The candidate Les Républicains R in the presidential election Valérie Pécresse explained on Monday that she wanted to give “new impetus to university autonomy” but denounced Emmanuel Macron’s “provocation” to charge the university. Less than three months before the presidential election, Emmanuel Macron on Thursday wanted a “systemic” reform of universities, which he wants to be more “professionalizing”, while deeming a system of higher education “without any price” for students untenable but with a massive failure rate.
“Talking regarding the increase in tuition fees for families who today are in real trouble with purchasing power, even though there is such a strong withdrawal from the State for the university, for me it’s ‘is provocation’, criticized on Europe 1 the former Minister of Higher Education of Nicolas Sarkozy.
“For five years, there has been neither reform nor means”
“When I was minister of universities, there was reform and means, but for five years, there has been neither reform nor means”, accused the president of the Ile-de-France region. “It’s terrible to hear candidate Macron promise the opposite of what President Macron did, it was already the case on security in Nice”, she also reproached him. “We will have to restore momentum to this university autonomy which is the norm in the world and which makes it possible to effectively seek partnerships everywhere”, pleaded Valérie Pécresse, insisting on the need to “do step 2 because François Hollande, with Emmanuel Macron, unraveled this reform”.
“The most anti-youth president of the Fifth Republic”
She defended the “model of tomorrow” where grandes écoles and universities work “together”, “not a model where we oppose each other, where we break up the grandes écoles to give to the universities”.
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Thursday, during the closing by videoconference of the Congress of the Conference of University Presidents, Emmanuel Macron had estimated that France might “not stay permanently in a system where higher education has no price for almost all students, where a third of students are considered to be scholarship holders and yet where we have so much student insecurity, and a difficulty in financing a model much more financed by public money than anywhere in the world”. On Sunday, the environmental candidate for the presidential Yannick Jadot considered Emmanuel Macron’s proposal “shocking”, even going so far as to accuse him of being “the most anti-youth president of the Fifth Republic”.
