The Academic Research Enterprise within the Industrialized Nations Comparative Perspectives (1990) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
France
France
Pages 95-108
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 95... ...
, to say nothing of more than seventy commercial and business schools and about eighty others with different vocational specialities.3 The quality, in such a large sector of education, is necessarily variable, but the most prestigious of the schools, such as the Ponts et Chausse'es, the Ecole des Mines, and, most notably, the Ecole Polytechnique, enjoy an incomparable status in the eyes of candidates and their parents. Research, too, has traditionally been seen as the function of specialized institutions, far fewer in number than the grandes ecoles, but including some of the glories of French intellectual life, such as the sixteenth-century College de France (with its array of chairs across the spectrum of the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences)
|
From page 96... ...
It has always been recognized that professors in any institution, even in the grandes ecoles with their emphasis on vocational training, could perform research, and the reputation of the Ecole Polytechnique in its early golden age rested in large measure on the intellectual distinction of teachers of the calibre of Monge, Ampere, Gay-Lussac, Petit, and Thenard. But it was only when France was wafted by the international currents of reform in the later nineteenth century that research came to be seen as one of the primary duties of the academic profession, in particular of teachers in the · · universities.
|
From page 97... ...
Any explanation of these dominant attitudes to scientific research and of ministerial indifference to the conditions that prevailed in French laboratories between 1918 and 1939 must take account of elusive cultural prejudices. These prejudices fostered individualism and made it appear normal, even desirable, that research should be conducted in a large number of small laboratories in which dilapidation was a price willingly paid for independence and a strong hold over such matters as the choice of problems and the all-important matter of the succession when a Director died or retired.
|
From page 98... ...
This culminated, in 1939, in the founding of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) , as a national body that would break aggressively with the past, not only by encouraging research but also, and more specifically, by fostering cooperation and breaking down the barriers and intellectual fiefdoms that were integral to the old system of patronage.is The founding of the CARS can be seen as the first salvo in a continuing struggle by a succession of pressure-groups and governments to detach scientific research from its traditional institutional setting.
|
From page 99... ...
For a while, it seemed that the CNRS and the CEA were to be the harbingers of unprecedented change in the patronage of French science. But if Joliot-Curie's communist sympathies were acceptable enough in the immediate postwar reaction against what the Left liked to portray as the dead hand of the universities, they soon underlined the dangers inherent in the politicization of science.
|
From page 100... ...
But their argument that basic research cannot be planned paled as those who were willing to follow the designated research priorities found themselves spoiled. Time and again, the forced channelling of funds into priority areas allowed France to leap ahead, in telecommunications technology, for example, and in her vigorous nuclear power programme and military technology.
|
From page 101... ...
One, predating' the Gaullist era, was a colloquium of 150 scientists, industrialists, and political figures, held at Caen in an atmosphere of crisis in 1956.~9 Another was the consultation of 1982, when 25,OOO scientists, technologists, and engineers from both the state and the private sectors participated in a series of regional meetings and a final national colloquium on educational and research policy stimulated by the election of the new socialist President, Franpois Mitterand.20 The effectiveness of consultation on this scale is, of course, open to question. It has also been suggested that the period embraced by the successive National Plans is too long to allow for the short-term changes of direction that might be coped with rather better in a company involved in a constant review of its policies and priorities.
|
From page 102... ...
It was intended that the proportion of the GNP devoted to research and technological development would increase from 1.S percent to 2.5 percent between 1981 and 1985, and that there would be an increase of 4.5 percent per annum in the number of scientists and engineers employed in the main national research organizations, accompanied by a comparable growth of posts in higher education. There was also to be a determined push in the direction of greater cooperation between governmental and academic laboratories and private industry; here, a reinvigorated Agence Nationale pour la Valorisation de la Recherche (ANVAR)
|
From page 103... ...
One irresistible attraction has been the implantation of CNRS groups in university laboratories, a procedure that has accelerated the diversion of significant research funding into higher education and helped further to erode the traditional French divide between research and teaching. It is a mark of the success of this diversification that polytechniciens too have been touched by the new spirit: in recent years nearly fifty of the Ecole Polytechnique's annual graduating class of about 300 have gone on to careers in research, often (at least in their early years as researchers)
|
From page 104... ...
Le guide des formations et des carneres, from which much of my statistical information is drawn. For some classic contemporary statements of the view that France had been defeated by "German science," see the views of Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, Armand Quatrefages de Breau, and others in Comptes rendus hebdomadaires de l'Acade~mie des Sciences, Vol.
|
From page 105... ...
The "Prologue" to the report speaks of the profound "malaise" of the research community and itemizes complaints ranging from the excessive bureaucratization of research to what was seen as a weakening of governmental support through the 1970s.
|
From page 106... ...
27. The appointment of Hubert Curien reflects the relative ease with which the French system of administration admits figures with particular expertise from outside the political world.
|
From page 107... ...
Shinn, T "~e French Science Faculty System 1808-1914: Institutional Change and Research Potential." Historical Sedges in the Physical Sciences, Vol.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.