By placing Sylvie Retailleau at the head of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, the President of the Republic gave a form of dubbing to a model: that of the intensive research university. Physicist, specialist in nanoelectronics, she has spent most of her career on the Orsay campus, where she obtained her thesis in 1992 and then became a professor in 2001. Also an associate professor of physical sciences, she has been directing the Paris-Saclay University which she led to the top, the establishment representing 13% of French research potential.
By combining the former University of Paris-Sud with four major schools and seven research organizations, for a total of 48,000 students and 9,000 researchers and teacher-researchers, this university, with experimental status, ranked in 2020 and 2021 to 14e then 13e rank in the Shanghai ranking, where the great American universities prance.
Unvarnished, Sylvie Retailleau displays her ambition to “to create a new model of French-style university”. For Anne Roger, secretary general of Snesup-FSU, this appointment is a cause for concern. “In his view, research must be an economically profitable investment and project financing must be generalized. This is the opposite of what we want, namely long-term and recurring research funding”she comments.
Sylvie Retailleau embodies “a model of university of excellence very attached to the Shanghai ranking, which is not quite the model of French higher education and researchconfirms Franck Loureiro, Deputy Secretary General of SGEN-CFDT. There should therefore be no change in the main lines, with a policy of concentration of establishments in major centers of excellence. » But, he adds hopefully, “the President of the Republic has announced that we need to change the method in the dialogue with the social partners, so this model could at least be discussed and that is what we expect. » Boris Gralak, secretary general of the SNCS-FSU, hopes that social dialogue will simply become « normal »notably regretting the exclusion of his union from wage negotiations.
Crucial budgetary trade-offs
Even if the innovation component has disappeared from the title of her ministry, the new incumbent has before her large, urgent files, including that of the reform of scholarships on social criteria. Promised by the Head of State three times since 2017, the overhaul of the allocation of scholarships – paid to 750,000 students – has remained a dead letter, on the grounds that it would be “too complex” to be implemented, according to the former minister of higher education, Frédérique Vidal.
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