Liberties and Responsibilities of Universities

Liberties and Responsibilities of Universities is the official name of a French law aiming at revamping entirely the French public higher education system. The bill was presented by the French Ministry of Higher Education Valérie Pécresse and was officially voted on 11 August 2007 by the Parliament. The law is commonly referred to as the law LRU (after the acronym of the official name), or Law Pécresse. It is sometimes called the law on the autonomy of universities, because the law give universities more financial autonomy, so that the government will stop funding them.

The text of the bill consists of six titles. The first title recall public service and higher education's mission. The second title is about the management of universities. The third deals with the new responsibilities for universities. The three other titles give additional details about the reform.

The bill was rapidly voted by the Parliament in July 2007, and definitively adopted on 1 August 2007, less than three months after Nicolas Sarkozy's election. The university student, in holidays during the vote of the law, began to express their discontentment in October 2007.

University Reforms had been promised by French President Nicolas Sarkozy before the 2007 Presidential Elections. Prime Minister François Fillon announced the reform would be the most important of hi term in office. Therefore, the reform was debated long before the bill was officially presented by the government.

Soon after the presidential elections in May 2007, the Higher Education minister Valérie Pécresse announced to university representatives (students, teachers, researchers, presidents of universities) that her ministry would work on the reform. She said the bill on university autonomy would be voted in July by Parliament, during an extraordinary session, while the other reforms would follow in the next months. The ministry released a first draft on 22 June. Some representatives were dissatisfied, saying that independency was not the main concern. The priority was to address student failure.

University autonomy concerns university management, i.e. the powers of the presidents and the administration councils, also recruitment and paying teachers. The majority of the representatives of students, teachers and researchers said they were strongly opposed to reform:

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