The sick search for management
If research is sick, it is because it is managed like a business competing on the global knowledge market. This is what researchers, teacher-researchers and administrative staff experience every day in their laboratories or classrooms but which the government persists in not seeing.
Public research lacks neither skills nor commitment; she lacks air. It is suffocated under a mode of governance which transforms a public service into a market segment, work collectives into project portfolios, scientific trajectories into performance curves. As part of the debates on the research budget in the National Assembly, this is what I was able to highlight. The report produced during this work is not a simple accounting exercise: it is the political x-ray of this lack, the quantified – and sometimes brutal – account of what the influence of “new public management” and the politics of numbers is doing to our research system.
I have to say where I’m speaking from. Today, I am writing as a deputy, rapporteur for opinion on research appropriations in the finance bill. But I come from the world of research – where I was a research director. I have seen and experienced short contracts, endless selection committees, lab meetings to prepare late in the evening, calls for projects drafted in a hurry because the deadline always comes at the worst time, articles submitted to the journal in botched versions. I have experienced the administrative burden that eats into hours of research, the feeling of guilt when you close your mailbox to simply try to think.
It is also because I come from this academic environment that I write today, to report on this work. For many readers in this environment, there may be nothing new here, except the testimony
