Privatization Trends in French Public Universities: Challenging the Geographies of a Public Service
Résumé
This chapter aims to analyze how some recent privatization trends in French Higher Education and Research system are transforming the geographies of universities at different levels. A succession of reforms implemented since mid-2000’s to conform to globalized scripts of international attractivity has fostered dynamics of privatization, in a general context of decreasing recurrent public funding and transformation of the State involvement. Certain trends towards corporatization, marketization and entrepreneurialism have an impact on the landscape and organization of public universities. It calls into question the publicness of the French public university model, and its spatial dimensions. The hierarchization of the university system, the competition through selective public call for funding, and the diversification of the public and private universities’ resources by local involvement challenge some spatial dimensions of what has been considered as the public character of French universities: the uniformity of institutions and their members, the equivalence of study and working conditions, and a balanced distribution of sites over the national territory.