The Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation and the Secretary General for Investment announced Thursday, October 29 that the Idex of Lyon-Saint-Etienne was definitively stopped. In their joint press release, they explain that it is the position of the board of directors of the Jean-Monnet University of Saint-Étienne which stops the procedure.
As a reminder, Idex (for Initiatives of Excellence) is a kind of label, granted to higher education and research sites and accompanied by funding. In return, the site in question (here Lyon Saint-Étienne) must provide guarantees of structure and consistency. But not only: to obtain the Idex, the establishments must approach and abandon some of their prerogatives in favor of a large “target university”.
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Old weaknesses
On October 23, the board of directors of the Jean-Monnet University of Saint-Étienne rejected the draft statutes of the target University. The vote was final with 22 votes against, 11 for and one abstention.
The ENS de Lyon had adopted them the day before, but with a narrow majority (one vote). However, this is not the sole explanation for the halt. In fact, in Lyon Saint-Étienne, the merger project has always shown signs of weakness. The importance of the site, its richness, the size and the diversity of the entities that make it up immediately made the process more complex than in other places.
From its inception, in 2012, the Idex project encountered difficulties. We can no longer count his misadventures. Catching up in 2012, conditions set in 2017 and, throughout this process, defections, dissensions and numerous legal proceedings have weakened its credibility. In November 2019, the jury had again granted a stay, demanding to clarify the issue of the statutes of the target university.
Among the obstacles to this regrouping, the establishments feared losing their moral and legal personality, their room for maneuver. Staff representatives pointed to economies of scale leading to job cuts. For several years, criticism has also focused on governance cut off from the field, a certain opacity of decisions and administrative miseries.
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Réaction d’Écharde, a student union at ENS de Lyon
“Idexit! »Bravo to all for your mobilization, the Stéphanoises in the lead.
One period closes, another opens: everything our presidents have tried to break has to be rebuilt. We continue the fight! ✊ https://t.co/sDwZH9UBX5– ECHARDE (@ECHARDE_ENSL) October 29, 2020
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Defects
As a reminder, Lyon 2 had been ruled out in 2016, engineering schools, in particular Centrale Lyon and Insa had also taken some distance … And in the universities still involved in the small group, the agreement was fragile. The risk of Jean-Moulin Lyon 3’s disengagement, whose presidency is due to be renewed very soon, was not excluded. For a long time, his powerful law school signified his fear of being “fused” into a large whole. However, Lyon 3 was also to vote on the statutes of the target university before December 31.
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Restricted circle
What was left of the initial project? It was now envisaged a merger between the universities of Claude Bernard (Lyon 1), Jean Moulin (Lyon 3) and Jean-Monnet (Saint-Étienne) in a new experimental establishment of which the École normale supérieure de Lyon would have been a component establishment.
The Minister of Higher Education and the Secretary General for Investment “deeply regret that the State has to take this decision which puts an end to a project which is nevertheless very structuring for the territories of Lyon and Saint-Etienne and which would have strengthened their anchoring regional, their socio-economic impact and their international visibility ”.
“They hope, however, that in the future and within the framework of a procedure other than that of the initiatives of excellence, the establishments of Lyon and Saint-Etienne will be able to find another way of making recognize and promote the exceptional academic and scientific potential which is their “.
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