Plans to simplify France’s research system will work only if major players learn to trust each other and share resources better, according to an analysis of recent proposals commissioned by the government.
In December 2022, higher education minister Sylvie Retailleau asked academic Philippe Gillet and colleagues to come up with ideas for how France might strengthen and rationalise its hybrid research system.
Among the 14 proposals in their June report are the appointment of a top-level government adviser for science and directing more resources to the managers of the mixed laboratories that are typically hosted by universities, but staffed and run by both academics and the employees of national research organisations such as the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm).
The report team led by Professor Gillet, an emeritus geosciences professor at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and a former CNRS director, also suggested that universities and research organisations take on more distinct roles, with the former playing a bigger part in regional research and the latter focusing on national programming and research evaluation.
That idea has caused concern among universities, particularly those that have fought for a bigger share of national funding and recognition since a shift towards more competitive, excellence-focused research funding in the mid-2000s. Responding to the report, the umbrella body France Universities said that its members “cannot be reduced to a territorial research operator” and should have a real role shaping and taking part in national strategies.
Michel Deneken, president of the University of Strasbourg and of Udice, a lobbying body representing 10 universities funded by the national Initiative d’excellence (Idex) research programme, told Times Higher Education there was a “tension” between the prominence French president Emmanuel Macron had given to Udice universities as “poles” of the national research and innovation system in recent speeches and the position sketched out for universities in the Gillet report. “We are not only here to organise national research coming from the top down; our power is also in the great opportunities we have at our sites,” he said.
Mixed laboratories make up 54 per cent of France’s public research space and are a microcosm of the tensions created by its system, where day-to-day tasks such as booking train tickets or paying staff are hamstrung by the “absurd complexity” of each research organisation in the lab working off its own rules and software, according to Martin Andler, an expert on higher education and an emeritus professor of mathematics in a mixed lab hosted by Paris-Saclay University.
Professor Retailleau, who was president of Saclay until she became a minister in 2022, has previously said that she wants each mixed lab to be led by one person. The Gillet report calls for financial and strategic decision-making powers to sit with a single organisation in each – although, under the terms Professor Retailleau set for the review, staff must still be employed by their home organisations.
Andrée Sursock, a senior adviser to the European University Association who helped develop the Idex programme, said the plan for a single lab head and set of administrative processes “makes a great deal of sense”, but noted that the report left open how each lab leader would be chosen, a decision that could create more tensions in a system where benefit of the doubt is in short supply.
“The French system is based right now on distrust,” said Professor Andler. “Professors distrust their university administration; they distrust the ministry. The ministry distrusts the universities and vice versa, and the research ministry is distrusted by the finance ministry in a major way.”
“It’s not the case everywhere, but at some sites there is not very great trust between the different actors. This is the first battle we have to win,” agreed Professor Deneken. At Strasbourg, Idex funding had helped to build trust within its mixed labs because staff had to decide collectively how to spend the money, he said, rather than protecting their own pots. “Of course, everybody wants his field of power not to be reduced; we all want to have greater autonomy,” he added, although he did not respond directly when asked whether universities and academics should be ready to accept a reduced role in some areas to simplify the system overall.
Philippe Huneman, a CNRS research director at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, a mixed lab hosted by Paris’ Panthéon-Sorbonne University, said the mismatch in resources that meant CNRS staff were better able to win competitive grants was a “constant source of resentment” from academic colleagues, adding that the report had not sufficiently considered material inequality as a cause of complexity or inefficiency.
The Gillet report does suggest that each institution hosting a lab should develop its own shared research support infrastructure and a simplified framework for administrative management. Professor Deneken said that mixed lab head jobs should also be made more attractive because many saw such positions as “very boring and not very interesting for their own research”. Professor Andler agreed that mixed lab heads had a crucial role equivalent to department chairs abroad but were often lost among the conflicting systems.
The attractiveness of the French system appears among other proposals, such as giving grants of between €10,000 and €100,000 (£8,500-£85,000) to every young researcher recruited over a period of three years, which Dr Sursock said would help draw many to research careers. Professor Huneman, however, said that the uneven distribution of the handout among researchers would “create lots of conflicts” among staff.
Professor Deneken said combating brain drain was one issue that united the universities and national research organisations. He said many academics in Strasbourg were lured a couple of miles away across the German border by better research environments. “This is a battle that makes us allies, not enemies,” he said.
He praised Germany as a “system of universities”, where the national research organisations such as the Max Planck Society, the Helmholtz Association and the Fraunhofer Society were very specialised, unlike the more generalist French equivalents, which naturally come into direct competition with each other and research universities.
The report authors also suggest that a new form of ministry-university funding agreements, launched in March this year, could be a way for the ministry to rationalise the research system, but they also noted that the agreements’ three-year period was out of sync with the five-year cycle of the national research programme. “What has been going on for the past century is adding extra layers without removing the previous ones,” said Professor Andler, one of many to compare the cumulative complexity of the French research system to a millefeuille, a fragile layered dessert.
The report’s opening proposal is the creation of a senior science adviser reporting directly to the president or prime minister, mirroring similar positions in the UK, Canada and New Zealand. The report authors suggest that one person might have more hope finding their place in the upper echelons of government than the previous research councils that have been reconfigured and replaced over the past 40 years.
France was forced to hastily create a national scientific council to provide advice during the Covid-19 pandemic, a body that quickly became a “decoration” for political decision-making, said Professor Huneman, but which probably also influenced the suggestion of a top-level adviser. Professor Deneken said that a French chief science adviser would have a tougher time steering policy than their counterparts in the UK or US, as post-holders in France tended to carry less authority.
The report will be debated by politicians in the autumn, with many of the suggestions expected to be written into legislation. Professor Deneken said he was glad that fragmentation in the research system would be discussed and that the greatest risk the report posed was that it would be forgotten among shorter-term research policy problems.
Professor Huneman said the report’s proposals were too timid to be transformative. Julien Gossa, an analyst of higher education policy and associate professor in computer science at the University of Strasbourg, said he was also sceptical the proposals were radical enough to integrate the parts of the system.
“The main reason is probably that, to simplify, you need to make political arbitrations, that is remove some power from some powerful people who are in position to kill a reform,” he said, adding that the original commission had been too focused on research management and overlooked the work itself. “The report simply misses the point too much.”
