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Dear colleagues,

Some of these issues have been discussed here in the past, so I thought this may be of interest ...


Doreen

From: William Keith <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 08:31:00 -0600





>Subject: Pétition : Appel international à tous les universitaires
>
>International call.
>
>French universities are on a permanent strike.
>
>The French system of universities is public, with teachings and research 
>of high quality. It has always enjoyed independence, liberty and 
>recognition. But, within the past few months, the government has decided, 
>brutally and without any concertation, to end this system and replace it 
>by some sort of marketplace model of research where arbitrary decisions 
>and instability prevail.
>
>  The previous statute of the academics has ended and their teaching 
> duties are now decided on face value.
>  Permanent positions are being cut dramatically and being replaced by 
> temporary, insecure and dependent positions.
>  PhD students can now be fired without any justification during the first 
> six months of their PhD, and are now made available to private industries 
> without any recognition of their rights.
>  The training of teachers is in distress.
>  Universities are autonomous (but in fact, they compete with each other 
> under a reinforced government control) and without sufficient funding, 
> they will soon have to put in place tuition fees and put themselves under 
> the influence of local funding sources
>  The CNRS is suppressed and changed into a funding agency managed by 
> technocrats
>  Academic researches are evaluated by inadequate and inept "quantitative 
> means" rejected by all scholar societies
>
>We, academics and researches from all around the world, assert that these 
>decisions are bureaucratic, financially motivated and dangerous. Similar 
>decisions were or are imposed in other institutions of many countries. As 
>such, we support the French academics in their fight. If, the education 
>and the research of the country of the Encyclopédie, of Voltaire and 
>Rousseau, and of the Declaration of Human Rights, are now reduced to 
>market laws and under the influence of the political powers, then it is 
>the freedom of the whole world that is under threat.
>
>The powers that are imposing this new deal are organizing themselves. To 
>defend our common values, we need to organize ourselves better and in 
>greater number. Therefore, we call for all academics of all political 
>sides, of all beliefs and of all creeds to join to oppose these changes 
>that no humanist scientists of any time ever supported.
>
>To sign 
>:<http://math.univ-lyon1.fr/appel/spip.php?article2>http://math.univ-lyon1.fr/appel/spip.php?article2

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