On the 13 th of February 2012, a decree established criminology as a new discipline in the French university system. Six months later, the new Ministry of Higher Education and Research rolled back the reform and abolished the newly created section of criminology. Because French university governance remains centralized and corporatist, any project that transforms an interdisciplinary field of research into a fully-fledged academic discipline is difficult to carry out, all the more when the latter bears a political and utilitarian dimension as criminology does. It comes then as no surprise that in the hyper-disciplined French university, the disciplinary enterprise of institutionalising criminology is fraught with difficulties, not the least being the existence of an undisciplined academia.