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1/ Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, and Tyler Cowen, the famous economist and blogger, recently wrote an article in The Atlantic. In it, they call for designing a new discipline focused on human progress and how to solve the world’s most pressing problems. They call it “progress studies”. If, like me, you’re interested in technology and institutions, the discussion that followed was hard to miss. While many in the tech world have been voicing enthusiastic support, others, notably in academia, have pointed out that the world hadn’t been waiting around for Collison and Cowen to work on advancing progress.
2/ I’d like to think I can bring a different perspective to the discussion. I’ve been working in technology for almost 10 years, briefly as an entrepreneur and then as a cofounder & director of The Family. But before that, I worked for several years as a senior civil servant in the French government. To get there, I had to go through a long and highly selective process: first an engineering school, then the Institut d’études politiques in Paris (otherwise known as Sciences Po), and then the École nationale d’administration (ENA), where French state officials are trained at the beginning of their career.
3/ You should note that none of those institutions I attended is a proper university. Rather, they’re known in France as grandes écoles (literally “great schools”). Instead of employing permanent faculty focused on research, the grandes écoles have historically focused on sharing practical knowledge with the happy few that then go on to the most rewarding careers in either the public or private sectors. This makes for a well-known French exception, where the best and most ambitious French students are educated in institutions that are essentially deprived of a long-standing academic tradition.
4/ The French elite being trained away from academia triggered a negative feedback loop. It explains why academics are largely absent from the French public debate. French officials simply don’t realize that there are academics out there working on the problems they would like to solve. More often than not, they rely on what they have in-house—that is, fairly competent civil servants that are anything but academics. Like me, these individuals were trained as generalists, which means they know a bit of everything and they’re focused on practical problem-solving more than on research and science.
5/ Each time, the goal of the French innovators that founded a new grande école for their world was to recover from a setback and then to rebuild. It was effectively “progress studies” as the mission was to make France great again rather than simply doing more research and accumulating more knowledge. But all of these institutions have at some point entered a phase of stasis and started to lose their edge. Indeed, I see various reasons for why most French grandes écoles are now out of touch. And the most important is that we’re going through a paradigm shift, which makes most of their training obsolete.
6/ And it’s getting worse because...all grandes écoles have been trying to turn themselves into something more like universities: hiring permanent faculty, doing research, counting their number of scientific publications so as to move up in the Academic Ranking of World Universities. After all, this is what you need to do to attract high-paying foreign students and to make the degrees you deliver more valuable on the global labor market. But I can’t say it works. For all their efforts to become more like universities, the French grandes écoles are still very much second-class institutions at the global scale.
7/ Also, by trying to comply with the traditional academic model, the grandes écoles have added a new layer of structural problems that are inherent to academia. Now that they’re mimicking the academic world, they’re adding weight but losing momentum. The slow pace of academic research, the terrible jargon that academics prefer, the bureaucracy that this whole world seems to entail: it all contributes to making the more academic version of grandes écoles even less relevant. Our grandes écoles used to be about the problems of the present. Now they’re catching up on a model from the past.
8/ Now would Collison and Cowen’s “progress studies” be advanced by founding a new grande école for our time? Indeed, all those grandes écoles from the past were founded to tackle a specific challenge. The École polytechnique, an engineering-focused military academy, was dedicated to strengthening Napoleon’s Empire. ENA (where I was trained) was about rebuilding France after World War II, a time when the state couldn’t rely on its old administrative guard (most of its members had collaborated with the Nazis). Note that in both cases, the direction for progress was provided by the state. Alas, today, the state is largely missing in action—both in the US and in Europe.
9/ I only know of one French grande école that was founded without any direction provided by the state. In reaction to France’s humiliating military defeat against Prussia in 1870, Émile Boutmy, a fringe entrepreneur, decided to found what later became Sciences Po (of which I’m an alumnus). His view was that the old elite had failed because the academics that had educated them were backward-looking and narrow-minded. Boutmy thought that a new elite should rise, one that would look forward and embrace a multi-disciplinary approach to the world and solving problems. Sound familiar 😼?
10/ This, indeed, resonates quite a lot with the dispute around “progress studies”. On one side are those (academics) who are waiting for someone, likely the state, to provide the direction of progress—and then, maybe, we can use all that knowledge that they’ve been producing all along. On the other side are the Boutmys of the world, including Collison and Cowen, that want to make up for the absence of a direction for innovation. What they say is that we shouldn’t wait to invent a new institution (a grande école for our time) that will teach young people what actually matters, and then at some point the rise of this new elite will contribute to inspiring a new direction and delivering progress.
In conclusion, let me mention two things:
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