Autonomy, Act 2: Udice member universities ready to take up the challenge!
Udice welcomes the announcements made by the President of the Republic during his speech on December 7, 2023, on the future of French research and it is ready to take on the challenges raised by 2025.
These announcements mark a new stage in the continuation of the transformation of French Higher Education, Research and Innovation. By rethinking the organization of research in France to strengthen its readability, it will reduce its complexity due in particular to superposition supervisors and managers and thus gain efficiency.
The declarations of the President of the Republic also mark the entry into a more ambitious phase of university autonomy, reinforced through real multi-year Objectives, Means and Performance Contracts, and with more ambitious and equipped with more incentive means.
In his speech, the President of the Republic also affirmed the central place of universities and their role as leaders on university sites and coordinators of a collective organization necessary for large-scale multidisciplinary research. Universities are the natural actors to promote synergy between education, research and innovation at the territorial level. They are therefore legitimate for coordinating all the players and developing a coherent strategy that encompasses these three aspects. They will have the challenge of always bringing local priorities and national policies into dialogue and of coordinating partnerships with the socio-economic world.
Research organizations will transform into real programing agencies equipped with the resources necessary to manage major programs and encouraged to take risks. Likewise, the the Ministry of Higher Education and Research will be positioned as a pilot and strategist which will also contribute to strengthening the autonomy of universities.
Internationally, universities will interact with their university counterparts and research organizations that have become programing agencies with international program agencies.
The member universities of Udice are ready to take up the challenge of a new organization for research with the aim of simplifying the daily lives of researchers. This involves freeing up time for research, providing better administrative support and moving to a simpler, less frequent and ex post facto evaluation method, with the appropriation of the evaluation results. The same goes for research units that must be able to work in complete freedom. The definition of a single manager on each site is in line with Udice's proposal, which consists of entrusting the full delegation of the management of all UMRs* to the university, which hosts a very large part of the structures. This will of course require a redistribution of resources for these support functions.
We are ready to make bold proposals in terms of autonomy in HR management, professional mobility and career promotion. The shared challenge is to train, recruit and retain the best talents in a science open to the heart of society and decisions!
*UMR: a mixed research structures that are co-managed by a university and a national research agency
About Udice:
Established in October 2020, Udice represents the voice of ten research-intensive French universities, working for excellence in research, higher education, and the development of attractive, innovation ecosystems. Member universities: Aix-Marseille University, Sorbonne University, Claude University Bernard Lyon 1, University of Côte d’Azur, University of Bordeaux, University of Paris Cité, University of Strasbourg, University of Grenoble Alpes, University of Paris-Saclay, University of Paris Sciences et Lettres.