Threat to SHS in France: CNRS definitively withdraws its supervision of CEPEL

Communiqué from CEPEL members, Montpellier, October 6, 2025

On September 22, 2025, CEPEL's management learned that the CNRS-SHS would withdraw its tutelage from CEPEL at the end of 2026. This announcement put an end to ten months of procrastination over the CNRS's forty-year investment in our UMR. In November 2024, the brutality of the initial announcement of withdrawal had led to such mobilization that CNRS-SHS had proposed alternative solutions: merger hypotheses that were ultimately impracticable and then, with the agreement of the University, a Mixed Research Team (EMR) project concentrating, not without testing the cohesion of the collective, CNRS resources on a reduced part of the workforce within a university enveloping unit hosting the rest of the team. Backed by the support of a CNRS research director wishing to take responsibility, the EMR project was drawn up, first discussed in technical terms, then positively assessed in terms of its scientific interest.

However, the governance of CNRS-SHS, in the person of its director and deputy scientific director (section 43 of the national committee), informed the University and CEPEL of its refusal to support this project. The reason given for this was a lack of "presumed attractiveness", even though a CNRS DR had been recruited to back up the project, opening up new prospects. In this way, the CNRS led CEPEL to work on the development hypothesis it was proposing, without providing the slightest support in this respect, without taking into account the psycho-social problems caused by the uncertainty of the situation for the staff concerned, without even projecting how much the expected attractiveness could itself be weakened by the announcement of withdrawal: as the saying goes, he who wishes to drown his dog accuses him of rabies.

Neither the argument of the University's support for this project, on a site of excellence where the partner CNRS is concerned by the weakness of the social sciences, often denounced; nor the unwavering support of the scientific authorities and learned societies; nor the disastrous concentration of researchers in Paris (in political science, almost three quarters of the CR and DR are based there) ; nor the gamble of leaving a team that had been offered the chance to prove itself in terms of thematic and organizational innovation - will have altered a decision that was probably taken a long time ago by the above-mentioned governance of the CNRS.

CEPEL members deplore this decision as much as the CNRS's procedures, which will have led to the closure of one of the few political science UMRs in the south of France.

CEPEL members