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

On November 5, 2024, during a routine phone conversation, the CNRS informed CEPEL, UMR 5112 CNRS-University of Montpellier, that it would be placed under 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 personnel—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 pleasure in denouncing.

The eagerness with which CEPEL is thus being attacked—even before it has been evaluated, without even allowing it to complete the five-year contract it had entered into, without even allowing it to present and implement the renewal plan it was collectively developing, 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 research directors nearing retirement). One can always 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 fundraising capabilities have always been praised, as has its major role in the “Montpellier University of Excellence” strategy—in which the CNRS is, after all, 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 that would 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 Île-de-France region. This means that the CNRS has abdicated its fundamentally 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 researchers’ movements over which they have no control. Yet the resources needed to ensure our long-term viability are extremely modest. Recently, however—contrary to the signals it has been sending—a systematic but unacknowledged strategy of withholding 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 social sciences and humanities 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: should we further weaken what the ministry itself calls a “rare discipline” worth preserving? The School of Law and Political Science where it operates had just lost its other UMR: in the name of what relentless determination should this department be struck yet again?

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 defend its scientific record and its mission and continue, with and on behalf of the CNRS, to fulfill its public service mission in research, in Montpellier as elsewhere.

CEPEL Members