Paris University Scandal Clouds Esteemed Past

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/world/europe/sciences-pos-future-cloudy-after-leaders-death.html

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PARIS — Sciences Po was a renowned place of learning well before Richard Descoings became director, an exacting Paris university and among the most prestigious points of entry into the French political, intellectual and economic elite. President François Hollande is an alumnus, for instance, as are the three men who preceded him as chief of state, along with at least a dozen French prime ministers from recent decades.

But Mr. Descoings set about transforming the school when he arrived in 1996, reconfiguring a deeply French institution in the image of an American university, courting foreign students and professors, enlarging the student body and beginning a groundbreaking affirmative-action policy.

He brought international acclaim to Sciences Po, known formally as the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, and to himself as well, though his changes were sometimes viewed skeptically in Paris.

He was deemed a visionary — a divisive innovator in the sometimes drearily bureaucratic world of French education — but he was also something of an autocrat. When he died of a heart attack, at 53, in a New York hotel room last spring, Sciences Po was thrown into turmoil.

Since then, in a scandal that has undermined his legacy and embarrassed the school, a government audit has shown that the change Mr. Descoings oversaw was accompanied by the sometimes profligate use of public funds, which helped pay for a sizable raise for himself and vaguely justified payouts to many others.

The new Socialist government took control of Sciences Po in November and placed it in a kind of receivership, while a contested and messy search for Mr. Descoings’s successor drags on.

“Everyone can rejoice at the success obtained and at the dynamism the institution has shown,” said Didier Migaud, the president of the government auditing bureau, the Cour des Comptes. “But this success had a hidden side that the Cour was obliged to show, as well,” he said, according to a transcript of his comments in November, when the audit was published.

Sciences Po is one of a handful of more prestigious alternatives to France’s public university system. Public universities are open to all students who have passed the high school exit exam, the baccalauréat, and instruction is all but free. Such is not the case for Sciences Po, where entrance exams are notoriously grueling and annual tuition can reach nearly $13,000 for undergraduates, many of whom have gained admission only after costly preparatory programs.

The disclosures by the Cour des Comptes, which bear on the years 2005 to 2010, have thrown the school’s future into play, however. Amid an accusation that a cabal of top administrators had maneuvered to install its man as head of the school after Mr. Descoings’s death, the government has named a provisional director to oversee day-to-day operations and guide the selection of a new leader. School officials and other academics worry that the government intends to maintain control, perhaps damaging Sciences Po’s ability to compete internationally.

There is broad agreement that the school’s recent successes stemmed from Mr. Descoings’s vision and particular leadership style. He had a “fierce will to innovate,” said Hervé Crès, a former deputy to Mr. Descoings who served as interim director after his death. Mr. Descoings delegated “almost nothing” and was “reticent about writing down procedural rules” that might have blocked him from acting quickly, Mr. Crès said.

A government official who has been closely involved in the handling of the crisis said: “There was no No. 2 at Sciences Po. It’s a school that depended on one man.”

Politicians have been critical of the state-financed largess at the university, but they have not been spared reproach themselves. The audit showed that official oversight was poor, despite the tens of millions of dollars of annual financing from the state, about half of the university’s annual budget, which is about $200 million for 2013.

“Whether they like it or not, the undeniable success of the charismatic Descoings allowed them, for all these years, to hide the dust under the rug,” wrote Marie-Amélie Lombard-Latune in the daily newspaper Le Figaro. “They excused the prince for many things; they forgot his caprices.”

Mr. Descoings said he sought to offer innovation and new approaches for a changing world. He tripled the student population to 12,000, of whom nearly half are now international students, and expanded teaching in English.

The annual budget grew in kind, nearly doubling since 2005, with increased state subsidies and a sharp rise in tuition. But Mr. Descoings also expanded financial aid and, in 2001, introduced an affirmative-action program aimed at students from poor areas around Paris, the first of its kind in French higher education.

Where salaries at public universities are state-regulated, professors at Sciences Po are paid competitively. Many of the university’s financial problems stemmed from a “preoccupation” with offering “the most attractive possible living conditions” for prospective hires, especially foreign professors, the Cour des Comptes found.

Overtime pay sometimes appeared unwarranted; lecturers were sometimes paid double, triple or quadruple the usual amount per lecture; pay raises and bonuses were doled out with little recorded justification.

Mr. Descoings’s income also rose sharply between 2005 and 2010, to a little over $700,000 from $412,000, five times that of the best-paid public university presidents.

By the end of 2010, Sciences Po was also $69 million in debt, of which about $20 million came from a bank loan considered “speculative and dangerous,” according to Mr. Migaud, the audit chief. At least part of that sum is considered public debt, he noted, but the loan was contracted without “consulting or even informing” the school’s boards.

For all the posthumous criticism of Mr. Descoings, he was admired by students and fellow academics, and there is still a great deal of praise for him. Writing in Le Monde in December, an international group of academics hailed Sciences Po as “a model of hope in French society.”

They asked, “Is it possible, in the global university community and even in the national framework, to do without what Richard Descoings’s Sciences Po represents?”

A government commission will mete out punishments for the excesses of Mr. Descoings’s time as director; fines, however minor, are expected for some top administrators. More troubling to many at Sciences Po, the government is seeking to alter the university’s bylaws to ensure closer state oversight, including the placement of government representatives on its boards.

“It’s absolutely clear that what is in play today is Sciences Po’s capacity to remain credible in the universe of great international universities,” said Mr. Crès, the former deputy to Mr. Descoings.

Jean Gaeremynck, who was named by the government to replace Mr. Crès, disagreed. “We have no fears at all,” Mr. Gaeremynck insisted in an interview, noting that prospective students seemed unfazed: applications by French students rose markedly this year, he said, and applications by international students appear to be trending similarly.

After all, the political class has always been deeply enmeshed in Sciences Po, not least because so many politicians and state administrators are lecturers or alumni, including numerous members of the Cour des Comptes, the state auditor. And the university’s new director, whoever it turns out to be, can be legally confirmed only by presidential decree.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Maïa de la Baume contributed reporting.