On Tuesday I attended the talk of Segolene Royal, last year's Socialist Party candidate for the French presidency. During this week, she has been making a series of appearances at Harvard and MIT, who were jointly sponsoring her visit.
Segolene is as elegant and beautiful as I saw her on TV :-)
The topic of the talk was "Reforming French Higher Education". She read a prepared talk in English (a little bit cliche) and then she responded to questions in French, with an MIT French professor translating to English. She was able to understand questions in English and she regreted that she could not speak better English. Some things she pointed out to improve higher education in France:
- French universities do not rank high in worldwide university rankings. In particular she mentioned the Shanghai world ranking. Some improvements she proposed:
a) to grant more decision power to universities.
b) to increase global mobility (not only European mobility as the Erasmus program). She thinks that France is not open enough and there are various visa issues. She felt that the mixture of cultures, backgrounds and nationalities in the US educational system offer wonderful opportunities - Free access to universities is a way for poor peole to rise in socitye, and therefore, higher education should continue being free.
- Grande Ecoles vs. Universities: The current educational system creates an elite only based on a single point in life (preparatory classes). After that point, careers diverge: Peole that make it into the Grande Ecole belong to the elite (she called these people the "aristocrats") and do not have an incentive to work hard any more. On the other hand, people that do not enter will never make it, no matter how hard they work. Although Segolene criticized the system, she did not give a clear alternative.
As a negative comment about the event, I would like to say that it was not well organized: There was no moderator, a better room should have been chosen (or at least, erase the board behind Segolene), and a real translator should have been chosen. The translator added her comments while translating and in a couple of occasions she disagreed with Segolene! the tranlator should have understood that she was not why we were there.
Find below two pictures I took from the event and look at the board behind her... so MIT!
Comments