World-renowned universities that attract the best students, the most qualified researchers and the most magnanimous financial partners: Since the advent of international rankings in higher education 20 years ago, the quest for a certain conception of "excellence" has become part of the university vocabulary, to the point of becoming a political project.

In France, the first edition of the Shanghai Ranking, in August 2003, came as a shock: Ignoring the administrative subtleties of France and the three-way split between universities, grandes écoles and research organizations, the ranking did not list any of the country's flagships in its top 50. Stung to the core, successive governments jumped in and sought the tools to comply with the standards. In 2010, President Nicolas Sarkozy set Valérie Pécresse, then minister of higher education, a precise objective: to have two French institutions in the top 20, and 10 in the top 100, of the Shanghai Ranking.

The law on the freedoms and responsibilities of universities, passed in 2007, then bore its first fruits, presented in person by Pécresse in July 2010 to professors Nian Cai Liu and Ying Cheng, the two creators of the ranking. Incentives for universities, grandes écoles and research organizations to join forces flourished under a variety of names in response to the state's projects to distribute substantial public investment (IDEX, I-SITE, Labex, PRES, Comue), until 2018, with the new status of the experimental public establishment (EPE). All these political tactics are like the French stigmata of the Chinese ranking.

These great maneuvers have been orchestrated without ever asking a fundamental question: what is the vision of the world of higher education and research that the Shanghai Ranking conveys? When it was first conceived, at the request of the Chinese government, the ranking had a single objective: to accelerate the modernization of the country's higher education institutions by copying the characteristics of the great North American Ivy League universities, starting with Harvard. This is a far cry from the French model, where, according to the Education Code, universities are part of a public higher education service.

Philosopher Fabienne Brugère said that France, like China, continues to "dream of the great American universities, without being able to imagine a French model with a vision of knowledge and the prospect of public happiness." "Is it not time to provide a vision of what a university should be?" Brugère asked in the magazine Esprit ("Quelle université voulons-nous?" ["What kind of university do we want?"], July-August 2023). "I'd like offer a different angle, leaving aside the question of alliances, groupings and resources, to set out a condition for its governance: a vision of the world of knowledge."

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