France: Marginal formal changes but noticeable evolutions

In 2009, the French minister for Higher Education, Valérie Pécresse, issued a new decree regarding faculty at universities. After six months of demonstrations and negotiations, this decree was signed in April 2009 and it somewhat modified the 1984 decree. The French academic profession, however, has rarely been at the center of the many reforms in higher education within the last decade. These recent reforms addressed the governance of French universities (the LRU Act of 2007: Loi Responsabilites et Libertés des Universités [Responsibilities and Freedom of Universities Act]) and the institutional organization of research funding and evaluation of higher education and research (the LOPRI Act of 2006: Loi d’Orientation pour la Recherche et l’Innovation [Research and Innovation Act]), which led to the creation of a national research council, the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (ANR) and a national agency for evaluation, the Agence d’Évaluation de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement Supérieur (AERES), today called Haut Conseil pour l’Evaluation de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche [HCERES]). [first paragraph