Dn a skein, it is impossible to pull on a thread without everything moving. In recent years, the large-scale crises that have shaken the country have had repercussions on multiple levels. Thus, the war in Ukraine has seen geopolitics, economics, energy issues, tensions on global supply chains and struggles for media influence intertwine for a year. The Covid-19 crisis has, for its part, given rise to a wide variety of work to identify its impact and find appropriate responses, in infectiology and epidemiology, of course, but also in fluid dynamics, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and logistics.
We had time to point out, afterwards, lack of preparation in certain areas and lack of coordination between structures. Turning a deaf ear to these shortcomings is not an option, but permanently mobilizing resources to respond to hypothetical crises is no more an option: imagine asking full-time, for each type of crisis potential, a team of sociologists and anthropologists in order to guess the effects in advance? Or economists, to measure, outside the period of an epidemic outbreak, the effect of hypothetical confinements?
Rather than this unviable maximalist solution, I propose the constitution of an academic reserve where it would be possible to draw in critical times. The bodies of higher education and public research in France constitute a formidable pool of highly qualified personnel: some 56,000 teacher-researchers and more than 25,000 tenured researchers in the various public research organizations (CNRS, Inria, Inserm, CEA, etc.), to which is added a significant fraction of non-permanent staff. We could rely, on a voluntary basis, on personnel willing to be called upon for studies and short-term services, if the need so requires.
Annual exercises
The chosen terminology is not trivial. This academic reserve would not be unrelated, in its foundation, to the military reserve or the medical reserve: it is a question of being able to mobilize personnel whose skills are precious, but who do not need to be solicited on a daily basis. .
To be effective, these reserves require regular updating of skills and training. The academic reserve that I call for cannot free itself from such exercises and, with folded arms, wait for the next crisis: the devices, which have become obsolete, are not always replaced; teams change; the skills are disappearing… Conversely, organizing one-off annual exercises around a possible crisis scenario, to test the response of the reserve, would guarantee the maintenance of a network of skills and would organize it.
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