French Research Governance After Shanghai: More State, More Market and More Humboldt

This article explores the recent reforms in research governance reforms in France, which can be viewed as the result of tensions between historical legacies and transnational competitive pressures.  While most recent research on the internationalization or Europeanization of HE focusses on the Bologna Process, I show that other factors such as international comparative rankings and domestic public sector reforms are crucial variables in explaining changing patterns of governance. In a state of gradual change since the mid-1980s (Musselin 2001), the French HE and research landscape has recently undergone extensive reforms, which were accelerated after the very poor performance of French universities in the Shanghai Ranking. Once considered to be the epitome of state-centeredness and educational “immobilisme”, French educational and research policy-makers have recently embarked on a quest for international legitimacy and increasingly aligned themselves with external models perceived as successful. In the article I demonstrate how French HE and research policy has recently taken on numerous characteristics of Humboldtism (i.e. research-centered universities) while maintaining its traditionally strong degree of state design and intervention and introducing a series of state-monitored market mechanisms.