Guillotining the Grad Schools

By Kenneth M. Pierce

The French government cuts back on advanced degree programs

"It's tantamount to killing the university," snapped the president of France's Avignon University, Geologist Joel Mahe. What has aroused Mahe and most of his fellow French university presidents is a decision by France's tough-minded minister of universities, Alice Saunier-Seite, to cut back proliferating graduate degree programs at the nation's 76 universities, which in France are both accredited and financed by the state.

With little advance warning, Saunier-Seite chose this academic year as the time to guillotine 1,131 or 30% of all master's and doctoral degree programs, mostly in the humanities and social sciences. Among them: a Sorbonne doctorate in educational sciences directed by noted Sociologist Vivianne Isambert-Jamati (who is a consultant to Saunier-Seite's office) and Medievalist Pierre Jonin's acclaimed graduate seminar at Avignon.

Technically, Saunier-Seite merely announced that the government would not accredit diplomas in the ill-fated programs, but that was enough. In France nationally accredited diplomas account for 90% of graduate degrees--and are the only degrees with prestige in the job market.

"Already this year we've lost 200 registrations," complains Avignon's Mahe, whose 1,500-student school was denied national accreditation for graduate programs in medieval literature, modern literature and English. The minister also said "non" to six new degree offerings Avignon proposed in such fields as theater and medieval history. Students enrolled in rejected programs were obliged to transfer to other schools, often in distant towns or cities. Many of those unable to change cities have abandoned hope of advanced degrees. Angry student groups claim that 80,000 students will eventually be affected one way or another throughout the country. The government points out that only 3,000 face serious disruptions in their studies.

Saunier-Seite defended her cutbacks as an efficiency move that will end course duplication and restrict graduate education to major university centers like Paris, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Nancy and Strasbourg. These, she hopes, will become "poles of excellence." (With that in mind she also doubled the number of classroom hours required for all graduate degrees, and so far students have not complained.) At smaller universities like Amiens, Perpignan and Avignon, the minister wants faculty members to concentrate on lower-level courses. Says she: "You can't teach everything everywhere." That rationale, reasonable though it may be, has stirred deep passions in France, where educators and students fear a return to the severe restrictions on educational access that touched off a nationwide protest of workers and students in 1968.

The French university system expanded from a small cadre of universities to the present 76 after the events of 1968. The number of graduate degrees awarded rose from 90,000 in 1967 to 145,000 a decade later. Many of the newer campuses are small schools in the provinces whose programs were sharply scythed by Saunier-Seite. Said Alain Touraine, research director of the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences: "Instead of both selective grandes ecoles [the elite specialist schools outside the regular university system that train most of France's future leaders] and open-admission universities, we will have the grandes ecoles and a few elite universities, and then all the rest. It's a return to the old, centralized order." Warned the Council of University Presidents in a public statement: "Contrary to what they intend, these measures compromise higher education's capacity for innovation. They may lead to the ossification of the French university system."

Saunier-Seite and Premier Raymond Barre, however, view the reorganization as a forward-looking step into the technological '80s. While slashing programs in the humanities and social sciences, the government did approve almost all (90%) of the science programs up for review, in line with a five-year plan that names technological research and development as the nation's top priority. The government also increased the 1981 national budget for universities by 14.8%.

In the present soft job market, policymakers are worried about a glut of recent graduates with advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences. Roughly 25% of humanities majors are jobless after graduation, and many of them eventually have to find work in other fields. These subjects, moreover, are frequently taught from a Marxist perspective in France. During a recent speech, Saunier-Seite bluntly warned students to beware of the "Marxist domination" and "ideological imperialism" rampant in faculty lounges and student cafeterias. But that just made many academics all the more wary of Saunier-Seite and her efforts to reorganize them. Says Sorbonne Classics Professor Andre Mandouze: "This is an effort to muzzle intellectuals, to isolate and slander them, and to undermine the French university."

Similar alarms were voiced in 1976, the last time the government tinkered with the granting of graduate degrees. Then some job-related programs were given national accreditation, among them technical English translation and applied business Spanish. At first, classically inclined French students scoffed. There was grumbling that the government had "sold out to Big Business," and only 3% of eligible students chose the new programs. But today 15% do. The government hopes that the same steadily growing acceptance will greet the current effort to encourage more economically useful training.

--By Kenneth M. Pierce. Reported by Alessandra Stanley/Paris

With reporting by Alessandra Stanley/Paris

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