CNRS: the co-option of networks of mediocrity
When I started my work, an important step was – after having established a certain number of theoretical bases – to embark, with a colleague from Thomson-CSF, on a somewhat adventurous project: trying to manufacture magnetic multilayers. This work led to the discovery of giant magnetoresistance, but initially it was a risky project that no one could know if it would succeed. The CNRS funded it, because this organization is capable of discussing with researchers and supporting them. A project financing agency would never have chosen it: at the time it was too marginal a subject and far from fashionable themes (Albert Fert, Le Monde, 10/25/2007).
Unfortunately, Nobel Prize winner Albert Fert seems more enlightened when it comes to magnetoresistance than science policy. You cannot be good everywhere, as the person concerned also indicates. The CNRS is no longer capable today of “discussing with researchers and supporting them”. This organization may, at other times, have had an interest. Today it is characterized by several negative traits.
First, scientific incompetence. The CNRS has no ethics, no respected code of ethics, no transparent and anonymous evaluation procedure, no evaluation methodology – nor even the slightest serious reflection in these areas. The use of the detestable technique of the rapporteur, very often followed by conformity or lack of information by his colleagues, biases collective decisions and promotes, in an environment that is afraid of risk, the behavior of Panurge’s sheep. There is confusion between scientific evaluation (that is to say that of content), professional evaluation (that of the overall contribution of researchers), and the measurement of potential (which the CNRS does not know how to carry out) . The meetings of its evaluation bodies are confused, polemical, based on the gathering of information by the gang via cooptation networks that are either favoritist or exclusionary, but rarely objective.
Then, the misery of human resources and organizational development policies. Low salaries, slow career progression, rigid public accounting procedures (slow reimbursements, insufficient cost coverage, various impossibilities, etc.), have a variable effect depending on whether those who undergo them have prior experience in other sectors or are “born at the CNRS”. Either these conditions attract or fix mediocre personalities who have never known anything else or find themselves comfortable there. Either they result in surreptitious demotivation and a discreet alignment of collective performance on the “lowest possible average”. Whatever the case, the security of the official buys the silence of many.
The latest “discovery” of the CNRS in terms of personnel policy is a bibliometric productivity of the Stakhanovist type (quantity of publications or “production”)…in an environment of executives presumed to be highly qualified and supposed to exercise their capacity for reflection! This is called being late for a war. And this in defiance of its founding texts, which provide that researchers carry out a diversity of missions: development of knowledge, but also: transfer and application in all areas contributing to the progress of society, dissemination of scientific culture throughout the population , participation in initial and continuing training, administration and management of research, etc.
Finally, its policy of association with universities in the last decade has been catastrophic for the CNRS. This policy led him to come under pressure from a mandarinate hungry for social status and which is even more abstract than the CNRS itself. Far from seeking to promote its members, the institution capitulates to these pressures, to the point that its researchers must increasingly go through the university rite of “authorization to direct research” in order to be able to practice what is nevertheless good. their profession! Furthermore, this policy results in a circular cartel in which the CNRS sprinkles its credits over numerous “associated” units, therefore providing them with little added value, but nevertheless being able to take advantage of their work – while these The latter can claim the CNRS label…
It is true that fundamental research should remain free and creative. It is less and less so in the bureaucratic gangue of the CNRS. When we look at the relationship between the colossal amounts of public money swallowed up (some 2.5 billion euros per year…) and the results obtained, the “quality/price ratio” is far from being as flattering as Mr. Fert claims. . The co-option of Soviet-style networks of mediocrity can never replace the dynamism of project-based research, which encourages the integration of managerial and scientific dimensions, as long as it is open and adequately funded.
