The decree of 31 December 2014 (1) officializes the birth of the University Paris-Saclay, an entity that federates higher education and research institutions according to a legible and internationally competitive model.
After three years of negotiations conducted by the Community of Universities and Institutions, the decree creating the university was published in the Official Journal on 31 December 2014. It inaugurates one of the future flagships of French higher education which impresses by its dimensions. The city-sized campus (12,000 housing units are being built there) will be divided into four large districts located in Palaiseau, Gif-sur-Yvette, Orsay (Essonne) and Jouy-en-Josas (Yvelines). It will accommodate 60,000 students at the start of the next academic year, twice as many as the University of Jussieu (Paris VI), 12,000 researchers and 20,000 R&D staff in industrial centres.
The founding members of the University Paris-Saclay, their associates and partners, show the collective will to create a new structure there and to install it on the international scene. This trajectory is based on an ambitious joint project that combines training, research and innovation and that places the student in a dynamic of excellence and success. The Université Paris-Saclay is now a major research university interacting with the other major university centres in the Paris Region, within the largest university region in Europe.
The challenge: transforming a leading university campus into a true ecosystem of innovation.
An international ambition
The creation of Paris-Saclay University is both the culmination and intensification of a process of cooperation between higher education and research actors in the Paris-Saclay area.
Their common objective is to create a world-class research and innovation university, bringing together universities, grandes écoles and research organizations and developing the continuum of knowledge from the basic to the applied sciences to a level never before seen in France, emphasizing interdisciplinarity, knowledge sharing and international openness with the aim of reaching 19th place in the Shanghai ranking, the benchmark for assessing the excellence of a campus.
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A federal model open to society
Université Paris-Saclay brings together 19 autonomous higher education and research institutions and research organisations within an original model: Polytechnique, ENS Cachan, Supélec and Université Paris-Sud under the same banner, AgroParisTech, Télécom ParisTech, ENSTA,... Better still: seven research organisations are associated with the project. Among them, the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA).
These founding member institutions (2) retain their identity and their resources and agree to coordinate their actions and to pool certain resources within the framework of a jointly defined and implemented shared project.
By promoting synergy between the approaches of researchers and engineers, public and private research, and by crossing scientific fields and major thematic areas of socio-economic interest, the University Paris-Saclay strengthens cooperation between fundamental research and technological R&D of companies.
This rapprochement is also achieved through students and programs to encourage entrepreneurship and technological, economic and societal innovation.
A territory that develops its assets
One of the university's challenges is to achieve its ambition within a campus that is pleasant to work and live on, easy to access and integrated into a territory with scientific, industrial, agricultural and environmental assets.
Thanks to the investment programmes conducted by the State to develop housing, infrastructure and transport in the Paris-Saclay area, students, teacher-researchers and university staff will have access to a quality mixed environment where student and family housing will blend harmoniously. A single student card will give access to all the common services of Paris-Saclay University: library (learning center), computer, internet access and catering.
New means of transport (metro, exclusive right-of-way public transport, soft links) will put Saclay 20 minutes from Orly, 35 minutes from Paris and less than an hour from Roissy.
This indispensable element of attractiveness considerably strengthens the credibility of the Paris-Saclay University project. During a site visit to the campus in 2014, the representatives of the Etablissement Public Paris-Saclay (EPPS) emphasized their desire to make this area a real place to live, and not a "dormitory" university campus, with the construction of shops, cinemas, etc.
In the south-western sector of the Île-de-France region, the Université Paris-Saclay now officially organises the territorial coordination of higher education and research institutions and research organisations that request it, in the form of the Paris-Saclay territorial grouping comprising the member institutions of the Université Paris-Saclay and associated institutions.
Before rubbing shoulders with Yale and Stanford universities, Paris-Saclay will have to elect its president in May. Biophysicist Gilles Bloch, in charge of the life sciences department at the French Atomic Energy and Renewable Energy Commission, is expected to be elected, according to the Journal du Grand Paris.
Let's hope that new innovations will come out of this concentrate of science because in 2013, the Paris-Saclay campus filed only 219 patents, compared to 395 for its Californian counterpart in Berkeley. It signed 48 new licensing agreements compared to 169 for the prestigious American university and gave birth to some 30 startups compared to 71 in California...
(1) Decree no. 2014-1674 of December 29, 2014
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(2) AgroParisTech, CEA, Centrale-Supelec, CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, ENSAE, ENS Cachan, ENSTA ParisTech, HEC, IHES, INRA, Inria, Inserm, Institut Mines Telecom, Institut d'Optique, Onera, Université Paris-Sud, Université Versailles Saint-Quentin.
To find out more:
- The Paris-Saclay University website is open : www.universite-paris-saclay.fr
- The documents published for the exhibition "Paris-Saclay le futur en chantier(s)" are available on the website of our partner EPPS: http://www.epps.fr/blog/2014/12/15/tout-sur-lexposition-paris-saclay-le-futur-enchantiers/
(Source: CP Université Paris-Saclay-1 January 2015)
