ICJ - Interview of Monique Canto-Sperber

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• published: 18 Oct 2011
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Monique Canto-Sperber. Founding member, Paris Sciences & Lettres PRES 1. Why is Caisse des Dépôts providing support to universities? For a very simple reason: it is absolutely the nature of Caisse des Dépôts to take an interest in the knowledge economy and in universities. Why? Because Caisse des Dépôts is, by definition, a long-term investor. And if there is any long-term investment, it's universities, it's the education of students, which takes roughly between two years and ten years for the most common study programmes. So it was absolutely natural that Caisse des Dépôts be involved once the government launched its "Campus Plan". When I say "we were involved", I should say rather "we associated ourselves with", because Caisse des Dépôts does not report to the government as such. It is, as you know, placed under the protection of the parliamentary assemblies, but it has its own policies and these policies naturally are made within the framework of a general policy of providing long-term support to businesses. When the Caisse makes an investment, it's always for at least five years, or more often ten to twelve years, not at all for two years. Therefore it's normal that we were somewhat interested in universities, the knowledge economy and the renewal of universities. 2. What amount of funding do you have available? Funding has never been a limitation for our work. Please note, we are talking about studies and in this case, studies are always carried out by sharing funding between universities and Caisse des Dépôts, either 50/50 or 80% for the Caisse and 20% for the universities. We never carry out studies for free, that seems rather normal. There were never any problems for the studies and we have reserves of around 450 million euros over three years for putting them into action, so you can see that's a lot more than is required and if we can't do it, it's because these things take a very long time to start up, they must be studied in painstaking detail. No, the funding is not a difficulty. The real difficulty is helping universities put together their projects. Universities have ideas, but it's a long and complicated road between saying "we should develop this and that" and actually doing so, like the inauguration of a building, for example. This is the real subject. We have worked with and we only work with universities that are interested in doing so. If a university tells us no, it doesn't need Caisse des Dépôts, rest assured, we have plenty of work elsewhere, we don't need to lay siege to these universities. As far as I know, we actually have agreements with all the universities. Of course, they are not all the same agreements but they all more or less call upon us for some subject or another with, naturally, different visions, which is very normal. We are available for them, we are not imposing anything. 3. Is your involvement a strictly financial one? No, providing support to universities is not a strictly financial activity, far from it. Above all we provide expertise for those universities who want it. So we have sought to help universities that didn't have ad hoc specialists to solve problems related to their new autonomy. I would say we helped them in terms of personnel and expertise. Then funding comes next. Funding must never come first, funding is there to serve, funding is monitored. It has not been the number one priority, and that is a rule of Caisse des Dépôts.