Threats to the Future of CEPEL: Statement Following the Brutal, Unjust, and Harmful Attack on Our Unity

On November 5, 2024, during a routine phone call, the CNRS informed CEPEL, UMR 5112 CNRS-University of Montpellier, that it would be transferred to secondary supervision effective January 1, 2025, and that the CNRS would eventually withdraw its supervision in 2026. The laboratory has just celebrated its 40th anniversary and is currently preparing its self-evaluation report in anticipation of the HCERES visit next year.

This announcement has stunned the entire staff—researchers, faculty members, doctoral students, and administrative staff—who are today formally protesting its harshness, its hastiness, and its lack of scientific justification. In doing so, the CNRS is exposing its employees to serious psychosocial risks, which it otherwise takes great pains to condemn.

The eagerness with which CEPEL is being attacked—even before it has been evaluated, without even allowing it to complete the five-year contract it had signed, without even letting it present and implement the renewal plan it had been developing collectively, and without even the slightest attempt at consultation regarding its future—is beyond comprehension.

CEPEL is certainly one of those regional social sciences and humanities laboratories where the number of CNRS researchers is small (in this case, two senior researchers nearing retirement). It is always easy to point to its lack of appeal and attribute it to this or that aspect of strategy or governance. But the evaluations it has undergone reveal, over time, a very different picture: that of a recognized unit, supported locally, whose professionalism, commitment, quality, productivity, and funding capabilities have always been praised, as has its major role in the Montpellier University of Excellence strategy, in which the CNRS is nevertheless a key player. All CEPEL members know that these qualities could never have been highlighted without the human, administrative, and logistical support of the CNRS and its staff, who are now at a loss. There is no scientific shortcoming to justify the need for such a withdrawal.

For the past 25 years (in the last century!), the laboratory has been unable to recruit any CNRS researchers. During the same period, resources have been steadily concentrated, year after year, on a small number of units, primarily in the Paris region. This means that the CNRS has abdicated its strictly national mission, against a backdrop of austerity-driven Malthusianism, and by turning its back on its core purpose. It is thus creating the very lack of appeal that it subsequently blames on suffocated laboratories, which are at the mercy of potential researcher movements beyond their control. The resources necessary for our survival are, however, extremely modest. Yet in recent times, contrary to the signals being sent, a systematic but unacknowledged strategy of non-support has targeted CEPEL. The contempt with which it has since been treated is evident even in the manner in which this catastrophic decision was communicated.

This short-sighted decision contributes to the nationwide weakening of the humanities and social sciences as a whole: how many departments are in a situation comparable to ours? CEPEL is historically the only UMR with a focus on political science south of a line running from Bordeaux to Grenoble: must we further weaken what the ministry itself calls a “rare discipline” that needs to be preserved? The Faculty of Law and Political Science where it operates had just lost its other UMR: in the name of what relentless determination should we strike yet another blow against this department?

We—researchers, faculty members, doctoral students, and administrative staff—call for CEPEL to remain a CNRS-UM joint research unit (UMR), so that it may confidently uphold its scientific achievements and research agenda in order to continue, alongside and on behalf of the CNRS, its public service mission in research, both in Montpellier and elsewhere.

CEPEL members