Speech by President Emmanuel Macron on the closure of the 50th anniversary of the Congress of the Conference of Presidents of Universities.

Madam Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. President of the Conference of Presidents of Universities, who became France Universities, Ladies and Gentlemen University Presidents, Ladies and Gentlemen and Gentlemen and Gentlemen and GentlemenDirectors, Ladies and Gentlemen, Teachers-researchers, Ladies and Gentlemen, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Mr. President, thank you for your wishes and for your words, I will come back to a lot of the points that you have just raised at the moment.And in turn, I send you, to you all, presidents and presidents of universities, directors and directors of higher education and research establishments, and to all present through the screens in amphitheater,My best wishes for this new year.My wishes for good health and success for yourself, as for your loved ones, your institutions, your work and all students and students.May this year 2022 be a great vintage, if I may say, for Bordeaux that you are, for intellectual advances and scientific discoveries.

I want, before I start, maybe immediately say a word on which you finished your remarks, president.Indeed, we learned yesterday that Fariba Adelkhah, again, had been imprisoned.We fought for many months for his release, obtaining more acceptable conditions and the Iranian authorities decided again, to incarcerate it.I want to say here that this incarceration is not based on absolutely no element.It is indeed a scientific prisoner.His imprisonment is completely arbitrary.I know that his loved ones, his colleagues and beyond, the academic world is already mobilizing.All of France is mobilized to obtain its release.This is a sign of what free research represents as threatens when obscurantism spreads.And I wanted to tell you that we are fully mobilized alongside him, alongside his loved ones and all scientists.

President, this is the second time that I have been lucky to be among you.And I am happy to return this year on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of your conference and I must say: that on the way traveled in half a century!You recalled the big milestones, Mr. President, at the crossroads of intellectual, scientific, political and social history of our country.Its new name, France Universités, also corresponds to a new impetus which reaffirms the role that you have always played as an essential partner of the public authorities, but with a greater ambition than ever to be force of proposal, you have justShow, more lively transformations for higher education and research in France.You are, yes, an essential partner of the public authorities.I have been able to measure him fully for two years that our country has been plunged into an unprecedented global epidemic.

So, I first wanted to come back to the reforms conducted and these years of epidemic.As we know, the university community in general and students in particular have been hit hard by the direct or indirect effects of this crisis.The constraints that have touched their social life, the difficulty of learning by interposed screens, precariousness, isolation, loneliness, the difficulties of organizing exams, psychological disorders, etc.., etc.So, side by side, with Minister Frédérique Vidal and you, the presidents and presidents of universities, grandes écoles, but also with student associations, Cnous, Crous and all your partners, with also communitiesterritorial like associations, we have built unpublished devices to face this storm.Vaccination stands on campuses, freeze on tuition fees and rents of crisp residences, exceptional financial aid for precarious students who could go up to 5,200 euros, meals at 1 euro that we had generalized inJanuary 2021 and that we have maintained since the start of the school year in September for scholarship students and precarious students, psychological support via the Psy check which was an innovation and which also made it possible to initiate a deeper dynamic on the basis ofYour proposals, the hiring of 14,00 effective student referents in the Crous, the opening of 20,000 stakeholders that we have returned to this academic year or even inflation compensation of which the students were the first to benefit.During the crisis, all together, we knew how to invent or reinvent emergency systems by providing training otherwise thanks also to a myriad of educational innovations and support for digital education that I really want to greet here and which mustContinue to inspire us for the future.The Prime Minister recalled it when he came to meet you on December 16.All these safety, solidarity, educational continuity nets, we have deployed them together.Also, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for this flawless or release commitment at the service of our students of their future, simply our future.

In the heart of a world epidemic as we have not known for a century, in a world that has never been so populated, in a world where inequalities within our societies as through the planet n'have never been so large, on a planet that has never been so fragile and which we have again measured during this crisis and through the climate crisis vulnerability, in societies which, from a technological point of view andI would dare to say anthropological, have never evolved as quickly, for the better and sometimes for the worst, we today need science, letters, knowledge, humanities, interdisciplinarity.And it is to you, those who put themselves in search of the facts, of the true, who consolidate the knowledge acquired and carry out this work, who assume its share of doubt through the work of research, those who read, whoExperience, who discover and who transmit: it is up to you that it is up to enlighten the world as it goes.And so, this pandemic struck our university world full.We all resisted together, but education, higher education, research, discovery and transmission functions that are at the heart of your missions, taking into account the challenges that are those of the planet and our societies, n'have never been so important.This mission is all the more decisive at a time when rationality and scientific authority are going through a zone of turbulence.To recreate consensus, our era needs objectivity, solid and supported benchmarks, and I want to say it here with a lot of force: defending our universities is also defending a scientific and academic authority without which there isNE NO KNOW NOTHING TRANSMISSION OF KNOWS NOR research;and democratic societies like ours which have a passion for equality that we all share must nevertheless defend the right hierarchies that must be in our societies without which everything dissolves.And if our societies are put in situations where the academic and scientific authority is disputed, then we build the bed on the one hand, of a relativism which makes almost impossible the development of a truthscientist, but also of an enlightened, democratic debate, and we nourish in this way the conditions of conspiracy, that is to say the dissolution of a public spirit.

So I say it with great strength, universities are in my eyes where academic authority is built because, as one of my masters said, some have read more books and by the recognition of their peers,From their work under scientifically established conditions, have been recognized as sachants, which can transmit, which can conduct research and that this research and their results, judged by their peers in objective and known conditions, consolidate these elements as a truth, aelement of truth, recognized, questionable facts, under transparent conditions, but open to discussion and scientific debate.This enlightened frame is a treasure.Let no one question it.The Bronne commission underlined it, your contribution is essential to collective intelligence and must help us to reinject, if I can express myself, reason in the public debate.The commission brown, in fact, chaired by one of your eminent colleagues, aimed at building, rebuilding or refounding the lights in the digital age, landscape some of these milestones to which I have just returned.Yes, the universities that are our highly training, research, dissemination of knowledge has an essential role to play not only to ask the big questions of the century, but to answer them.

This first involves your principal and principal mission, the training of our youth.You recalled it, dear president, at the moment.Your establishments, as we know, welcome and form more and more students each year.The demographic wave had been expected for more than a decade, which did not prevent it from being relatively poorly anticipated to be honest, as shown by the drop in student expenditure for a little more than a decade.So we all worked to organize and respond to this challenge and to help you face this influx, we accompanied you from the start of the five -year term through the students' orientation and success law, then inthe framework of different plans such as the France Plan revives and by the creation of additional places.84,000 seats in total over 5 years.We had opened an additional 10,000 in 2020.We opened even more at the start of the 2021 school year, with 20,000 new places, with efforts that are unprecedented in certain sectors, such as in medicine, pharmacy, odontology and a few others where we opened 18 % more seats this return2021, which has been unheard of for 50 years.Our support was also materialized by aid for the energy renovation of your premises, which was essential, up to one 1.3 billion euros.With this aid, this government action, you have managed to restore visibility, attractiveness to your international establishments.Several establishments here present have entered the Shanghai ranking thanks to strong choices, increased financial means.Several others have leaps in giant and I am thinking in particular of Paris-Saclay University, which has risen directly to the thirteenth place this year, but also to many others here present.

More recently, we have also pursued the policy of strengthening university sites by recognizing, in the mind elsewhere, that you have just declined at the moment, their diversity and their excellence.800 million euros were thus allocated to strengthen fifteen of our university sites of all sizes.

Above all, we have done research a national priority.A priority that has been engraved not only in the spirits but in the law and I want to thank the Minister of Higher Education and Research and Innovation which has prepared this text with you and with many of your colleagues and whichthe door.For 10 years, the budget which was devolved to him was well below the objective of 3 % of our gross domestic product that we had set ourselves with the Lisbon strategy.The research programming law therefore marks a catch -up and a historic advance by allocating an additional 25 billion euros over 10 years to our research.This is an unprecedented commitment, it is a commitment that starts to catch up with chronic under-investment for too long.With major wage revaluations, career entry income which will not be able to descend below two minimum wage, new devices, in particular, the chairs of junior teachers and the long -awaited reinforcement of our national research agency.This law has implemented investments that were important in terms of modernization and created new devices, essential in a world as you said, where in a way, the theater of competition is international and the battle to train,Keeping and attracting talents is increasingly difficult to lead.And so, we must endow us with instruments and devices that are adapted in this competition.

To these unprecedented means are added the multi -year commitments of the investment programs for the future and, more recently, from France 2030.We have identified the areas in which we can be in the lead in a few years, but also those that we do not have the right to abandon and on which we must bet for their long -term strategic character.In all, nearly 50 billion euros will irrigate French research in the coming years.These targeted investments in strategic fields are decisive for our security, our intellectual, academic, industrial, energy, military and health sovereignty.It is a strong and new choice, it is a political will and we wanted the universities to be fully associated with it, including within the framework of priority research programs and equipment.These are investments in which, each time, I kept what we are vigilant about this continuum that you recalled, fundamental research and finalized research or technological research.This is also why in multi -year law, there is this desire to strengthen, consolidate the financing of our basic research.

This same dynamic is supplemented by our ambition at European level, with several European projects which are funded on the basis of the recovery plan that we have built by the Franco-German alliance and consolidated in July 2020 as part of the European Relaunch Planwhich allows the European Commission to carry out new essential projects for our research, there also fundamental and technological, and new major industrial programs.We will do during the informal summit in March under French presidency, a synthesis, if I may say, and new announcements on all of these subjects.But the crisis highlights every day how salutary innovation is, if not vital to live better, offer a nation and a continent, sometimes in the whole world, solutions to the problems and challenges we encounter.And therefore, we see how all of these investments and this policy were essential.All this is based on the work you have led, you have just remembered, to make our research places and our places of teaching places where we have continued to decompartmentalize to promote synergies, complementarities, betweenTechnological research and technical innovations, between research and teaching, between research and practice, and I know how much you hold like me, to the model of our university hospital centers too, that I want to mention today with you.And I welcome it, because it is a question every time to know too, in a way, sometimes ward off our history and this French model.You recalled my words a few months ago.Yes, I believe that the key for the future is to know how to make our universities and these major university and research sites, these places where we will reconcile fundamental research, technological research, higher education, training of our outgoing students justBaccalaureate to post-doc.And places also, creations of startups, technological innovations, or practice and clinical research.Because it is in the ability to make these spaces dialogue and to make them collaborate that we improve our practices, that we improve our research, that we sometimes also create the great ruptures within research and that we favor the framework ofeducation.We have all worked a lot since 2017 to improve this framework, reinvest.

We see the first traces collectively of these improvements.I mentioned the Shanghai rankings right now.I could also evoke the formidable results that we have still obtained very recently with the winners, precisely for our ERC startings, where France went from the fourth to second place, which shows the vitality of this ecosystem that weare collectively refounded.We have 53 projects against 57 for Germany.We are progressing very quickly and I also want to congratulate the quasi-precarity of these projects since they are 43 % worn by women.All this, therefore, is a unprecedented advance.More means and we will go even further: deep reorganizations, organizational innovations and a redesigned and assumed ambition.However, if I may say, we had the headwind, because we had to face the unprecedented demographic increase which asked us even more means, and the pandemic.Nevertheless, all together, we managed to make our youth a clear priority with these first results and also to make our youth and our students a priority.And to finish on the balance sheet, I want to insist on this point.First by improving guidance tools.I remind you that with in particular all that the law that I mentioned earlier has made it possible to improve, we managed to rebuild an orientation system for our high school students, with satisfaction and response rates thatare incomparable with what was for fewer baccalaureate holders at the start of the five -year term and with Parcoursup, something more readable and whose results are more efficient.By also improving our learning, we have gone from a chronic result between 250,000 and 300,000 learning contracts per year to more than 700,000 at the end of last year, in full year.And we must continue, including within our higher education, to massively develop learning, which also makes it possible to reduce the separation that can sometimes be between higher education and the world of work.

We also worked together to improve the health of students who was a constant concern.Thus, social protection of students is now covered by social security.The bond has been extended to all students, without resource condition and without parental surety.And we have further facilitated the conditions of study with, for example, a larger number of places and a greater hourly amplitude of university libraries.However, there are many things that are still to improve.I mentioned the orientation.I completely share what you said.I think we must completely rethink the link between high school and university and we need to be much more ambitious in terms of orientation of our college students and our high school students.I will come back to it in a moment.And I have to look there too the figures opposite.We are not at the rendezvous of the commitments that we had made in terms of student accommodation.We had a desire to have 60,000 public student housing.We made about it around 34,000.There have been several tens of thousands of private homes.But if we want to answer this problem of student precariousness which is again today, the question of student accommodation must call even more massive answers than those that we have managed to set up.

And so, I recognize it bluntly, we started on a lot of subjects to stop the gaps, to reconsider.We started to catch up, but we have immense challenges before us.We have laid the milestones, we share the ambitions and I want to try here to consolidate some of the prospects I think.We must indeed redouble their efforts so that on the horizon of 10 years, our university is stronger, that it attracts to it the best students and international talents.But above all that we train the best talents in the world and that we keep them by giving them prospects in the academic and research world, in our businesses or our public sector.Fully make France an avant-garde of research, excellence, knowledge.

It must be said, in France we have built and we have accepted a model at several speeds for too long, with a form also of dogma which had settled.Philippe d'Iribarne had this formula of a form of "egalitarian aristocracy" which corresponds exactly to what you recalled earlier.The grandes schools and research organizations were supposed to deal with the excellence and training of elites, and the universities of the democratization of higher education and the management of the masses.This system is over.It is revolved first because it does not correspond to international competition, because its very form creates barriers, segmentations which are ineffective.And that’s what we started to lift together.Tomorrow, it is our universities that must be the pillars of excellence, the center of gravity for research as for training.And besides, that's what you have done with major university sites in recent years.This is what, from Idex and all this trend, this last decade, has been launched, this is what we have started to consolidate, which has, on the ground, in real life, broken manybarriers that could exist.But we must complete this movement.It is also exactly this same sense of history that I also wanted for the training of our high public service, wishing that universities play an increased role within the National Institute of Public Service which,From January 1 of this year, replaced ENA, in a changing world where the training of our public service must be anchored in the academic world, the world of research, and participate in these major transformations.This is how French research and universities will find all their colors.But beyond the bases laid, we must launch a new investment policy in higher education and research for the 10 years old.I said it by presenting France 2030.You recalled my words, so I'm not going to come back.And therefore beyond the catch-up, we need together to have a new investment policy to fully project our universities in the scientific competition of the 21st century.

But the financial means, if necessary, are not self-sufficient.I want to quote some examples to show and illustrate this argument.We have injected one billion euros of more means in the first cycle since 2017 and therefore created more than 84,000 places in our universities and allowed 29,000 students to benefit from a personalized course to help them succeed in the first yearlicense.Tremendous.And yet only 50% of students present themselves to the first year exams.We must look this reality in front, which shows that we have a problem, despite all this investment, these improvements, orientation and choice, in any case of the first university year.And I'm just talking about presentation to exams.It's intolerable for all of us because it's a great mess.It is a mess for all those who followed, provided lessons for these students, it is a mess too because it means that we refused access to other students whose it was sometimes thefirst choice.Another example: we have revalued scholarships on social criteria for three consecutive years to preserve the purchasing power of scholarship holders.We are in a country, and it is a pride, where 1 in 3 students is a stock market and was able to benefit from it.And yet we have never seen so much student precariousness.We therefore see that beyond the question of means, we have a structural question and we will not be able to remain permanently in a system where higher education has no price for almost all students, where athird -party students are scholarship holders and where, however, we have so much student precariousness and a difficulty in funding a model that is much more funded on public money than all over the world to respond to international competition.I say things with the clarity and the frankness you know me because if we do not solve these structural problems, we will lie to ourselves.

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And so we need a profound change of approach, a systemic transformation of our universities, our organization.This is why, alongside the significant increase in the higher education and research budget that I have assumed, worn and that we have assumed for the future, the State will have to pass with the universities of realContracts of objectives and multi -year means, pledges of clarity, efficiency, performance, and build the frame, exactly as you said, a new stage of autonomy, our design, our organization.

First, universities will no longer have to guarantee the reception of students in training, but guarantee the orientation of young people to employment.And that is something that the whole nation must build, it is struck at the corner of common sense.The university must first prepare our young people to exercise their future profession.It must give them knowledge, skills that open the doors to employment, whether it be education, higher education, research, but such industrial, technological, service jobsor others.In short, it must become more effectively professionalizing because we cannot be satisfied with the failure of our students in the first cycles, nor the too high unemployment rate of young people who come out of certain university sectors.To help you, we must continue the work of improving the orientation initiated by Parcoursup.

Parcoursup, I say it here with also a lot of gratitude for those who carried this project, when we had the APB system, remember, there were fewer students, it was much more complicated, it worked a lotless good.So, great success.Thank you to those who thought it and do.Nevertheless, I do not consider that we are finished, completely treated the subject with Parcoursup.There is still a work of clarification, field orientation, simplification which must be carried out.We have seen all the difficulties in certain sectors, so we have a lot of subjects both in certain territories or in certain sectors that we must improve.But above all, we must start this work of guidance before and therefore we must also invest in an orientation work from college, deeply rethink the orientation of our adolescents and our young people so that it is not a sudden choice whereWe sometimes leave very poor families when it comes to entering the application and bringing our choices.On this, we will need our universities, as well as the business world in our colleges and in our high schools to improve our organization and invest on this subject.But we must also invest more where the current and future skills needs of our country are the most important in assuming that the logic also of supply takes precedence over the logic of demand.Orientation must evolve to better meet the needs of the trades of the nation and to give all their chances of integration to students.It is an orientation work, but also a work where we must assume together to think in a way the management of the skills that the nation needs at 5 years, at 10 years, and to think of the opening of the sectors, ofinvestment in higher education in the light of this management of talents and skills we need.Because when we open sectors which correspond to the requests for registration or to the structure of our educational offer, but that there is not behind perspectives, we conduct an investment, in this case, at a loss,Because we form young people who will not have perspectives for several years.And we place young people and families in intolerable situations where, whatever graduates, they find themselves faced with situations where there are no jobs, there are no job offersAnd besides that, in many territories, in many sectors, we find ourselves confronted with largely predictable situations where sectors are creating jobs, will be in 5 years, in 10 years, but where we do not havenot collectively organized training.

We will therefore also have to open more places in certain sectors, in particular short and professionalizing sectors in apprenticeship or alternation, if only to prevent the holders of Bac Pro to be repressed and sometimes fail in general sectors, D'as much as these sectors offer many talents the possibility of flourishing and many ambitions of excellence to realize.It is enough to compare France and Germany to see the interest of this model.We must aim for professionalization, our university training and the integration of our 2.7 million students on the job market is at this price.The universality of access to employment must therefore be our goal.Not a young person must leave the education system without training that does not give him the keys to access the job market.

Beyond the initial training of our students, it is as crucial as universities can face the new challenges of work by accompanying the evolution of professional careers throughout life.I remember very well, a little over 5 years ago, I was in front of you in another condition and I already mentioned this point.I believe it very deeply.We started to do it together, but I think we are only at the beginning, at the beginning of this great transformation for our country and our universities.We have, I all believe, all together the reform of learning and alternation in our country with incomparable results.We have to go further and universities have an essential role for alternation and learning to continue to consolidate and develop alternation and learning in all sectors, all sectors starting with the sectorsexcellence, but we only partially succeeded in the great transformation of our professional training.We started to clarify the funding framework.We separated the financing of the training and we started, if I may say, this split which allowed us to get out of a largely incestuous and ineffective system where the trainer was at the same time the one who touched the funding and who approved thesystem.We started to put visibility in it, transparency.Nevertheless, there too, I try to be lucid on myself, as much as possible.

We are only in Mi Gué and our policy of continuing education and vocational training must still go much further.Universities, the whole of the world of higher education, not only the university, engineering schools, business schools, the whole of higher education has a key, much more important rolethat today, to play in the matter.A role that will improve the functioning and financing of our universities because all these training courses are training, as we know, which are remunerated by funding from the professional world, our businesses, also public subscriptions.But by opening their doors to professionals who want to specialize or convert more more, by inspiring us with what is starting to be done and what is sometimes done much more in certain countries where it is common to finish a license, to liveA first career, to refine your professional project and to return to complement your training at the university.We must adapt our model to careers, lives where we will train throughout our existence, because we live longer in a world that changes faster and where the relationship to work is in full upheaval.We live in a world where to make a career in the same job will become increasingly rare.And so, yes, we live in a world where we will have to reform.We must be able to reform ourselves by requaling ourselves deeply and therefore have access to the best training, that is to say those that we lavish at the university, and therefore that is why I insisted on theAlso importance of these professional professional sectors, because they are not simply those we will provide for our young people by thinking a form of provisional management of skills and careers for the nation but we will also need to reformThirty -something, forty -something people, fifties for their second part of the career and universities have an essential role in this continuing training in the nation.Our citizens need it, our economy needs it.I believe that it is at the heart of the great transformations of the world, that they are, if I may say, demographic, but also in the organization of our societies.

Besides your cardinal missions which consist in producing and propagating knowledge, in training citizens fully fulfilled intellectually and fully inserted professionally, it is also incumbent up to you more and more strongly with regard to students and I know how much youare attached to it, because the crisis has shown us how the life of our students, their emotional ties, their psychological balance was built in your campuses and on university sites.The daily life of these young adults, beyond studies involves human, sporting, cultural meetings within a space which is for them both a workplace, exchanges, orientation,information.Also on their possibilities of accommodation, support in life and career prospects.So, like the best campuses in the world, we must offer our young people a high level of training, but also the experienced student life experiences.Our students are citizens of the world who have chosen the university for its modular, decompartmentalized education, but also for the opportunities it offers in the light of their life, career or commitment projects.I am convinced, we must go to a system which even values internships, associative commitments, entrepreneurship, stays abroad, all formative experiences on the university site, the campus but in thatThey also allow back and forth abroad or to other places.Again, we must change approaches and give universities who wish to contribute more to the development of student life by opening up new skills.This is also a powerful lever for our universities to be more attractive and that our young people have not only the head well made but very full lives, full of meetings, exchanges, experiences of democratic life, social, cultural.To help our students succeed, we will also have to, once the emergency has passed, take back the site support for students, whether they are scholarships, housing, job possibilities compatible withsuccessful studies.And so, this subject of student life, for me, is an essential site to think of our universities and student life on the horizon of 2030.

Finally, I want to continue to aim for more excellence for our universities.To restore visibility and vigor to our international establishments, we have already built large worldly recognized establishments.We must continue this restructuring of French university centers 10 years after the Idex which largely contributed to it.But let us also keep the dangers of an excessive culture at the bottom of the too measurable result and the norm.Excellence, you have recalled it and I share it, it takes multiple forms, which we must cultivate by the diversity and complementarity of our universities anchored in their territory.There is room next to major research universities, for local universities and we are building a very plural model.But I think there are many advantages and given what I have just said in terms of training importance, but including for research elements, whether it is fundamental or applied, shows theforce of the plurality of the French model.Indeed, this quest for excellence must go hand in hand with, basically, an empowerment and empowerment of our universities.You have, I must say, I was listening to you just exactly described what I think.We are in the middle of the autonomy of universities.And so, now we have started to build all the foundations to go further.Yes, we must go towards more autonomy in terms of organization, financing, human resources.Academic autonomy, it is there and it has been largely consolidated, but on all other fields and alongside this autonomy of a responsibility.Because like you, I believe that autonomy without responsibility is not the real autonomy.We must complete the logic of empowerment started a little over 10 years ago, and this autonomy is that which will allow each university to express its difference precisely, to develop according to its history, its identity, itsown ambitions, its educational and strategic projects.It is this diversity of establishments that make the richness and the strength of our higher education.

But this autonomy, let us be clear and sincere between us must also be synonymous with reinforced governance of our universities in which the presidential teams can fully define and embody their project.And autonomy, it must go with responsibility, with presidential teams which are carried, which carry a clear project, but which have the possibility of implementing it once they are elected and that they are at the helm.And that cannot go with governance systems which, it must be said in tradition, have had in many situations for the consequence of too often helpless the teams in the face of the challenges posed to them.Our system is very hypocritical - half autonomy, we continue to control;Those who succeed, we help them a little more, those who do not succeed, we compensate them.And then autonomy, but basically, even locally, we give responsibilities, but we block those who are elected by ourselves.

Let's be honest, if we want complete autonomy with responsibility, we will have to go to a clarification of governance.Our governance today is not the one that responds to international competition.And so, if we want to keep our plural model to which I want like you, keep the universality of the model and find the avant-garde, yes, we must have the honesty to carry out all these reforms, all these reforms together, withreal contracts, real assessments and real responsibility that goes with these contracts.It is also necessary to allow our universities to be not only places of research, but also real innovation food and this breeding ground that you have mentioned for our startups.The next flowering of startups must come from our universities and our research organizations.Campuses must become places of innovation in constant, close to economic players.So that each researcher can, if he wishes, create or contribute to companies under the simplest, clearest, and most fluid conditions possible.Many laws, since the laws of 98 have made it possible to improve the system, we must now make it live everywhere with much more force.

To do this, we will have to build more bridges between universities and research organizations in order to have an effective, recognized and always more attractive system internationally.This is exactly also what you said, president.In the context of technological acceleration that we know, we will still have to strengthen the capacity of our major organizations to play a role of means of means to invest, carry out ambitious research programs.Yes, I think we have to go towards this clarification, between agencies of means with the best researchers associating the community of researchers in all disciplines or in interdisciplinary approaches and international jurys to select theBest basic or finalized research projects, which allocate the means of the nation independently and relevantly.And besides that, the teams, as we know, must have as much synergy as possible in the field and we must also succeed in redeploying back and forth between research and teaching works and their marriage everythingThroughout life according to the disciplines, with logics in the life cycle which are very different depending on whether one is a mathematician, mathematician, historian, historian or doctor.Between the time that we devote to research and teaching, simply, our system has stiffen an organization where we made as if a seal was perfect for all disciplines, whatever they.Let us also have the honesty to revisit these subjects of which we all know that they are probably a little obsolete even if they would have been a topical day.

Finally, I will finish there, at the dawn of the French Presidency of the European Union, I want to share with you our ambitions for higher education and research in Europe.This moment so important for France, you have prepared it with attention and dynamism and I thank you, in particular because you have been involved in this formidable project of European universities.In September 2017, I was in this great amphitheater offering this idea which seemed a little crazy.Many tired commentators said: "It will never work, it's a French idea".Well, universities have made commentators lie, I am extraordinarily proud in the first place.We have doubled the objective set, which was to build at least twenty by 2024, since 41 alliances are now formed.There are no less than 32 French establishments involved there.Which says a lot about your efforts and the success that crown them.But we must continue to expand, to further deepen these university cooperation to enable them to attract the best talents around the world in Europe.And we must consolidate these advances in the most concrete, most measurable way thanks to projects, such as the European diploma.A proposal that you have carried and that I support fully and for which we already need a full European recognition of university degrees, this is the first essential step and we know that there is still work to do on thisway.We will be fully mobilized to go in this direction and resume this strong proposal.We must also pursue the cooperation that Europe has been able to forge with the African Union, with the ambition of growing and radiating the university campus more where the training is co -constructed between the two continents, like what wedid with the Franco-Senegalese campus a little over three and a half years ago.And this is what we are going to bring within the framework of the French presidency at the summit between the African Union and the European Union at the end of next February.

The French Presidency of the European Union must be a highlight to advance Europe, to explain to all our fellow citizens, to all our economic players, to all our universities and to all our students that we have this need for Europe.

We need Europe because Europe is concord, openness, cultural diversity, respect for others, this ability to compromise, shared values.In a few days, we will celebrate Erasmus' birthday and we must still encourage our young people to live one of the most beautiful European experiences there is, that of the meeting, discovery and learning of knowledge.But Europe must also become the place where we build our strategic, technological, industrial independence via massive research programs.And with the European Research Council and the European Innovation Council which structure these approaches, I mentioned earlier the Starting ERC, we need to continue to move forward.This is why we supported an increase in the Erasmus budget of more than 80% for 2021-2027 compared to the previous program as well as a 20% increase in the Horizon Europe budget.This is why we proposed the construction of a European breakdown in innovation agency that EIC embodied.All these initiatives, we will continue to carry them and within the framework of the French presidency, next spring, we will bring together in France all of the European university alliances which have been formed, and I hope that France Universities can have a role,If I may say, promoter and you can prepare this meeting, to take stock of what we have done, but especially on the 10-year transformations that we have to drive in our European programs to better support our young people and ourResearch programs.

Here, ladies and gentlemen, some of the convictions and perspectives for higher education and French research that I wanted to share with you.Our universities, our research centers, our research organizations have an obviously essential place in this project, that we owe, even though the crisis is always there, prepare with force.These are billions of euros, millions of students, tens of thousands of doctoral students.I don't want to hire the numbers here that you know perfectly.But behind, it is this essential role of world university that you carry.Our universities, they bring the beating heart to life in our cities, our French metropolises, of our medium -sized cities sometimes also, and we have been keen to develop everywhere on French, hexagonal or ultramarin territory, this important role ofOur universities that structures the presence of our youth everywhere on the territory.They also vibrate the world and the relationship to knowledge and exchanges everywhere on French soil.And in a moment when doubt, sometimes, settles down, when the crisis has fully revealed the solitudes that there is also in our societies and a shaking of consciences, universities represent a capacity for shared lives, exchanges,Construction of knowledge by both the acquisition of knowledge, but also the permanent debate, the organized controversy, this new journey that humanity has built, which is that of the acquisition of knowledge and research, isan invaluable treasure.

And so for all these reasons, I mean how much to be by your side today is also for me not only a mark of confidence, but a desire to tell you that France will continue to play its role of resistance in defense of thespirit of knowledge, research, free education and free research.Because I believe that it is the only way to continue to truly conquer the world, that is to say to invent possible new possibilities in a humanity in peace.The other ways, we know them.These are obscurantisms, totalitarianisms, nationalisms based on discord.Those of free education, open knowledge, strong universities, they are those of the Renaissance, Lights, the Republic.It is, I believe, very deeply this path that France has always led and which carried you, which carried us.

Thank you for being there, thank you for continuing to work.Long live French universities, long live the Republic and live France!