French research is not doing well: brains are going abroad, doctoral enrollments are constantly falling.

A bill, providing for 25 billion programmed over 10 years for research and supposed to give a course to the latter, has just started its legislative course.

But it is already strongly contested.

Details.

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"It is the biggest movement of investment in favor of science since the end of the 1980s", assured Sunday in the hemicycle Frédérique Vidal: in the Assembly opened the discussion around the bill of programming of research carried out by the Minister of Higher Education.

With 25 billion programmed over 10 years, the government is talking about an "unprecedented investment", but the scientific community is standing firm.

Rarely have we heard more opposing speeches, when this bill has been awaited by the entire scientific community for years.

Researchers don't believe it

The goal of such a budget increase over 10 years: to prevent France from winning in international competition.

But the researchers do not believe it: for them, it is to impose the heaviest expenses on the following five-year periods.

At the time of the Minister's speech, on the Place du Palais Bourbon, they shouted their distrust of this bill.

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The text is however tempting: it provides for a substantial improvement in salaries while for twenty years, doctoral enrollments have only fallen, the career attracting less and less.

The text also guarantees more than 5,000 positions.

The very essence of the reform in question

Too little to cope with the influx of students, retort academics.

The philosophy of the reform is also in question: the text provides for the creation of chairs of "junior professor", young doctors who can hope, after years, six maximum, to become professors if they prove their worth.

A real "precariousness" of careers retort teachers, who often took years before obtaining a post at the university, but who, when they do, guarantees them a career for life.

In the entourage of the Minister, we recognize that we are addressing an "ultra demanding public", which has suffered from decades of neglect.