The Recent Evolution of French Universities

Christine Musselin (1) , Stephanie Mignot Gerard

1 CSO - Centre de sociologie des organisations (Sciences Po, CNRS)

The French agency for the modernisation of universities1 (Agence de Modernisation des Universités et des Etablissements, AMUE) was created in June 1997 as an expansion of a former structure called GIGUE (Groupement pour l’Informatique de Gestion des Universités et des Etablissements). It is in charge of disseminating university management software and offering services to universities in order to improve their management and internal practices. Shortly after its creation, this new agency commissioned a number of research studies aimed at obtaining knowledge of the current state of the French university system. One of these research areas was ‘university government’ and our centre, the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations was chosen to conduct this study. The study involved two large fieldwork projects. In 1998, a qualitative study based on 250 interviews was conducted in four universities with the help of graduate students from Sciences-Po Paris. A comparative report was written (Mignot-Gérard and Musselin 1999) for the AMUE. Drawing on the results of this first study, we designed a questionnaire that was sent to individuals associated with 37 universities in 1999. We received 1660 responses (from 5000 questionnaires sent), about 1100 from academics and 560 from members of the administrative staff (see the methodological appendix at the end of the paper). A second report was written in 2000 and delivered to the AMUE (Mignot-Gérard and Musselin 2000).

Domains: Sociology; Political science

Christine Musselin, Stephanie Mignot Gerard. The Recent Evolution of French Universities. Alberto Amaral; Glen Jones; Berit Karseth. Governing Higher Education: National Perspectives on Institutional Governance, Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp.81 - 103, 2002. ⟨hal-03458569⟩