French Universities Are Transforming Into Soviet Courts

In many French universities, a climate of intellectual terror prevails that is not unlike—minus the physical elimination—“terrorism without the gulag,” to use the phrase of the Quebec intellectual Mathieu Bock-Côté during the heyday of the Soviet Union. Some professors and researchers, hounded for non-conformist views and for the content of their courses deemed controversial, find themselves having to defend their case before disciplinary committees, where the free exchange of ideas is not the order of the day.

Le Figaro cites the case of a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), accused of psychological harassment by two of her colleagues—an accusation driven primarily by ideological concerns, which led to an investigation against her, based entirely on evidence supporting the accusations. No room was made for a defense. Her case is not an isolated one. Lecturers and researchers are being reported due to the content of their courses being deemed offensive or not in line with standards of political correctness, and the machinery to crush them is set in motion.

In such cases, no support whatsoever can be expected from the institution. This is why independent organisations have been set up to come to the aid of researchers and intellectuals subjected to such pressures: among them are the ADLA, the Association for the Defence of Academic Freedoms, and the O2ER, the Autonomous Observatory for the Respect of Equity and Integrity in Higher Education and Research. Xavier-Laurent Salvador, a member of ADLA, a professor of modern literature, co-founder of the Observatory of Decolonialism, and known for his contribution to the collective work against “woke obscurantism” in French universities—which was censored by the press—regularly receives calls from colleagues facing reports they consider unfounded. The humanities and social sciences are over-represented. Reports come not only from students but also from other lecturers and prove very convenient for disqualifying a rival in the allocation of a post or a promotion.

The support of these organisations is vital for the professors under investigation. Indeed, they are often subjected to lengthy internal investigations, conducted by peers who have no legal knowledge or sense of fairness, and in which they are given no opportunity to defend themselves. Some incur legal fees to no avail and feel abandoned within a broader context marked by the abdication of university management, who do not wish to get involved in defending their professors and prefer to throw them to the wolves of the most determined activists who lay down the law within the university walls without being accountable to anyone.

On an individual level, the knock-on effects can be dramatic. Such is the case of Caroline Guibet Lafaye, a research director at the CNRS and a recognised sociologist specialising in radicalisation. Two young researchers accused her of failing to sufficiently anonymise certain Kurdish witnesses during her research. Guibet Lafaye found herself caught up in a downward spiral. She was isolated by her superiors, with her colleagues forbidden from contacting her. She eventually ended up being suspended.

Her Ph.D. students lost their supervisor. Her funding was cut off. For a year, the researcher received no salary and had to pay thousands of euros in legal fees to refute the accusations levelled against her. One does not emerge unscathed from such an ordeal.

To guard against such abuses, defence mechanisms are being put in place. Some lecturers go so far as to record their lectures in lecture theatres to be able to prove their innocence, says Fabrice Balanche, himself at the centre of a smear campaign for having expressed his opposition to the organisation of Ramadan iftar banquets at the University of Lyon. Many are calling for investigations to be taken out of the university and handed over to the courts to ensure a minimum of objectivity. Thus, in the summer of 2025, a professor of education at a university in the Île-de-France region (ER: the metropolitan area surrounding Paris), finally lodged an appeal with the administrative court against her university for “harassment, failure to provide protection, conflict of values and obstruction of academic freedom” after years of pressure and harassment: her teaching duties were withdrawn on the basis of reports from students. In 2020, she was accused of Islamophobia following a lecture on secularism delivered a few days after the murder of Samuel Paty.

Lives, careers, and research projects are thus shattered for reasons that are always the same: students denounce lecturers who offend their ‘religious beliefs’; accusations of ‘transphobia’ or ‘Islamophobia’ are brandished as indisputable slogans.

The university has ceased to be a refuge for free thought, yet none of the national authorities—the ministry of higher education or the CNRS management—seem to be fully grasping the extent of the problem.