Threats to the future of CEPEL: statement following the brutal, unjust, and harmful attack against our unit

On November 5, 2024, during a simple telephone conversation, the CNRS informed CEPEL, UMR 5112 CNRS-University of Montpellier, that it would be placed under secondary supervision as of January 1, 2025, and that it would eventually withdraw its supervision in 2026. The laboratory has just celebrated its 40th anniversary and is currently preparing its self-assessment report in anticipation of the HCERES visit next year.

This announcement stunned all researchers, lecturers, doctoral students, and administrative staff, who are now protesting strongly against its brutality, hastiness, and lack of scientific justification. In doing so, the CNRS is exposing its employees to serious psychosocial risks, which it otherwise 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 it had signed, without even allowing it to present and implement the renewal project it was developing collectively, without even the slightest consultation as to its future, is beyond comprehension.

CEPEL is certainly one of those regional social sciences and humanities laboratories where CNRS researchers are few in number (in this case, two senior researchers approaching retirement). It would always be easy to point to its lack of appeal and blame it on this or that aspect of strategy or governance. But the evaluations it has undergone over time paint a very different picture: that of a recognized, locally supported unit whose seriousness, 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 involved. 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 distraught. There is no scientific deficit that could justify such a withdrawal.

For 25 years (in the last century!), the laboratory has been deprived of CNRS researcher recruitment. During the same period, resources have been increasingly concentrated, year after year, on a small number of units, mainly in the Paris region. This means that the CNRS has abdicated its national mission, against a backdrop of Malthusian austerity, and turned its back on its vocation. It is thus creating the lack of attractiveness that it then blames on suffocated laboratories, which are dependent on potential movements of researchers over which they have no control. The resources necessary for our sustainability are, however, extremely modest. But in recent times, contrary to the signals sent out, a systematic but unacknowledged strategy of non-support has targeted CEPEL. The contempt with which it has since been treated is reflected even in the manner in which this catastrophic decision was communicated.

This short-sighted decision contributes to weakening the social sciences and humanities as a whole at the national level: how many units are in a situation comparable to ours? CEPEL is historically the only joint research unit (UMR) specializing in political science south of a line between Bordeaux and Grenoble: should we further weaken what the ministry itself calls a "rare discipline" that must be preserved? The Faculty of Law and Political Science, where it operates, had just lost its other joint research unit: why should this component be hit yet again?

We, the research staff, faculty researchers, doctoral students, and administrators, request that CEPEL remain a CNRS-UM joint research unit, enabling it to confidently defend its scientific achievements and its project in order to continue, with and for the CNRS, its public service mission in research, in Montpellier as elsewhere.

The members of CEPEL