Why France is building a mega-university at Paris-Saclay to rival Silicon Valley

Re:Why France is building a mega-university at Paris-Saclay ... by vonnik on Thursday May 28, 2015 @04:57PM (#9621130)

This entire article seems to misunderstand what Silicon Valley is, what universities are, and the difference between them. It's rather typical of the French statist approach, where change comes from top-down policy initiatives, rather than from bottom-up civic and economic activity. How bureaucrats does it take to teach a class on entrepreneurship?

French universities, in my personal experience, are deeply underfunded (i.e. we can't afford chairs in all the classrooms), and the French economy is hardly in a position to support this new, vaster agglomeration.

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Re:Why France is building a mega-university at Paris-Saclay ... by rm445 on Thursday May 28, 2015 @05:41PM (#9621361)

It would be naïve for anyone to think that recreating Silicon Valley exactly would be a French goal. Trying to achieve similar success in a more centralised, government-driven way sounds much more plausible.

Such an approach has been unsuccessful when tried elsewhere (at least by the number of places declared to be the new Silicon Valley and never heard from again), but the French do seem oddly better at achieving success in a statist fashion than many other places are.

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Re:Why France is building a mega-university at Paris-Saclay ... by Lafcadio on Friday May 29, 2015 @03:02AM (#9623146)

Same problem as always, they are thinking of clusters in terms of spatial planning when they should be encouraging places where clusters already exist. The logic is top-down when it should be bottom-up. What has been done for the French Tech program is a good example of what should be done in the future.

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Re:Why France is building a mega-university at Paris-Saclay ... by yodsanklai on Thursday May 28, 2015 @09:40PM (#9622246)

> French universities, in my personal experience, are deeply underfunded (i.e. we can't afford chairs in all the classrooms)

I doubt ParisTech schools such as HEC or Polytechnique have chairs funding issues.

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Re:Why France is building a mega-university at Paris-Saclay ... by Totoradio on Friday May 29, 2015 @04:32AM (#9623411)

HEC and Polytechnique are not universities, they are "Grandes écoles"

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