Strike!

Previously, government regulations stipulated, for example, how much time a mathematics professor was supposed to spend on teaching and how much on research. The LRU reforms aim to give more control over such matters to the universities themselves, so that university presidents would have discretion to, say, shift around teaching loads, rewarding those who are productive in research by assigning them fewer teaching hours and upping the teaching loads of those doing less research. The buzzwords are “autonomy” and “local control”, which sound reasonable and perhaps even desirable. But French academics are more comfortable basing such decisions on government regulations, which are seen as impartial and even-handed.