The timing has choked more than one.
After having pinned Sunday evening on CNews the “Islamo-leftism” which, according to her, “gangrene the company as a whole and the university is not impermeable”, Frédérique Vidal drove the point home Tuesday.
The Minister of Higher Education and Research asked the CNRS "for an assessment of all the research" taking place in France on the subject.
Its objective: to distinguish between what is academic research and what is activism.
This initiative is supposed to lead to a "scientific study" rather than an investigation, we hasten to note today at the ministry.
A precision to round things off, while this announcement made the university body shudder, but not only.
The reframing even came from the top of the state.
In civilized terms of course, but Macron reiterated his "absolute attachment to the independence of teacher-researchers", government spokesman Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday.
The distress of students as a backdrop
Why this exit?
"I do not know ...", scratches the head of an adviser to the executive, noting that Ms. Vidal is "a little rabbit in the headlights" after this exit.
"When she's on a television set, she should be obsessed with student life, not put out that sort of thing," laments a majority executive.
The political stake is enormous for the executive which sees flourish the images of students in the queues in front of food banks, and the testimonies of psychological distress among young people.
VIDEO.
Food distribution: "The crisis has doubled the number of beneficiaries" among students
This hiatus has also been exploited by the opposition, like the Communist senator Pierre Ouzoulias who, questioning the government on economic aid for young people, ironically proposed to Ms. Vidal to "ask the CNRS to launch a investigation on the subject ”.
"Not a scientific reality", warns the CNRS
On the merits, the exit of Mrs. Vidal caused the “stupor” of the Conference of University Presidents (CPU) in a vitriolic press release vilifying the “caricatural representations” and “commercial coffee quibbles” of the government.
The CRNS said it was ready, in a press release, to "participate in the production of the study desired by the minister" while insisting heavily on the fact that the term Islamo-leftism "does not correspond to any scientific reality ”.
The CNRS "condemns, in particular, attempts to delegitimize various fields of research, such as postcolonial studies, intersectional studies or work on the term 'race', or any other field of knowledge".
# Press release 🗞️ |
"#Islamogauchism", a term with ill-defined outlines, is the subject of many public positions.
The @CNRS strongly condemns those who try to take advantage of it to question academic freedom ...
➡️ https://t.co/SzRHk3BWS8 pic.twitter.com/XrHaUBgsen
- National Center for Scientific Research 🌍 (@CNRS) February 17, 2021
"We are going to ask our CNRS researchers to become cops who investigate their own university, it's absurd, this is an incomprehensible slippage", abounds Michel Deneken, temporary administrator at the University of Strasbourg, putting this initiative on behalf of a political strategy to "rally the right before the regional elections and the presidential election."
"The university community is once again the target of the electoral strategy aimed at attracting sympathies from the far right," also tweeted the philosopher Pierre Charbonnier, researcher at the CNRS.
Islamo-leftism is a media tinkering, but it hides a reality, which is the existence of certain anti-capitalist circles which delegate to Muslims their own anti-Semitism, he assures us.
These environments are extremely rare at university.
"
Morning essentials newsletter
A tour of the news to start the day
Subscribe to the newsletterAll newsletters
The path, which had already been taken in October by the Minister of National Education Jean-Michel Blanquer, had indeed been dug for several months by the right, including the deputy LR Julien Aubert, who demanded a parliamentary mission on the issue.
The controversy revives in any case the criticisms around Ms. Vidal, an academic recognized specialist in molecular genetics, but accused of lacking weight and political sense.
The adoption in November of the programming law for research, its flagship text, was thus polluted by controversial amendments, in particular on the "offense of obstruction" in the universities.