ABSTRACT
The rhetoric of excellence has taken hold in higher education and research globally, and with it, a series of reforms aimed at changing the system of symbolic and financial credit allocation in favour of a greater concentration of funds and their competitive distribution. By 2014, more than two-thirds of OECD countries had already adopted such schemes, which resulted in “significant changes in the structure of the research systems” (OECD, 2014, p.17). The Initiatives of Excellence (Idex) are one of the French variations of these policies. By using calls for projects that put universities in competition with each other to create “world-class” institutions, this program concentrates €7.7 billion on nine universities. In doing so, the Idex increases inequalities between French higher education institutions while also deepening inequalities within universities. These funds are also concentrated at the local level, i.e. inside the universities labelled excellent amongst what are considered to be the best researchers and the best teaching programs, increasing the competition between academics and laboratories from the same institutions. Based on a case study of one of the nine Idex universities, involving 89 interviews and written sources, this chapter explores the disciplinary dimension of these inequalities. It demonstrates how this policy results in a stratification of disciplines within the Idex universities, particularly favouring the natural sciences. In this way, this chapter documents the evolving context that economics can encounter within universities shaped by excellence-oriented public policies.
