Overhaul urged for elite school upon graduation
April 26, 2003 - The Globe and Mail
PARIS—At France’s revered Ecole Nationale d’Administration, students always have been treated differently.
From the moment the school year begins in January, they are considered government workers and receive salaries. Much of their instruction comes from professionals rather than full-time academics. And at graduation, the enarques, as they are known, are allowed to choose their first jobs from a government list, based on their final marks.
With French President Jacques Chirac and former prime minister Lionel Jospin among its graduates, the elite university of public administration is so well regarded in France’s corridors of power that few dare to challenge it.
But as France finds itself confronted by a fast-changing world, the government is doing just that. A 96-page report this week concludes that the notoriously insular ENA needs an urgent overhaul.
Written by ENA graduate and former European Union commissioner Yves Thibault de Silguy, the report does not recommend closing the school’s doors, as some have suggested. But it leaves little doubt that the institution will be kept under the microscope for the foreseeable future as it looks to bring itself up to date with France and the rest of the world.
Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin—who commissioned the report and was not a student—has indicated he wants to move the school out of Paris.
“It’s about time something like this happened,” said a student hoping to gain admission. “I hope this kicks in before I get there.”
Recruited from among the most promising students and professionals in France, enarques are trained to be public-service machines; the school goes as far as giving grants to qualified prospective students preparing for its entrance exams.
Without having to go through interviews, graduates choose jobs according to their class ranks. Mr. de Silguy’s report calls this a “major defect” that sometimes results in a mismatch between the person and the position.
The reward for top rank is another target of the report, which suggests that the upper echelons of the government be opened to bright graduates of other universities.
“It is strange that this school, which generates such competition among its own pupils, is not subjected to competition itself,” said Public Service Minister Jean-Paul Delevoye, who welcomed the report’s conclusions.
The institution’s emphasis on grading and evaluations led Mr. de Silguy to conclude in the report that it is “more a school of creating rank than teaching.”
Despite its tiny student body (fewer than 5,000 students have graduated since former French president Charles de Gaulle founded the school in 1945), when it comes to churning out heads of state and captains of industry in France, nothing comes close to the ENA. Few countries even have a rough equivalent.
Much of the criticism the ENA has received has been due to the clique this exclusivity creates. The French may admire the mental capacities of their top students, but when asked to describe un enarque, words such as “technocrat,” “inhuman,” “unfeeling” and “uninteresting” come up repeatedly.
Departing students now “need to be able to prove their open spirit, critical nature, innovation, capacity to change and take risks” the report says. It argues that since its inception under de Gaulle, the school and its students have moved out of step with the times.
To help break this, the report recommends moving the school’s classes from its headquarters in an exclusive Left Bank neighbourhood to its campus in Strasbourg in eastern France.
School officials said they had only a few hours to look at the report before it was released, and have declined to comment.
