The Recent Evolution of French Universities

Abstract

The French agency for the modernisation of universities 1 (Agence de Modernisation des Universités et des Etablissements, AMUE) was created in June 1997 as an expansion of a former structure called GIGUE (Groupement pour l'Informatique de Gestion des Universités et des Etablissements). It is in charge of diffusing management software dedicated to universities and offering services to universities in order to improve their management and internal practices. This agency engaged research aimed at developing knowledge on the situation of the French university system at the time when it was initiated. One of these research conventions was dealing with "university government" and our centre, the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations was chosen to conduct this endeavour. We thus organized two large field work projects. In 1998, a qualitative study based on 250 interviews was led in four universities with the help of graduate students of Sciences-Po Paris. A comparative report was written (Mignot-Gérard and Musselin 1999) for the AMUE. Drawing on the results of this first study, we built a questionnaire which was sent to 37 universities in 1999. We received 1660 answers (on 5000 questionnaires sent), about 1100 from academics and 560 from members of the administrative staff (see the methodological annexe at the end of the paper). A second report was written in 2000 and delivered to the AMUE (Mignot-Gérard and Musselin 2000). This provides us with a large empirical corpus on French universities that we can compare with the narrower corpus E. Friedberg and C. Musselin (1989) accumulated on the same topic in the eighties. This comparison clearly reveals that one should not give too much weight to the overwhelming discourse on the "impossible reform" of French universities 2 , on their endemic immobilism, and even on the conservative nature of the academic profession. Change has occurred and university government has evolved in France. This of course does not mean that all problems are solved, but that the potential ways to change, the relevant actors to mobilize, the existing margins of action and their realm are not the same as they were fifteen years ago. But before arriving to such conclusions and further argument on it, we first have to give evidence for change. In this perspective, we will first quickly describe some of the main changes that affected French university system in the last decade. We will then be able to point out the more striking developments that can be observed on university government when comparing the results of the field research led by E. Friedberg and C. Musselin

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Cambodian higher education in transition: an institutional governance perspective

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