Patrick Hetzel, a professor of management, was appointed Minister of Higher Education and Research on Saturday 21 September. He had just begun his fourth term as a member of parliament for the Bas-Rhin, in June 2024.
60-year-old Alsatian Lutheran, A member of the Les Républicains party, he is close to Prime Minister Michel Barnier, having tested his programme in the party primaries in 2021. Before embarking on a political career, Patrick Hetzel was rector of Limoges (2005-2007), educational adviser to Prime Minister François Fillon (2007-2008) and director-general of higher education (2008 and 2012) at the time of the law relating to the freedoms and responsibilities of universities (LRU) promulgated by Valérie Pécresse, then Minister of Higher Education and Research.
Since then, Patrick Hetzel has promoted a liberal vision of universities. In early 2022, in an article published in the journal University actionnewspaper of members and supporters of the right-wing student union UNI, presented a quasi-ministerial roadmap, with a view to “booster” higher education and research. In the program: “de-bureaucratize and make the system breathe”, “give more educational and budgetary autonomy to schools” or even “allow universities that wish to do so to experiment with new governance systems”.
“Turn right”
The former senior ministry official considered it necessary “Admitting that the single model [de l’université] It no longer corresponds to reality and it is absurd to make it survive, according to a uniform logic, in every establishment in France. “Let us stop believing that all universities would do exactly the same, those that carry out research at a world level and those, no less ambitious, that work mainly to bring their students closer to the bachelor’s level and integrate them professionally,” he concluded.
“It embodies the step back, the movement to the right”estimates Anne Roger, co-secretary general of the Snesup-FSU union, who compares the new minister to “a substitute for Valérie Pécresse”, “an old figure who was in the closets of higher education and research.”
“We have a fundamental divergenceThis is also pointed out by the communist senator Pierre Ouzoulias, an archaeologist and researcher at the CNRS. I am opposed to designing universities in several zones, because the French university is a public service that responds to a fundamental public principle, that of equal access to higher university studies.
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