COOPERATION AND COMPETITION: NEW WAYS FOR THE FRENCH UNIVERSITIES TO FIGHT THE CRISIS Gilbert Guillard Honorary Master of Conferences University Sorbonne Nouvelle / Paris 3 Over the past five years French universities have undergone important changes. <...> The French government has launched a series of reforms to improve the efficiency of teaching and research, to turn out better graduates and to enhance the international visibility of these institutions. <...> The two main changes were, on the one hand, the new obligation of universities to increase their efforts to promote the professional integration of their students: diplomas and courses should be more professionally oriented and a large overhaul with this in mind is consequently now taking place. <...> Each discipline must add to its initial list of diplomas a professional one at Masters Level. <...> The boards of administrators has been reduced in size and opened up to more external members, such as representatives of public institutions or private enterprises. <...> Another action undertaken by the French government was to incite the universities to unite themselves either on local or regional levels in order to build the so called ‘Poles for Higher Research and Education’. <...> Three or four universities can join up with one or two elite schools to build up such poles of excellence. <...> For example, in some cities where there were three independent universities (Strasburg I, II and III) there is now only one. <...> In the Parisian area four such poles have been created, for example Paris 3, Paris 5, Paris 7, the Institute for Political Studies and the Higher School for Social Sciences are now cooperating inside a new structure called ‘Sorbonne Paris Citй’. <...> The goal is to achieve better research results through improved synergies on one side — in order to save money that can be better spent otherwise, to attract new partners, whether they are private enterprises willing to support universities via, for example, foundations, or foreign universities searching for international cooperation. <...> Another goal of these new combinations of higher education establishments is to increase their international visibility and international ranking; the bigger the institution, the more noticeable. <...> Size is of course not the only criterion, as proved by Harvard or, recently, the Ecole Normale Supйrieure, with its list of Nobel <...>