Word: saunier
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...tantamount to killing the university," snapped the president of France's Avignon University, Geologist Joël Mahé. What has aroused Mahé and most of his fellow French university presidents is a decision by France's tough-minded minister of universities, Alice Saunier-Seïté, to cut back proliferating graduate degree programs at the nation's 76 universities, which in France are both accredited and financed by the state...
With little advance warning, Saunier-Seïté chose this academic year as the time to guillotine 1,131 or 30% of all master's and doctoral degree programs, mostly in the humanities and social sciences. Among them: a Sorbonne doctorate in educational sciences directed by noted Sociologist Vivianne Isambert-Jamati (who is a consultant to Saunier-Seïté's office) and Medievalist Pierre Jonin's acclaimed graduate seminar at Avignon...
Technically, Saunier-Seïté merely announced that the government would not accredit diplomas in the ill-fated programs, but that was enough. In France nationally accredited diplomas account for 90% of graduate degrees-and are the only degrees with prestige in the job market...
...Saunier-Seïté defended her cutbacks as an efficiency move that will end course duplication and restrict graduate education to major university centers like Paris, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Nancy and Strasbourg. These, she hopes, will become "poles of excellence." (With that in mind she also doubled the number of classroom hours required for all graduate degrees, and so far students have not complained.) At smaller universities like Amiens, Perpignan and Avignon, the minister wants faculty members to concentrate on lower-level courses. Says she: "You can't teach everything everywhere." That rationale, reasonable though...
...weekly Paris Match calls it "that big pimple." Minister for the Universities Alice Saunier-Seïté claims that a "horse registered and was accepted." The place, she has declared, "has become a forbidden city where drugs are sold openly for the Paris region." In fact she once sputtered to a Communist senator, "It is what will become of all France if you ever come to power. Vincennes is Italy...