Academics in the Storm of the Kafkaesque Capitalism. The Profesor French Case

Abstract

As well as telecommunications, the French system of Higher Education and Research (HIR) is deeply restructured from the Pact of Bologna (1999). In the name of a perpetual modernization of public services and a policy of economic austerity, the HIR was dismantled and rebuilt in a record time. The reforms initiated in 2005 with a policy of drastic decrease in teaching positions and senior researchers have a number of effects on the working conditions and employment, and then on the homo academicus. Reorganizations induced by these reforms were, and still are, synonym for all academic staff of increasing of their homework and constant intensification of their workload, that phenomenon is also shown by Spanish or Chilean research. However, with the continuing decline of human and economic resources and the proliferation of conflicting mandates, academics workers face a chronic inability to do well their job. The degradation of their environment as well as the erosion of their work ethic, coupled with disappointment and exhaustion, are psychosocial risk factors. But the multiplication of forms of suffering and warning signs in universities are often invisible in the French academic landscape, which, like the rest of the country, is gradually “latinoamericanized”.