Your voice of reason at Paris-Saclay
Fabian M. Suchanek 2018-03-07, terms of use
And yet, this visibility was apparently not sufficient for 5 engineering schools. They left the project to found their own university: NewUni.
Fluctuat&Mergitur has now secured exclusive access to the so-called GoodUni-document, which describes the roadmap for the new university. We have already presented the master’s programs of the new university, and now look into the key tool that shall enable these master’s programs: a harmonized calendar.
This state of affairs had a considerable impact on the organization of the common study programs. It was quite impractical to share courses across universities — even though this was the declared goal of the joint university. It was also impossible that a student who failed one course does the course again next year — because next year the student’s calendar would be different from this year’s. Apart from that, coordinating a dozen different semester plannings within the same institution was an administrational headache. This is why, in all countries that Fluctuat&Mergitur has investigated (US, Italy, Germany, Ecuador, Romania, China, and Mexico), the calendar is the same for all years and all disciplines in a university. All courses always take place at the same time of the day, on the same day of the week, from the beginning of the semester to the end of the semester. Paris-Saclay may argue that their case is different because it involves not just one university but around two dozen different institutions. But that is not an excuse: The joint university project has existed for around 10 years now — enough time to converge to a common planning.
To illustrate the difficulty of the discussions, Dr. Naibaf uses the following analogy:
Imagine you are trying to convince an American to use the metric system. You say “The metric system is much simpler than yours, and it is used everywhere in the world”. And the American replies: “Yes, but in America, everything is bigger. Therefore, we cannot measure it in centimeters, we have to measure it in inches”. And it is the same when you try to convince Paris-Saclay members to use a shared calendar.People argued that the different programs, and the different institutions necessitated different plannings. In reply to this argument, Dr. Naibaf shows us the two pictures on the right: The scheduling of trains in a British train station (top), and in an Italian train station (bottom). “Do you know why people are waiting in front of the display in the British train station? It’s because the track of their train is not yet known, and will be shown there shortly before departure. Now look at the Italian schedule. It tells you directly the track of the train. Now do you think that Italian trains are more regular than British trains? Of course not! The Italians have just understood that it is easier to state the general case, and to announce the exceptions, rather than to create time table that consists only of exceptions. If Italian trains are better organized than our semesters, we have a problem.”
To see those great things, follow us to the next article in this episode.