Threats to CEPEL’s Future: Statement Following the Brutal, Unjust, and Destructive 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 ultimately withdraw its supervisory role in 2026. The laboratory has just celebrated its 40th anniversary and is currently preparing its self-evaluation report in anticipation of the HCERES review next year.

This announcement has stunned all 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—the very risks it is quick to denounce in other contexts.

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 entered into, without even letting it present and implement the renewal plan it had been developing collectively, and without even beginning any 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 reality: 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—a strategy in which the CNRS is, after all, a key stakeholder. 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 laboratories that are being suffocated, 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 that had been sent—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” that needs to be preserved? The School of Law and Political Science, where it operates, had just lost its other UMR: in the name of what relentless persecution should we strike 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 defend its scientific achievements and its mission and continue, with and for the CNRS, its public service mission in research, in Montpellier and elsewhere.

CEPEL Members