Knowledge production (continued). Careers, disciplines and organizations

For the second year, the lecture focused on the production of knowledge. After analyzing the characteristics of the organization of higher education in the Anglo-American world in 2015, in the 2016 lecture we examine how the French model was built and developed on the dual dualism that distinguishes universities from grandes écoles and selective short courses, on the one hand, and universities from research establishments, on the other. The particularity of the French system lies in the abundance of horizontal relationships between these components, which recent reforms have had considerable difficulty in reducing. The lecture examines in turn the expansion of French higher education, and the variety of associations and dissociations between research and teaching tasks that result from the dual institutional dualism. The expansion of higher education is a reflection of changes in secondary education. In the latter, the increase in the number of students reaching the baccalaureate was achieved by diversifying and prioritizing streams. Success and failure rates in university higher education (non-selective) bear the imprint of successive tests of a selection and segmentation process. While student numbers have risen, the proportion of university-educated students has steadily fallen, to the benefit of selective para-university or extra-university training. The study of academic careers distinguishes between specialization in teaching functions alone (teaching in preparatory classes and short selective courses), specialization in research activities (employment in public research establishments) and the combination of the two tasks in academic careers stricto sensu. The professional situation created by statutory multi-tasking is compared with exclusive specialization in the respective roles of teaching and research. The lecture concludes with a case study.