficials” (1989, 59).

41. This never affected the excellent relations among the four directors, referred to as“the four musketeers.” As for the other departments, the DPDU and the DRED forall intents and purposes ignored each other, and the DPES remained external to thecontract policy.

42. Personal notes entitled “La politique contractuelle et le rôle des conseillers” (Thecontract policy and advisers’ role) specified everyone’s role once again after a“seminar” attended by all on February 15 and 16,1990. In it, the universityadviser’s task of helping universities re flect on their present and future situationwas confirmed, though they were advised to keep “pedagogic” advisers informedon points of interest to them (related to teaching, for instance). For the expertevaluation phase, the document specifies that “the DPDU is to remain in thebackground” and that “the role of university advisors at this stage is to maintainties with university institutions.”

43. I use “doctrine” here because it was the term used by contractualization actors,despite the fact that the word connotes a well-established, rigid approach.

144 • ENDNOTES

44. The DESUP’s lack of “voice” can perhaps be understood by the fact that the workof making explicit and legitimating practices, what Brunsson (1993) called“justification,” is timeconstrained action. While it may be central when newpractices are introduced, once they have been institutionalized, the tie betweenpractices and their justification slackens and becomes difficult for actors toperceive. Developing a discourse in favor of discipline-based steering would havesupposed that DESUP members had enough distance on their own practices tofind, or rediscover, meaning in them, meaning that had become implicit andtherefore invisible.

45. The absence of any opposed “doctrine” was particularly glaring if we consider thefact that all persons moved from the DESUP to the DPDU through reorganizationadopted the DPDU “doctrine” fairly readily. They did not feel they weredisavowing what they had believed in in order to play the “contractualization”game, because to some degree there was no longer a clearly identified “ideationalcorpus” to hold on to or defend.

46. It was not constructed in reaction to another overall approach, in contrast to whatUrfalino showed for the maisons de la culture [facilities for cultural events andactivities constructed in a number of major French cities on the initiative of AndréMalraux], whose principles were defined in opposition to the wishes of theAssociation des Villes [a body representing all French towns]. Nor was itconstructed through movement back and forth between center and periphery, incontrast to what Berrivin (1995) described for the Ministry of Public Works. Thecenter left the initiative to the universities while it steered the overall process.

47. These meetings worked to train future university advisers, who would be called to“hop a moving train.” They also strengthened ties among current advisers,consolidated and disseminated knowledge, and helped harmonize practices.

48. At the time, funding under contract represented about 5 percent of operating budget(not including salaries) and included post creation.

49. In a document dated October 1989 which would serve as the basis for a meetingwith western and northwestern universities, the following list of issues or themes wasproposed: “a realistic assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of theUniversity”; “figuring out how to take in bac-holders and premier-cycle students”;“integrating the university project into the region: relevance of educationprograms, links to the occupational environment, relations with local communities”;“responding to the need to train 300,000 new teachers by the year 2000”; “a policyfor forecasting need for academic and nonacademic staff”; “actions concerningstudents’ living and study conditions.”

50. Over the year 1990–1991, the first training-action seminars on managingnonacademic staff were organized, followed the next year by seminars on studentmanagement. It was also in 1990–1991 that the first series of exchanges onmanagement problems at the university level was launched, for example, internaldistribution of financial resources, criteria for distributing nonacademic posts,management of university premises, and so forth.

51. Duran’s definition applies well here: “The contract marks the more or less equalweight of the actors that are party to it; for all intents and purposes they havebecome partners” (1999, 163).

52. Claude Allègre clearly announced this goal in a letter dated May 22, 1998, touniversity presidents and académie rectors: “This moment [contract] negotiation

ENDNOTES • 145

that arises every four years is a special one: university project and national policycan be set side by side and compared; ideas on the carte universitaire andterritorial development can be further developed; policies for cooperation with othereducational institutions, research organizations, economic and cultural actors canbe reenergized; the democratic life of the university can be refreshed.” And hereaffirms the idea that the central administration is and should be directlyconcerned: “I expect implementation of the contract policy to prove an opportunityfor method innovation within the central administration, too: more flexibility,closer working together, more contacts with actors in the field…” (1998).

53. The struggle is inevitable because the two types of logic are “by nature”incompatible. Paradeise reaches the same conclusion regarding steering of CNRSresearch. The contradiction between discipline-focused logic and universityinstitution logic in the present case corresponds to what Paradeise identifies as thecontradiction between the standard ideal of community regulation and jointregulation. In the first model, it is understood that “no external body is competentto evaluate the content and projects [of the scientific community], instituted in theform of disciplines endowed with their own internal dynamic” (Paradeise 1998,215). In the second model, the organization is accorded the role of arbiter betweeninstituted disciplines, whose demands are not all “equally receivable” (221). But asthe author shows, these two ideal types are opposed to each other right down theline, in terms of “internal economy,” “actors’ conceptions,” “mode of managingthrough delegated confidence,” “use” made of “resources,” and “place” given to“argumentation.” They can never be combined; they can at best coexist.

54. Josette Soulas, Alain Abecassis, and Thierry Malon jointly headed the GIGUE from1993 to 1997, while continuing in their respective positions, Soulas at IGAEN[Inspection Générale de 1’Administration de l’Education Nationale], Abecassis asdelegate-general to the Conference des Présidents d’Université or CPU, and Malonas university secretary-general. On June 1, 1997, the GIGUE became the Agencede Modernisation des Universités, and Abecassis became director, Soulas deputydirector. After Abecassis’s departure in June 1998, Soulas was director of theAgence until 2000.

55. The GIGUE’s Nabuco (see chap. 4) improved accounting management, but GIGUEdirectors were also expecting that introducing this tool would both obligeuniversities to reflect on how to organize their financial and accountingdepartments and distribute powers and responsibilities within them, and help themdevelop university budget and funding policies.

56. Statutorily, the education minister is CPU president.57. In 2001, after the original French edition of this work, the agency was renamed the

Agence de Mutualisation des Universités.

Chapter 6

1. University adherence to the policy was facilitated by the material incentivesaccompanying contracts. Still, most universities did not have purely utilitarianreasons for committing to contractualization, and those in which the process is themost dynamic are not those in which contracts have been seen as merely a sourceof additional funding (Lipiansky and Musselin 1995).

146 • ENDNOTES

2. The Agence de Modernisation des Universities commissioned a qualitative studyfrom us on governance in four universities; this produced a comparative report(Mignot-Gérard and Musselin 1999) and a quantitative questionnaire sent to 37universities, leading to a second report (Mignot-Gérard et Musselin 2000).

3. In 1994, in the framework of the Higher Education and Research Ministry’s budgetforecasting unit, led by Bertrand Girod de l’Ain, we organized a study on contractpreparation, negotiation, and follow-up in three universities consisting primarily ofmore than seventy interviews (Lipiansky and Musselin 1995; Musslin 1997a,1997b).

4. Let the reader see these remarks less as a claim for my own work than anexpression of slight irritation at seeing renowned French scholars develop anoverall analysis of French universities on the basis of real but often isolated ortrivial facts, thus adopting a less than scientific approach, of a sort that theythemselves would criticize in their students’ work. Of course I have nothing againstposition taking, opinion demonstrating, or proposal making as such. But what are infact only opinions, positions, or proposals should not, it seems to me, be presentedas if they were scientific analysis.

5. To date, four studies on this question have been done in France, one each on thehistory and mathematics sections of the Conseil National des Universités or CNU(Blanchet and Musselin 1996; Hanin 1996) and one each on university specialistcommissions for history and mathematics in five universities (Blangy and Musselin1996; de Oliveira 1998).

6. Universities could of course use the data they collected and processed onthemselves for their own purposes, but that was not the idea behind having them doit.

7. To use the computer program Apogée to calculate student grades, it is necessary to“formalize” the mode of calculating averages (number of grades for a given course,weight of each grade, and so forth), make it transparent, and stop modifying it for atime. This ran counter to practices for certain study programs, in which courseworkand grading rules were likely to be reviewed and changed every year.

8. As Gueissaz has shown (1997, 1999), this leads to reviewing and changing howtasks are organized and divided up among teachers and administrators—anadditional source of tension.

9. For analysis of problems that arise when computerization is introduced in otherorganizations see Pavé 1989.

10. Nabuco, for example, is understood and used above all as an accounting tool,although it was conceived as a tool for developing budget policy.

11. This potential was used differently in the three universities studied (Lipiansky andMusselin 1995). We identified three factors that might affect use: (1) existingsituation: existing barriers and tensions often proved insurmountable obstacles; notonly was the contractualization process not enough to overcome them, it was itselfblocked by them; (2) the way contractualization was carried out internally:universities that set up a broad participatory process and collectively constructed acommon project produced contracts in which individual projects were not merelyjuxtaposed; (3) whether or not a few major academic or administrative figures weremobilized and committed, since the contractualization process requires activesteering (see Musselin 1997a).

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12. Dubois’s analysis (1997b and 1997c) of the different strategies universities developregarding supply of education programs shows that not all of them choose the samepaths and that education supply is a means for universities to translate their ownpreferences into action.

13. These two types of delegation need to be distinguished from each other. Withdelegation of expert evaluation, experts give recommendations on a question butdecision-making remains with representatives; they both understand the substanceand reasoning of the experts and, when deciding, may also introduce otherconsiderations (political, ideological, etc.). The notion of delegation of judgment,on the other hand, should be reserved for situations where “official”decisionmakers have no means of assessing experts’ work and do not diverge fromtheir recommendations.

14. Without there having necessarily been open discussion or a vote.15. In one of the four universities studied in February 1998, Conseil d’Administration

members voted down the budget proposed by the executive office and presidentbecause they felt they had once more been given a fait accompli. They thendistributed funding on different grounds than what administrators had proposed,and it was decided to modify the budgetpreparing process for the next time around.

16. Current presidents seem to know this: the “Presidents’ working breakfasts”organized by the Agence de Modernisation on such themes as “Financiallyimplementing university policy” and “Human resource management” have been asuccess.

17. Qualitative survey-based study of seven cases, three in late 1994 and four in early1996, produced the following results: in five out of seven cases, president’s teamswere active and influential in university governance; of the five “strongpresidency” cases, two presidents marginalized UFR directors, who foundthemselves in extremely weak positions in relation to both the president’s officeand their own UFRs; in the two other cases, presidents relied heavily on supportfrom UFR directors, who in turn found themselves in the awkward position ofmaking decisions that were not always appreciated in their UFRs; in only one casecan we speak of a cohesive team, here made up of the president and certain UFRdirectors who did not think their role should be limited to primus inter pares and inturn adopted a more interventionist style.

18. Though I agree with the main features of Compagnon’s diagnosis of the Frenchuniversity system (1998), namely, his point about “the fundamental incompatibilitybetween the values of the French Republic and those of the University” (179), I donot share his pessimistic view of the overall situation, which he says can beimproved only through “a comprehensive review and rehaul of the higher educationsystem and the creation of conditions for real competition among universities,including both faculties and professional schools” (176). In the last years we haveseen that universities came to exist despite the fact that these two conditions had notbeen met.

19. The ARESER (Association de Réflexion sur les Enseignements Supérieurs et laRecherche) is a group of academics, which included Pierre Bourdieu up until hisdeath and Christophe Charle, who reflect on the development of higher educationin France. In 1997 they published a work entitled Quelques diagnostics et remèdesurgents pour une Université en péril [Diagnoses and urgent remedies for animperilled University].

148 • ENDNOTES

20. Not to mention the fact that these proposals clearly favor the existence of a national“Université” idea that could be centrally defined and become a common referencefor all French universities!

21. The fact that recent studies on two other sectors have produced very differentresults supports the claim of university sector specificity. In analyzing the networkof institutional actors involved in running the city of Paris’s sewage and waterpurification systems, Tatéossian (forthcoming) has found that relations among themhave long been integrated into a highly consistent and cohesive “institutionalenvironment”; alternative approaches are few and remained marginal. Likewise,Bergeron (1998, 1999) has shown how and why there was fixation in France on asingle model for treating drug addiction (the psychological or psychoanalyticmodel), explaining that French focus on this single “treatment” process wasstrengthened by a cognitive system of representations, values, and norms shared bypoliticians, treatment professionals in drug addiction centers, the centraladministration, and others. There is a striking contrast between these situations,where representations, practices, and regulation modes reinforce each other to thepoint of excluding any other possible solution, and the diversity of approachesobservable within the French university system.

Chapter 7

1. This of course does not apply to the few authors who have tried to take intoaccount both components of academic work, studying either the content ofpedagogical activities or how they fit in or mesh with research activities. Cf.Bertrand 1993; Bertrand et al. 1994; FaveBonnet 1990, 1993; Zetlaoui 1997, 1999.

2. To these may be added Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of homo academicus in terms ofthe notion of “university field.” He specifies the need to examine “the structure ofthe field of power and the relation which the university field taken as a wholemaintains with it, and analyze—as far as the empirical data permit—the structureof the university field and the position which the different [disciplines] occupywithin it” (1984, 48; English, 1988, 32).

3. Merton’s scientific ethos is composed of four norms: universalism, communism(later changed to “communalism” to avoid confusion), disinterestedness or thescientist’s integrity, and organized skepticism.

4. T.N.Clark’s expression (1973), which was translated into French as cercle [circle].5. Studies conducted in the 1950s and 1960s on private research laboratories

systematically showed that the professional logic of the scientific communitycompeted in such labs with organization logic (cf. Glaser 1964; Kornhauser 1962;Marcson 1960; Meltzer 1956; Shepard 1962).

6. See, for example, Merton’s description of the disastrous effects of the Nazi regimeon science (1962b) and comparative studies by Ben David (1984, 2d ed.) analyzinghow scientifically advanced or behind various countries are by examining howscientific activities in them are structured.

7. The strong program consists of four propositions: (1) sociology of knowledge“would be causal, that is, concerned with the conditions which bring about belief orstates of knowledge… 2) it would be impartial with respect to truth and falsity,rationality or irrationality, success or failure… 3) it would be symmetrical in its

ENDNOTES • 149

style of explanation. The same types of cause would explain, say, true and falsebeliefs… 4) It would be reflexive. In principle its pattern of explanation wouldhave to be applicable to sociology itself” (Bloor 1976, 4–5). For a more detailedpresentation, see Lynch (1993), who lists most sociological works, and Giere(1998), who presents philosophy of science works inspired by this approach.

8. Once this happens, there is no longer any point to the battle between internalistsand externalists. As Latour wrote: “The irony of this affair is that the ‘internalists,’who are always trying to isolate researchers from their allies, are actually asking usto study people who are of no interest to anyone, who don’t have any access toresources beyond their own, who cannot even begin to have their ownlaboratories…. Conversely, the “externalists,’ who like to study the socialdimension of science or science policy but are careful not to descend into content,therefore seem to tell us about people incapable of holding together the variouspersons or groups interested in their projects and desiring to invest in them.…These enemy groups of analysts are in fact both talking about failed scientists!”(1989, 392).

9. Latour opens Science in Action (1989) with a description of three scientists, whomhe situates in different periods, countries, and institutions without ever referring tothese features in his analysis and interpretation of what they are doing.

10. It is not surprising that interest in universities as organizations should haveemerged in a country where, as Touraine, among others, has shown (1972), thedevelopment of university education was fundamentally linked to the emergence ofinstitutions established outside all state control and prior to the constitution of anorganized academic profession.

11. Hardy is one of the best representatives of this approach. She first sought tounderstand what effects a single contextual development (in this case, budget cuts)had on a group of universities whose initial operating modes were collegial,another where they were political, and so forth, and showed that the responses andtheir internal consequences depended in large measure on the initial model (1989,1992). She also examined what conditions favor the development of one modelover the others (Hardy et al 1983).

12. Taylor (1983) is representative of this approach. He showed that in the case of theUniversity of Calgary, certain facts corresponded to the bureaucratic modelwhereas others corresponded to the collegial or political model or organizedanarchy. Ellström (1983), Davies and Morgan (1982) and Birnbaum (1988) use thesame approach.

13. Hardy goes beyond the four models and on the basis of Mintzberg’s typology(1979), distinguishes six cases for Brazilian universities: simple structure,charismatic bureaucracy, professional bureaucracy, mechanical bureaucracy,adhocracy, and division. A “professional bureaucracy” can be missionary, political,technocratic, or anarchic—her table thus includes ten variants (1990, 38–39).

14. Indeed, users of these models often seem to have forgotten they were developedfrom studies of universities. The most flagrant example is surely the garbage canmodel, which was used and developed extensively in analysis of public policy(namely Kingdon 1984), in works from which the associated notion of organizedanarchy and reference to universities tended to disappear.

15. Cf. Birnbaum’s many works, especially 1986 and 1992; also Vroom 1983, andNeumann 1989.

150 • ENDNOTES

16. For a discussion of different definitions of the word “university,” see, for example,Renaut’s introduction to Les Révolutions de l’Université(1995).

17. A widely accepted thesis today is that new education programs either give rise tonew institutional sectors or are developed through internal diversification inexisting institutions, and that in both cases there is a process of dedifferentiation(see Meek et al. 1996 for a synthetic, comparative presentation of these works). Inthe first case, new institutions seek to adopt the “standards” of the oldest and mostprestigious ones (“academic drift”), whereas in the second all institutions ultimatelyoffer the same education supply.

18. The Carnegie Foundation’s recent extensive survey of higher education academicsin thirteen countries is fairly exemplary. Such studies provide a snapshot ofstructures specific to each country and of attitudes and opinions of academics inthem at a given moment (Enders and Teichler 1995; Altbach 1996).

19. Is a directeur d’/UFR really comparable to a dean, a université to a university?Maurice, Sellier, and Silvestre (1992) showed the differences between a Frenchcontremaître (factory foreman) and a German Werkmeister, despite the apparentstatutory similarity between them. Why should the situation be any different foruniversities?

20. It should be specified at the outset that the term “configuration” here is not relatedto Elias’s use of the same word to designate the process by which members of asociety are linked and integrated (cf., among others, Elias 1970). In my usage,“configuration” does not have this societal dimension and does not designate astructure of normative constraints that profoundly affect the individual’spersonality.

21. To draw an accurate diagram of these relations, we would need to add, at the veryleast, research organizations and groups as well as companies and localcommunities, and to adopt a less monolithic conception of overseeing ministry,universities, and academic profession.

22. According to Crozier and Erhard Friedberg (1980, 153), a concrete system ofactions is “a structured human ensemble which employs relatively stable gamemechanisms to coordinate the actions of its participants. It furthermore maintainsits games and the relationships among them, by means of mechanisms ofregulation. These, in turn, form the content of still other games”. For the samereasons, configurations are also not “public policy networks”. In fact, the notionsof policy network and concrete system of action are very similar; both areunderstood as “tools for describing a fragmented state” (Le Galès andThatcher 1995). Moreover, studies using the policy network approach (cf. Marshand Rhodes 1992; Marin and Mayntz 1991) are not really interested in the internaloperation modes of the collective actors they study; network nodes remain obscure.In my concept of university configurations, such nodes are themselves objects ofstudy, particularly important ones in that they are instances of interdependence.

23. In other words, a change in regulations does not in itself change a given nationalconfiguration. Modifying French accreditation procedures, for example, in no waychanges the fact that this procedure is at the core of ministry-university interactionsin France.

24. We can say, however, that from one country to another university configurationsare more or less constraining; that is, the framing of what is possible can be moreor less open. Individual actors’ autonomy from the interdependences constitutive of

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a given configuration is greater or lesser by level and by types of constraint theconfiguration imposes.

25. In analyzing such a configuration, then, we can reconstitute the sectorial system ofreference (Jobert and Muller 1987), but only on condition that meaning bereconstructed from observed action, whereas with Jobert and Muller’s notion, themove is in the opposite direction: meaning is what makes action comprehensible.

26. Zetlaoui clearly shows this in her doctoral thesis on academics’ relation touniversity “space” (buildings, grounds) (1997).

27. Cf. in particular Meyer and Rowan 1977.28. A “university” configuration in this case, but the notion can readily be enlarged to

include sectors other than higher education.29. My analytic grid is similar to that proposed by a team of British, Norwegian, and

Swedish researchers for studying the effects of university reforms on academicvalues in Great Britain, Sweden, and Norway (see Henkel 1996; Kogan et al.2000). The authors also use three different analytic levels: macro, meso, micro.However, their analytic framework, like that of B.R. Clark presented above,neglects the existence of the intermediate and national structures by means ofwhich the academic profession is managed and defends its interests.

30. Cf. research studies by Brisset-Sillion on the state of New York and its publicuniversities (1994a, 1994b, 1996, and 1997), an example of how this analytic gridmay be transposed onto a place other than France or Germany.

31. In the French case, given that the trend that began in the 1980s is continuing andintensifying, and that local actors, both political and economic, are becomingincreasingly relevant and active interlocutors for universities, it would perhapsmake sense to transform the “triangle” of interdependent relations into a “square.”

32. In this process as I have followed it, it is crucial to compare data for two countries,as this facilitates the integration of results obtained at the local level into a givennational framework. Having such data enabled me to identify what pertained to thespecificity of the local situation under study and what could be imputed to the factthat that situation was part of a broader context.

Chapter 8

1. E.g., in the French case, modifications of the national study program maquettes.2. E.g., the Loi Savary.3. Quotations are from Piore’s preface to the collective tribute to Jean-Jacques

Silvestre (Gazier, Marsden, Silvestre 1998, 5). Hall’s typology for change in publicpolicy (1993) is comparable to Silvestre’s in that it distinguishes between first-orderchange that does not affect goals or instruments, second-order change that affectsinstruments without affecting the hierarchy of goals, and third-order change thataffects all three constitutive components of public policy, namely, sets ofinstruments, settings of policy, and the hierarchie of goals. The third categorycorresponds to paradigm change.

4. This was not the case for the “new universities,” also created during LionelJospin’s term as education minister. These institutions enjoyed a particular statusthat exempted them from the Loi Savary (see chap. 4, n. 5. And Merrien andMonsigny 1996; Merrien and Musselin 1999).

152 • ENDNOTES

5. I will use the term “ideas” throughout the rest of the chapter to designate any andall of the following: ideas, representations, systems of reference, theories, andcognitive frameworks.

6. Pierson (2000) borrows from economists the notions of “increasing return,""self-enforcing process,” and “positive feedback” mechanisms, showing how they maybe used to analyze policy phenomena. He first describes the conditions thateconomists (namely, Arthur [1994]) have identified as favorable to thesemechanisms: “large set-up or fixed costs; learning effects; coordination effects;adaptive expectations [actors adapt their behaviors in such a way as to realize theirexpectations].” He then identifies the characteristics of the policy sphere that makethese reinforcement mechanisms highly likely: the collective nature of politics, theinstitutional density of politics, political authority and power asymmetries, thecomplexity and opacity of politics.

Conclusion

1. The list of books and articles that observe such a development, analyze it, ordeplore it is long, and includes Neave 1986; Cave et al. 1988; Maassen and vanVught 1988; Neave 1988; van Vught 1989, 1995; Teichler 1988, 1996; Maassenand Potman 1990; Neave and van Vught 19991; Goedegebuure et al. 1993; Neaveand van Vught 1994; Maassen 1997; Merrien, Buttet and Anselmo 1998; Braun andMerrien 1999; Henkel and Little 1999.

2. The term “public service” as used by Braun and Merrien (1999) refers not so muchto status (public as opposed to private) as the position it is believed the universityshould adopt: serving and being accountable to students, society, and business.

3. It seems to me that this model should be understood mostly as a reflection ofdevelopments in sociological study of “university worlds.” Forty years ago moststudies concluded that universities were exceptional, highlighting the collegialcharacter of university functioning (cf. Polanyi 1962; Goodman 1962; Millett1962) and universities as peer communities characterized by give-and-takemechanisms (Hagstrom 1965). In a way, this made it possible to protectuniversities from any moves to rationalize functioning, either internal (originatingwith the university administration) or external (coming from the ministry).Conversely, the managerial university model seems very close to presenting “theuniversity exception” as rhetoric used by members of that institution to protecttheir monopoly situation and guaranteed income. Such criticism came from neo-Weberian sociologists of the professions, who accused Mertonian functionalists of“using the term ‘community’ to refer to what is actually a socioculturalorganization that ensures the implementation of esoteric knowledge” (Karpik 1995,15), affirming that, on the contrary, members of the professions were concernedabove all with having a guaranteed income and that their preoccupation with ethicswas just a façade. These criticisms echo those developed by the public choicemovement (namely, Buchanan and Tullock 1962; Buchanan 1967; Niskanen 1971)and recent New Public Management thinking on both public organizations anduniversities (cf. Braun and Merrien 1999).

4. In corrective intervention, the ministry evaluates the profession’s actions anddecisions after the fact and may mediate for societal or economic demands,

ENDNOTES • 153

translating them into a form of general interest that is compatible with scientificadvancement. In protective intervention, the ministry’s main role is to protect theuniversity from the economic or religious spheres, or society at large, and enable theacademic profession to maintain its overwhelmingly dominant position.

5. The significant amount of time spent at conferences presenting the specificcharacteristics of various national university systems on higher education is a sharpreminder of how far we are from any single model.

6. The maquettes for professional degree programs, for example, are defined with thecorpo ration, but their overt purpose is to train and prepare students to proceed toemployment in given job makets.

7. The differences between French and American universities are so great—the lattercharac terized by selective admission, free fixing of academics’ salaries andenrollment and tuition fees, private sector accounting rules, and so forth—thatlamenting the Americanization of French university education seems ridiculous,and above all attests to how ill-informed lamenters are.

8. Studies on American university functioning show that private research universitiesare much more attentive to “academic” criteria (namely, those related to researchquality) than are public or private higher education institutions with few or nodoctoral programs. In the latter type of institution, student pressure and the demandthat study program content be adapted to the job market carry much more weightthan in research universities, as does the administration (cf. Clark 1963, 1971;Brisset-Sillion 1996; Gusfield and Riesman 1968).

9. This solution offers the advantage of not requiring a new framework law such asthe one recently passed in the Netherlands strengthening the role and weight of“administrators” and weakening the “decision-making” bodies, making themmerely consultative; see de Boer and Huisman (1999). It would not be politicallydesirable to reform the statutes in France; drafting a new law would onlyunconstructively resuscitate conflicts and tensions.

10. Cf., for example, Le Monde-Campus, May 18,1999.11. An example of such a “game rule” would be department members agreeing not to hire

one of their maîtres de conférences so as not to fall into localism. There are otherrules of the game that could be developed, such as specifying that only candidateswith prior teaching experience will be hired.

12. The vast majority of university academics interviewed on the history andmathematics specialist commissions were in favor of maintaining the CNU becausein their opinion it guaranteed the scientific quality of hiring selection. It seems to meperfectly possible to affirm the opposite: it is all the easier to do “any old thing” ifthere are no strings attached, no retrospective accountability.

13. Reference is to Claude Allègre’s renowned call, soon after he became educationminister in 1997, to “cut out the fat” on the “mammoth.” Though he later explainedthat he was referring to the need to reduce ministry service size, his remark wasunderstood by teachers’ unions as implying a need to reduce teacher numbers, andit raised major protests.

14. This aspect of the problem was noted, but ultimately underestimated duringimplementation of the contract policy (Berrivin and Musselin 1996).

154 • ENDNOTES

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Author Index

Abecassis, Alain, 86, 154Altègre, Claude, 76, 77, 78, 79, 120, 141,

150, 152, 153, 160Altbach, Philip G., 109, 110Anselmo, Florence, 159Antoine, Gérald, 28, 33, 144Arthur, W.Brian, 159

Baldridge, J.Victor, 107, 108Balladur, Edouard, 83Bancel, Daniel, 73, 76Baraize, François, 150, 151Barnes, Barry, 106Barre, Raymond, 69Bayrou, François, 54Becher, Tony, 105, 111Beckmeier, Carola, 37Ben David, Joseph, 156Berger, Gaston, 34, 118Bergeron, Henri, 156Berrivin, Renaud, 74, 75, 152, 153, 160Bertrand, Denis, 156Bezes, Philippe, 151Birnbaum, Robert, 149, 157Blanchet, Sophie, 127, 154Blangy, Marc, 12, 127, 144, 154Blau, Peter, 107, 108Bleich, Erik, 121Bloch, Daniel, 83Blondel, Georges, 143Bloor, David, 106, 156Boudon, Raymond, 147, 148Bouglé, Célestin, 143Bourdieu, Pierre, 57, 141, 155Bourricaud, François, 31, 33, 34, 118

Boyer, Ernest, 110Braun, Dietmar, 107, 110, 159Brint, Steven, 145Brisset, Cécile, 67, 158, 159Brunhes, Jean, 143Brunsson, Nils, 153Buchanan, James, 159Buttet, Anne-Chantal, 159

Callon, Michel, 106Caplow, Theodore, 127Cassier, Maurice, 150Caullery, Maurice, 15, 28, 118, 143Cave, Martin, 159Cerych, Ladislav, 148Chaffee, Ellen Earle, 108Chandler, Alfred D., 141Charle, Christophe, 1, 14, 15, 18, 19, 26,

142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 155Charles VII, 9, 142Chevaillier, Thierry, 152Chevallier, Pierre, 9, 142, 144Chirac, Jacques, 40, 67, 69, 146Clark, Burton R., 102, 105, 108, 109, 110,

111, 112, 149, 158, 159Clark, Terry N., 20, 25, 26, 144, 156Clayes, Alain, 149Cobb, Roger W., 68Cohen, Habiba S., 24, 150Cohen, Michael D., 107, 108, 109Collier, Ruth B., 3Collier, David, 3Collignon, Maxime, 143Compagnon, Antoine, 155Courtillot, Vincent, 152

170

Cousin, Victor, 13Crane, Diana, 105Crespo, Manuel, 147Crozier, Michel, 64, 113, 151, 157

d’Iribarne, Philippe, 152Davies, John, 157de Boer, Harry, 160de Fortoul, Hyppolite, 17de Gaulle, Charles, 41, 42, 148de Martonne, Emmanuel, 143de Oliveira, Sylvie, 127, 154de Swann, Abraham, 9Devaquet, Alain, 40, 72, 146, 148DiMaggio, Paul J., 122, 149Dizambourg, Bernard, 86Dodier, Nicolas, 100Dubet, François, 132, 148Dubois, Pierre, 57, 109, 155Dumont, Albert, 144Dupuy, François, 43, 64Duran, Patrice, 152, 153Durkheim, Emile, 143Duruy, Victor, 13

Eicher, Jean-Claude, 142, 148Elder, Charles D., 68Elias, Norbert, 157Ellrodt, Robert, 26, 48Ellström, Per-Erik, 157Enders, Jürgen, 157Erlich, Valérie, 148Eurich, Nell P., 109Evans, Peter B., 150Ewert, Paula, 144

Falloux, Alfred, 16, 17Faure, Edgar, 2, 4, 7, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35,

36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 59,67, 117, 118, 119, 126, 138, 146

Fave-Bonnet, Marie-Françoise, 147, 156Favereau, Olivier, 74Ferry, Jules, 144, 147Fichte, Johann, 14, 18, 19Filâtre, Daniel, 62, 141, 150Fillon, Fançois, 148Fouchet, Christian, 27, 41

Freeman, John, 149Frémont, Armand, 77, 81, 83, 152Fridenson, Patrick, 141Friedberg, Erhard, 2, 44, 45, 67, 103, 108,

109, 113, 146, 157Füssel, Hans-Peter, 110

Galland, Olivier, 148Garraud, Philippe, 67Gasol, Bernard, 152Gaudin, Jean Pierre, 73Gazier, Bernard, 158Gerbod, Paul, 11, 12, 17, 25, 142Giere, Ronald N., 156Giman, Coit, 143Girod de l’Ain, Bertrand, 65, 147, 154Glaser, Barney G., 156Goedegebuure Leo, 149, 159Goodman, Paul, 107, 108, 159Grémion, Pierre, 113Grosperrin, Bernard, 142, 144Gueissaz, Albert, 91, 155Guenée, Simonne, 141Guichard, Olivier, 44Gusdorf, Georges, 13, 27, 33, 89, 90, 141,

145Gusfield, Joseph, 159

Hagstrom, Warren O., 105, 159Hall, Peter A., 72, 73, 114, 118, 121, 123,

158Hanin, Frédéric, 127, 154Hannan, Michael T., 149Hardy, Cynthia, 108, 157Henkel, Mary, 158, 159Huberman, Gur, 147Huisman, Jeroen, 160Humboldt, see von Humboldt

Jamous, Haroun, 41Jobert, Bruno, 82, 118, 121, 151, 158Jospin, Lionel, 67, 72, 76, 78, 120, 158Jullian, Camille, 143

Kahn, Charles, 147Kant, Immanuel, 14, 143Karabel, Jerome, 145

AUTHOR INDEX • 171

Karady, Victor, 9, 11, 20, 142, 147Karpik, Lucien, 159Keynes, John Maynard, 72Kingdon, John W., 117, 157Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 106Kogan Maurice, 59, 111, 158Kornhauser, William, 156

Laboulaye, Edouard, 18Laffont, Jean-Jacques, 74Lapeyronnie, Didier, 125, 148Lascoumes, Pierre, 73, 74, 123, 151Latour, Bruno, 106, 107, 156, 157Le Galès, Patrick, 157Lefranc, Abel, 143Liard, Louis, 7, 9, 11, 13, 19, 20, 28, 32,

34, 118, 142, 143, 144Lichnerowicz, André, 33Liedman, Sven-Eric, 16Lindblom, Charles E., 123Lipianski, Sandrine, 84, 154, 155Little, Brenda, 159Lochak, Danièle, 152Louis XI, 9, 152Louis XIV, 9Lucas, Christopher, 153Lucas, Philippe, 118, 150Lullies, Stefan, 144Lynch, Michael, 106, 156

Maassen, Peter, 159MacHugh, Alexandra, 148Magliulo, Bruno, 57Maillet, Jean, 142, 144Malon, Thierry, 154Malraux, André, 72, 153March, James G., 73, 107, 108, 109Marcson, Simon, 156Marie, Jean-Louis, 125, 148Marin, Bernd, 158Marsden, David, 158Marsh, David, 123, 158Maurice, Marc, 157Mayeur, Françoise, 13, 24, 25Mayntz, Renate, 158McDaniel, Olaf C, 111Meek, V.Lynn, 59, 149, 157

Meltzer, Leo, 156Mendès-France, Pierre, 34Merlin, Pierre, 37Merrien, François-Xavier, 92, 107, 110,

143, 148, 158, 159Merton, Robert K., 105, 156Métras, Franck, 83, 152Meyer, John W., 114, 158Migaud, Didier, 149Mignot-Gérard, Stéphanie, 154Millett, John D., 107, 108, 159Millot, Benoît, 146Minot, Jacques, 141Mintzberg, Henry, 108, 148, 157Minvielle, Etienne, 150Mitterand, François, 40, 67, 72, 73, 83, 156,

151Monsigny, Odile, 148, 158Moraw, Peter, 16Morgan, Anthony W., 157Muller, Pierre, 71, 82, 118, 121, 123, 151,

158Musselin, Christine, 2, 12, 28, 39, 45, 67,

74, 75, 84, 92, 103, 108, 109, 121, 127,144, 146, 148, 152, 154, 155, 158, 160

Napoléon III, 13Napoléon, Bonaparte, 3, 7, 9, 10, 13, 17,

23, 49, 53, 68, 142, 145Neave, Guy, 109, 110, 159Neumann, Anna, 157Neusel, Aylâ, 37Niskanen, William A., 159

O’Flaherty, Brendan, 147Olsen, Johan P., 107, 108, 109Orivel, François, 146Oussekine, Malik, 40, 146

Padioleau, Jean G., 76Palier, Bruno, 123Paradeise, Catherine, 154Passeron, Jean-Claude, 28, 33, 57, 144Pavé, Francis, 155Peylet, René, 83Pfeffer, Jeffrey, 108Pierson, Paul, 3, 121, 122, 123, 158

172 • AUTHOR INDEX

Piore, Michael, 158Polanyi, Michael, 159Potman, Henry P., 159Potocki-Malicet, Danièle, 64Powell, Walter W., 122, 149Premfors, Rune, 109Prost, Antoine, 10, 27, 28, 32, 34, 40, 41,

143, 144, 150

Quermonne, Jean-Louis, 69, 118, 145, 148

Raulin, Emmanuel, 125Rémond, René, 36, 37Renaut, Alain, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 101, 141,

143, 144, 157Rhoades, Garry, 58, 148, 149Rhodes, R.A.W., 123, 158Riesman, David, 149, 159Ringer, Fritz K., 16Rocard, Michel, 40, 67, 72, 120, 151Rowan, Brian, 158Rueschmeyer, Dietrich, 150

Sabatier, Paul, 148Salancik, Gerald, 108Salmon, Pierre, 27, 41, 147Satow, Roberta L., 108Saunier-Seïté, Alice, 69, 119Sauvage, Jean, 39, 40Savary, Alain, 32, 40, 48, 58, 67, 72, 73,

95, 138, 146, 148, 158Schelling, Friedrich, 14Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 14, 18, 19Schriewer, Jürgen, 58, 142, 144Séailles, Gabriel, 143Seignobos, Charles, 143Sellier, François, 157Selznick, Philip, 122Shepard, H.A., 156Sigot, Jean-Claude, 125Silvestre, Jean-Jacques, 117, 157, 158Simmonet, Stéphanie, 95Simon, Herbert, 73Simoulin, Vincent, 118, 151Siow, Aloysius, 147Skocpol, Theda, 150Soisson, Jean-Pierre, 69, 119

Soulas, Josette, 86, 154Stroup, Herbert M., 108Surel, Yves, 118, 121

Tatéossian, Pascal, 156Taylor, Rosemary, 114Taylor, William H., 145, 157Teichler, Ulrich, 149, 157, 159Thatcher, Mark, 157Thoenig, Jean-Claude, 43, 64, 113Tierney, William G., 108Tirole, Jean, 74Tordensdahl, Rolf, 16Touraine, Alain, 157Tullock, Gordon, 159

Urfalino, Philippe, 72, 96

Valluy, Jérome, 73, 151Van de Graaff, John H., 110, 148Van Vught, Franz, 110, 149, 159Verger, Jacques, 9, 142, 149Vergnies, Jean-Frédéric, 125Vilkas, Catherine, 96, 147von Humboldt, Wilhem, 10, 13, 14, 16, 18,

33von Kopp, Botho, 147Vroom, Victor, 157Vuilliez, Charles, 142

Weick, Karl E., 109Weir, Margaret, 152Weiss, Manfred, 147Weisz, George, 14, 17, 18, 19, 24, 26, 28,

143, 144, 149Williamson, Oliver E., 74Windolf, Paul, 147Woolgar, Steve, 107

Yahou, Nouara, 125

Zetlaoui, Jodelle, 156, 158

AUTHOR INDEX • 173