French University Strikes

I have started an archive of materials on the French university strikes (in French).

The most typical thing about the Sarkozy "reforms" are that they are no-money propositions. This is in spite of the fact that biggest problem with French universities is that on the Western scale they are poor.

The "reforms" are cost-free substitutes for better funding. Among other things, they

• enhance the powers of each university president to reallocate the time and functions of teacher-researchers
• increase the teaching hours of researchers

The theory seems to be that efficiency flows from having someone at the top giving orders. Command-and-control is a widely admitted failure in classrooms and laboratories, and it doesn't really work in the corporate world either. But it does allow conservative politicians to make moralizing statements about the shortcomings of everyone else, publicly flog their traditional enemies among scientists, teachers, and intellectuals, and save public money for more important things, like bank bailouts and tax cuts for the wealthy.

The same cheapness was also the case for Germany's "Elite 10" program for creating a German Ivy League. The idea came in the first place from the methodologically bad world rankings cranked out by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The literal bait was utterly puny - 13.5 million Euros per year per winning campus through 2011. 37 universities turned themselves upside down to apply for money that would add about 5% to the research funds of an ordinary medium-sized campus in the United States. The real incentive was the status of the "German Ivy League" label. More accurately, the incentive was avoiding defeat and demotion to a lower university caste. The outcomes are always the same:

1. less pressure to spend real money, in this case to improve Germany's overall higher education system.
2. university personnel distracted from common advancement by competition
3. rankings that justify fewer resources for the newly-invented lower orders
4. less development for society overall.
   

I'll write a comparison soon on the French and American "how to," as in how to avoid spending actual money on higher education.