FRANCE: An 'act of aggression', unions say

Unions representing staff of the CNRS, France's national centre for scientific research, walked out of a ministerial meeting to discuss reform of the centre after Valérie Pécresse, Minister for Higher Education and Research, made public her plans for its future before consultations had been completed.

Pécresse set out her reform programme in an interview with Le Monde newspaper the day before the meeting at which the centre's governing board, which includes union representatives, was scheduled to examine the text. A vote on the proposals was not due until mid June.

The four unionists accused the Minister of an 'act of aggression', and left after reading a statement in which they said they would not continue with 'such a masquerade'.

The multidisciplinary centre, created in 1939, is France's biggest research organisation, with 32,000 employees of whom 26,000 are tenured including 11,600 researchers. It has extensive international partnerships, including exchange agreements with 60 countries and 5,000 visiting scientists from abroad. Its budget for 2008 totalled nearly EUR3.3 billion (US$5 billion).

Research unions and associations have expressed fears that reforms will remove autonomy from the CNRS and other research organisations, and turn them into mere funding agencies (see 'Research protest against Sarkozy's reforms', University World News, 30 March 2008).

Pécresse told Le Monde the restructuring of the CNRS followed President Nicolas Sarkozy's wish to give universities a greater research role (see 'Proposals for greater university research role', University World News, 4 May 2008), and he now wanted better cooperation between the research organisations.

"Territorial quarrels, defence of one's own interests, must be removed in the interests of coordination and solidarity. That's the direction of the CNRS reform which, with the contract of objectives to be signed between now and the end of the year, will reflect the whole French scientific scene," she said.

The CNRS would be changed into a federation consisting of eight institutes: mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering sciences, social and human sciences, and ecology and biodiversity, with the existing departments of nuclear physics and sciences of the universe.

Of particular concern to critics of the reform is the future of CNRS involvement in the areas of life sciences and computer sciences. Pécresse told Le Monde these would be jointly controlled with Inserm, the health and medical research institute, and Inria, the information technologies institute, respectively.

In their joint statement, the union representatives, who belong to three different union federations, said enactment of the Pécresse reform would presage the disappearance of the centre.

"The characteristic of the CNRS as a national and general research organisation is to explore all fields of knowledge through inter-disciplinarity," they said. "Under the hypocrisy about 'decompartmentalisation' and promises about 'preserving the scope', the statute decided for life sciences and computer sciences is the prelude to a division which will be fatal to the organisation.".

Though the governing board should have discussed the introduction and synthesis of 'Horizon 2020', the strategic plan for the centre, the Minister had shown her scorn for the board's members through her intervention in Le Monde, the statement declared.

"In practice, [the Minister's decision] halted the ongoing consultations which for several months had occupied the staff, unit managers, scientific departments, the scientific council, departmental scientific councils, the national committee, unions and the working group of the governing board."
CNRS President Catherine Bréchignac, however, said she would go back to the unions to resume discussions.

jane.marshall@uw-news.com

© Image: Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons