On freezing days in Paris last winter, the streets of the citys Latin Quarter were filled with students and academics stirred into protest. The casual bystander would have been bemused to find right-wing law professors marching hand-in-hand with left-wing social sciences lecturers. The crowds rallying cry might have been equally puzzling. Long live the Princess of Cleves, the marchers shouted.This was the picture with which Monique Canto-Sperber, director of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, began a lecture on the reform of French universities at University College London in November.
What united the protesters in anger were two laws — one on university autonomy and one on new qualifications for high school teachers and academics — passed by the centre-right government of President Nicolas Sarkozy. Under the autonomy and responsibility law passed in July 2007, universities were given greater freedom from state control. Academics will now be employees of their university rather than the state, and institutions will make decisions on key issues such as the balance between teaching and research. According to Prof. Canto-Sperber most academics view the law as an egregious threat to the independence of faculty members.
Professors were previously under the authority of a National Council for Universities, with expert boards in each subject area. They consider themselves employees of the national education system and not of the universities they belong to, she adds.
The other reform stirring up anger is masterisation, a reform introduced as part of the Bologna Process, aimed at harmonising Europes higher education systems. Masters degrees and doctorates are now to be accepted as qualifications for high school and university teachers, a move seen as undermining the old agregation exam.
The agregation reflected a teachers depth and body of knowledge of a specific academic field and promised entry to the highest echelons of the intellectual world, says Prof. Canto-Sperber. The acceptance of masters is a threat to the continuity between high school and university teaching and to the quality and high status of teachers training, she adds. The two reforms have injured the sense of identity of students and their professors.
The protesters vocal support for the Princess of Cleves was a revolutionary rallying cry against an attack on the French education system by Sarkozy, who recalled being forced to read the useless 17th-century novel La Princesse de Cleves during his schooling.
Prof. Canto-Sperber fears that students and professors wont give up until the reform project is completely withdrawn. I have real hope that it will work, but the task will be very difficult. There is such a tradition in France of playing the state against university power, she says. It will be a very fractious, difficult way. But it is the only way to go. I really do hope presidents of universities will have the nerve to go through difficult times.

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)