Threats to CEPEL's future: press release following the brutal, unfair and harmful attack on our unit

On November 5, 2024, in the course of a simple telephone conversation, the CNRS informed CEPEL, UMR 5112 CNRS-Université de Montpellier, that it would be placed under secondary supervision as of January 1, 2025, and that it would eventually be withdrawn as a supervisory body in 2026. The laboratory has just celebrated its 40th anniversary and is currently preparing its self-evaluation file for next year's HCERES visit.

This announcement has stunned the entire staff of researchers, teacher-researchers, doctoral students and administrative staff, who are today solemnly protesting its brutality, haste and lack of scientific justification. In so doing, CNRS is exposing its staff to the serious psycho-social risks it likes to denounce.

The eagerness with which CEPEL is being attacked, even before it has been evaluated, without even allowing it to complete the five-year contract to which it was committed, without even allowing it to present and implement the renewal project it had collectively drawn up, without even the beginnings of a consultation on its future, is beyond comprehension.

CEPEL is certainly one of those SHS laboratories in the region where CNRS researchers are in short supply (in this case, 2 DRs close to retirement). We can always point to its lack of attractiveness and attribute it to this or that aspect of strategy or governance. However, the evaluations it has undergone over the years have established a completely different picture: that of a recognized, locally-supported unit, whose seriousness, commitment, quality, productivity and funding capacity have always been praised, as has its major role in the Montpellier Université d'Excellence strategy, in which the CNRS is a stakeholder. The members of CEPEL are all aware that these qualities would never have been possible without the human, administrative and logistical support of the CNRS and its staff, who are today in disarray. No scientific deficit exists to justify the need for such a withdrawal.

The laboratory has been deprived of a CNRS researcher for 25 years (in the last century!). Over the same period, resources have been steadily concentrated, year after year, in a smaller number of units, mainly in the Paris region. This means that the CNRS has abdicated its national mission, against a backdrop of austerity-driven Malthusianism, and turned its back on its vocation. It has thus created the lack of attractiveness that it then blames on asphyxiated laboratories, dependent on the eventual movement of researchers over which they have no control. The resources needed to ensure our long-term survival are extremely modest. But recently, contrary to the signals sent out, CEPEL has been the target of a systematic but unassumed strategy of non-support. The contempt with which it has since been treated is reflected in the way this catastrophic decision has been conveyed.

This short-sighted choice contributes to the national weakening of the SHS as a whole: how many units are in a situation comparable to ours? CEPEL is historically the only political science-dominated UMR south of the Bordeaux-Grenoble line: should we further weaken what the Ministry itself calls a "rare discipline" to be preserved? The Faculty of Law and Political Science, where CEPEL operates, had just lost its other UMR: why should we continue to attack this component?

We, the research staff, teacher-researchers, doctoral students and administrative staff, demand that CEPEL remains a CNRS-UM UMR, that it can calmly defend its scientific record and its project in order to pursue, with and for the CNRS, its mission of public research service, in Montpellier as elsewhere.

CEPEL members