Recent French Developments
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6017/ihe.2000.20.6879Keywords:
Reform and Change, Europe, FranceAbstract
French universities have long been known for their weak governance capacity. Research by Erhard Friedberg and Christine Musselin on this topic (Enquête d’universités, 1989) and their comparative work on French and German universities clearly confirmed this characteristic. They show that French university administrators tend to behave as primus inter pares rather than as active promotors of collective projects. In most cases, university bodies came to “␣ nondecisions,” not making any decisions at all, rubberstamping choices made by individual faculty members, leaving the final decision to the ministry, or simply implementing the criteria set by the Parisian central administration. Thus, individual autonomy was considerable while institutional autonomy was limited␣ ; moreover the latter was considered somewhat illegitimate. In the view of these two authors, the weak governance of French universities allowed the Ministry of Education to play an interventionist role that also maintained the weakness at the institutional level. Fifteen years later, the authors of this article have done a new study on French university governance, funded by the Agency for the Modernization of the Universities—created in 1997 as part of the French Association of University Presidents. Based on 250 in-depth interviews at four universities, the study shows that French universities experienced a number of important changes within the last decade and have strengthened their governance.Downloads
Published
2015-03-25
How to Cite
Musselin, C., & Mignot-Gerard, S. (2015). Recent French Developments. International Higher Education, (20). https://doi.org/10.6017/ihe.2000.20.6879
Issue
Section
Countries and Regions
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
- Authors will be required to sign our standard License Ageement before publication.
A Word document containing the License Agreement is available for download here.