Francois Hollande’s embattled administration faces a major test this summer as it attempts to push sweeping changes to higher education through the French parliament. With the Socialist government rocked by financial scandal and its leader’s approval ratings at a record low of 29 percent, opposition from university leaders to key parts of the draft bill on higher education, which was published on March 20, is not welcome.

Created by Genevieve Fioraso, the higher education and research minister, the Bill proposes 20 separate reform measures, which were scheduled to be debated in the National Assembly on May 27.

Much of the Bill has been happily accepted by the French academy. Plans to increase access to university, to cut dropout rates (about 36 percent of students fail to complete their studies, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) and to improve graduate employability are relatively uncontroversial. There is also support for plans to simplify France’s complex, esoteric higher education and research structures.

Instead of myriad public universities, grandes ecoles, specialist colleges and stand-alone national research agencies, each dealing directly with the education ministry in Paris, institutions will be organised into about 30 regional groups.  “Fioraso is trying to reunite the universities that were broken up after the unrest of 1968,” explains Anne Corbett, visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ European Institute. “She wants contact with just 30 groups, rather than 150 organisations, so is trying to get more universities involved in these (consortia), which is good politics.’’ Fioraso’s reforms seek to promote collegiality between institutions rather than the competition encouraged by Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, she adds.

However, university leaders are most concerned about plans to reform academic governance by increasing the size of universities’ administrative councils, which could number up to 80 people. Widely perceived as a move to please trade unions by increasing staff representation within universities, the plans have been publicly denounced by vice chancellors who fear a loss of executive power.

A letter by several unnamed vice chancellors published in L’Express in March warned that the change would create a “two-headed university”, in which power is located in the administrative board and university presidents are “relegated to the role of spokesman to communicate with the ministry”. This reform would turn universities into “ships adrift at sea” and exacerbate bureaucratic delays and departmental conflicts, they claimed.

Study at public universities is, in essence, free, with tuition fees set at a nominal rate of about Euro 200 (Rs.14,340) a year, and anyone who gains a Baccalaureat — a low pass is roughly equivalent to three C grades at A level — can enter most courses. “The reforms will not change much until the lack of selective at the entrance to the first year is addressed,’’ argues Edouard Husson, a former vice chancellor of the University of Paris.

Tuition charges set somewhere between “Britain’s crazily high fees’’ and the “very low fees in France’’ should be considered as well, he continues. “Without the possibility of funding themselves, French universities will always be dependent on the ministry.’’

Some university leaders have criticised the Bill as a missed opportunity. Several vice chancellors, among them Jean-Loup Salzmann, president of the University of Paris-13 and head of the French Rectors’ Conference, put their names to a letter published in Le Monde on April 20 that called for more long-term investment in universities.

Scientists and academic trade unions have also protested that the Bill does little to address the plight of researchers on short-term contracts and that its efforts to create more research posts are too modest.

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)