The university campus, with its myriad opportunities for engagement, is an important place for students to develop as people, not just as scholars. And in light of recent terrorist attacks and the grim history of violence on campus, it is all the more vital that it remain so. This is the view of Eloic Peyrache, associate dean for Masters programmes at the business school HEC Paris, who gave an interview to Times Higher Education at the annual conference of the Global Alliance in Management Education (CEMS) in December.

CEMS is an organisation of leading international business schools that intends to educate future global business leaders through its Masters in international management. It now has 30 members following the recent addition of the Korea University Business School.

In response to the Paris terrorist attacks in November that claimed 130 lives, HEC took actions that any large institution would, Prof. Peyrache says: ensuring the safety of staff and students, and offering support on campus to those traumatised by the events.

Such tragic events, while difficult to handle emotionally, could nevertheless be useful in starting a dialogue between people on campus about topical matters, and could also inform teaching and learning. At an international institution such as HEC, this has even more resonance. “We want (campus) to be widely open to the profiles of students,” says Prof. Peyrache. “We’ll invite them to talk about terrorism, security, geopolitics but also about mindfulness, meditation and how to react to those things,” he adds.

Prof. Peyrache is keen to stress the role of higher education in breaking down national barriers and helping to develop “global citizens”, but he notes that opinion is “polarised” on whether French universities in general are achieving this. “The big concern today is about the structure, not what’s taught in universities,” he says. “We have great engineering schools, business schools, but they’re… not part of a university. (People in higher education) want to set up a university that has more international visibility because they’ll be physically bigger.”

This is what has happened at HEC, which is a constituent of the newly formed Universite Paris-Saclay, which comprises two universities, 11 university-level colleges and seven research organisations. Although Paris-Saclay is one of the “most promising” developments, it was no easy ride, says Peyrache.

“We wanted to have an MIT a la Francaise,” he says. “But MIT is very much integrated, so then people asked what’s the model? (We have) people pushing in other directions. But at some other places in the world you see one institution being part of a university, or one department being willing to get independence; we’re going in the other direction. We are taking powerful brands with egos and saying: ‘Forget about your name, get together and we’ll set up a new university.’”

“We do look at what’s happening outside, but not enough,” he says. “The business schools in France are very good because we’ve been very much exposed to competition. It’s less the case for engineering schools, and absolutely not the case for the French university. Competition matters a lot to us, so we’ve been looking at what’s happening in the rest of the world a lot. I look at what LSE, Princeton and MIT are doing. If you don’t have to face competition to survive, then you’re not moving. French universities aren’t doing this enough. Some brands are very famous in the world, but overestimated,” says Peyrache.

(Excerpted and adapted from )