Here is the text of the speech read at the hearing
Mister President,
Madam Rapporteur,
Senators,
I am a senior lecturer (HDR) at Sorbonne Paris Nord University. I speak today not as a representative of a political movement or partisan organization, but as an academic with over twenty years of experience in French higher education, having participated in its governing bodies and observed its recent transformations. As a medievalist and linguist, I am an academic product of the University: Old French is the only discipline within the field of literary studies that is not taught anywhere else.
The French paradox
The question that brings us together today is that of academic excellence. I would like, however, to begin with a paradox. When we talk about academic excellence, we rarely talk about the university itself.
Yet, France's seventy-one universities host more than 1,7 million students. They provide the bulk of the country's doctoral training, produce a significant portion of fundamental research, and maintain an intellectual presence throughout the national territory. They accomplish these missions with tuition fees among the lowest in the developed world, often less than a few hundred euros per year.
In other words, the university remains the main infrastructure of the scholarly Republic.
However, for several decades, France has gradually shifted some of the functions that historically underpinned its authority away from the university. The most selective programs recruit elsewhere. Part of teacher training is organized elsewhere. Certain certifications are awarded elsewhere. And I would even add that an increasingly large portion of scientific policy is defined at other levels of decision-making.
But the university is not just a place where knowledge is transmitted; it is the place where a society decides what knowledge deserves to be passed on to the next generation.
We have thus constructed a unique system in which the institution responsible for educating the largest number of students is no longer always the one spontaneously associated with representations of excellence. Proof of this lies in the fact that the best students can now complete several years of study without ever encountering the researchers who produce the knowledge that the institution nevertheless requires them to learn from the books they write.
The current difficulties of the French university do not stem solely from a lack of resources or ideological tensions. They are due to a progressive loss of academic sovereignty, that is to say, a growing dissociation between the functions of training, certification, scientific recruitment, and research guidance.
The university does more than simply transmit knowledge. It also decides, through its disciplines, what deserves to be transmitted. This is a matter of epistemology. What does this entail? Nothing other than the categorization of knowledge that constitutes the well-formed mind of a young citizen of voting age. Does Magic fall into these categories? If it were ever to happen that a fictional discipline called "magic" were gradually recognized as an academic discipline, endowed with master's degrees, doctorates, and positions, sooner or later its teachers would have to be trained, its competitive examinations created, and it integrated into the curriculum. The university of today is still the school of tomorrow.
This is why the agrégation has always been the cornerstone of the university system. Indeed, the agrégation is not merely a recruitment exam. Historically, it represents the link between the university and the primary school. The disciplines that have an agrégation occupy a special place in this respect, since they directly contribute to defining the knowledge transmitted to an entire generation.
Academic institutions are not perfect. But when they fully embrace their role, they often constitute the best bulwark against intellectual fads and ideological pressures. When Tariq Ramadan wanted to find a university position in Europe, he was unable to do so in France simply because the National Council of Universities (CNU) played its protective role. It is important to preserve the role of these institutions while simultaneously strengthening state oversight of them.
The loss of academic sovereignty
Scientific sovereignty
For a long time, scientific legitimacy stemmed primarily from the discipline itself, peer review, and academic recruitment mechanisms. Over the past twenty years or so, a second principle of legitimation has gradually developed: that of targeted funding. A growing portion of research resources now depends on programs that define thematic priorities, societal objectives, or cross-cutting issues.
Some simple figures:
- 7th Framework Programme (FP7, 2007-2013): approximately 50 billion euros.
- Horizon 2020 (2014-2020): approximately 80 billion euros.
- Horizon Europe (2021-2027): approximately 95,5 billion euros in its adopted version.
- European Research Council (ERC): approximately 16 billion euros over the period 2021-2027 within Horizon Europe.
It seems clear today that the scale of decision-making has shifted. The more targeted the funding, the more it influences research topics. In twenty years, we have gone from a European framework program of around 50 billion euros to a Horizon Europe program now exceeding 95 billion euros. This evolution reflects a considerable change in scale in the capacity of European institutions to guide scientific policies and research priorities. The more targeted the funding, the more defining eligible themes, keywords, strategic priorities, and evaluation criteria becomes a major academic challenge.
The problem isn't really that Europe funds research. The problem is who defines scientific priorities when a growing share of funding depends on targeted programs. We have gradually moved towards a more administrative definition of scientific priorities, without always fully taking into account the national specificities of university systems or the disciplinary organization that structures them.
Researchers have gradually lost some of their collective ability to determine their own research priorities and are increasingly led to integrate funding mechanisms into their scientific strategies. This evolution mechanically alters the dynamics of recruitment, doctoral training, and the structuring of research teams. In many sectors, recruitment tends to prioritize the logic of team accreditation and funding over the specific needs of higher education or fundamental research.
To put it bluntly, in the past, academic excellence rested on a simple hierarchy that started at the disciplinary level, structured by competitive examinations up to the doctoral level, and then extended to the scholarly community through peer review. Today, certain thematic or transdisciplinary approaches tend to compete with traditional disciplinary frameworks, particularly when they correspond more directly to the categories used in calls for proposals—or when they are not specifically created for this purpose and facilitate their identification within objective-based research clusters founded on thematic priorities. This evolution is not to be condemned. It is to recognize that it profoundly alters the conditions for exercising academic sovereignty, and therefore what you still call "excellence." A democracy can legitimately define research priorities. But it must ensure that researchers retain the ability to define a significant portion of the questions they deem important themselves, without this sovereignty appearing as a concession, or even a necessary evil.
Institutional sovereignty
Universities are asked to do everything: train, integrate, certify, welcome, professionalize, internationalize, and democratize. But these missions are neither funded nor governed in a truly coherent way.
Academic sovereignty does not depend solely on disciplines or funding mechanisms. It also rests on forms of governance capable of maintaining coherence between the missions entrusted to the university and the resources available to it to accomplish them.
The aim of university autonomy was to bring decision-making closer to the field. It has produced mixed results. In many cases, it has strengthened institutions' capacity for initiative. But it has also contributed to the increasing fragmentation of the academic landscape. Institutions are now subject to a multitude of evaluation procedures, calls for proposals, and reporting mechanisms that consume a growing share of their human resources. An entire activity has developed around managing indicators, responding to calls for proposals, and accreditation procedures. This progressive bureaucratization diverts some of these energies away from their primary focus: teaching and research.
This evolution is accompanied by a deeper difficulty. Universities remain legally autonomous, but the decision-making structures that govern them have multiplied. Evaluation agencies, national and European funding bodies, regulatory frameworks, and administrative requirements now all play a role in defining academic priorities. This proclaimed autonomy sometimes translates into increased dependence on external steering mechanisms.
This situation calls for reflection on governance itself. The university cannot be managed like a business, nor can it be left to a purely managerial approach. It fulfills a public service mission that justifies both genuine scientific autonomy and a high standard of transparency in the use of public funds. This requirement could lead to strengthening the presence of state administrative and financial expertise within university executives, in order to ensure a better balance between academic autonomy and public accountability.
The issue of training particularly illustrates this difficulty. For several years, universities have been encouraged to describe their degrees in terms of skills. This approach is not illegitimate. However, it remains incomplete when it is not linked to the real needs of the professional sectors concerned. Too often, training frameworks are developed without sufficiently structured dialogue with professional sectors. This results in a growing gap between academic language and the language of employment, to the benefit of private institutions that sometimes appear more easily understood by recruiters.
Finally, universities today bear considerable responsibility for academic and cultural integration. In some programs, the proportion of international students reaches very high levels, without the necessary resources for their linguistic and methodological support always being allocated. This situation creates a constant tension between the ambition for international openness and the actual capacity of institutions to provide such support. A coherent policy of academic sovereignty requires that the missions entrusted to universities be effectively funded and supported.
The consequences: science, disciplines, and ideology
Contemporary debates on gender, race, intersectionality, and critical theories should not be understood merely as the emergence of new ideas. They also reveal a transformation of the mechanisms of academic legitimation. Certain thematic approaches have gradually acquired institutional visibility disproportionate to their traditional disciplinary roots, notably because they corresponded more closely to the categories used by contemporary research funding, evaluation, and organizational structures.
These approaches tend to gradually replace established disciplinary categories with categories more grounded in experience, lived experience, or the social purpose of research. Their spread beyond their original field then fosters the formation of disciplinary clusters whose boundaries often remain uncertain. This is undoubtedly the crux of the ongoing friction between studies and disciplines: a progressive shift in the center of gravity of analysis, from the verification procedures specific to disciplines toward categories more grounded in lived experience, engagement, or the social purpose of research.
The university has always been a place of intellectual, philosophical, and political debate. What is changing today is not the existence of these debates, but the way in which certain categories of analysis sometimes tend to evade the ordinary mechanisms of disciplinary critique.
This development touches upon one of the foundations of scientific ethics. Every discipline rests on a fundamental distinction between the researcher and the object of their research. Objectivity is not an abstract stance; it constitutes the very condition of rational discussion. A scientific discipline is based on a very simple idea: the constant possibility of being wrong.
If it is demonstrated to me today that my work on the Bible Historiale is based on an error of interpretation, I may be disappointed, but I will also be led to revise my conclusions. I will have learned something. The advancement of knowledge precisely presupposes this openness to refutation.
The situation changes when certain approaches tend to make the researcher's personal experience, lived experience, or commitment a central component of the scientific demonstration. In this case, criticism of the analysis can be perceived as an attack on the person themselves. Scientific error then ceases to be a normal stage of research and becomes an attack on one's identity.
This evolution helps explain some of the contemporary tensions in academic debate. The problem is not the existence of new ideas. It arises when adherence to certain categories becomes an implicit prerequisite for access to funding, recruitment, or academic recognition, or when the researcher's personal commitment tends to override ordinary scientific verification procedures. If they are proven wrong, it is not their scientific standing that is jeopardized, but their very person: their pathos, their identity. These researchers have, in effect, lost the right to be wrong. "Wokism" is not the primary cause. It is a symptom: the visible symptom of a deeper transformation in the mechanisms of academic legitimation; and the refusal to admit being wrong.
Paths to reform
To restore to the university control over what it teaches, what it certifies, and what it researches. Tensions will subside on their own once the university, legitimized on an indisputable disciplinary foundation, rediscovers the core of its teaching and research. 6 avenues to explore:
- Restore the central role of the university in certification: no nationally recognized diploma should be completely detached from a reference university.
- Rehabilitating disciplines: A democracy must know which knowledge it considers fundamental, and adopt a hierarchy of disciplines.
- Strengthening state control over academic regulatory institutions: academic institutions are not perfect. But they remain the best bulwark against intellectual fads.
- Reforming governance: Fewer procedures, more accountability. Transparency of funds; simplification; genuine student participation: student voting should be encouraged or facilitated to strengthen the democratic legitimacy of university bodies.
- Rethinking the education-employment relationship: university education should not be described solely through abstract skills but also through the professional realities it prepares students for.
- Making AI a lever for demanding democratization: for a long time, mass education and excellence were seen as contradictory. Artificial intelligence perhaps offers the historic opportunity to reconcile the two. We have spent twenty years opposing excellence and mass education. AI is perhaps the first technology that finally allows a teacher to speak to a thousand students as if they only had one.
Conclusion
For a long time, we considered mass education and academic excellence to be contradictory goals. Artificial intelligence perhaps offers us, for the first time, the possibility of reconciling these two ambitions. It allows us to imagine new forms of individual support, remediation, and personalized learning without compromising scientific rigor.
More generally, French universities are not lacking in talent, researchers, or students. They sometimes lack institutional coherence. Restoring their academic sovereignty is not about going backward. It is about enabling them to approach future technological transformations from a position of confidence rather than dependence.
A university that knows what it teaches, what it certifies and what it seeks is a university capable of calmly facing the upheavals of the 21st century.
The link to the audition: https://videos.senat.fr/iframe.5894005_6a3bb5d25b19b
