June 4, 2025
Welcome to the seventh and last entry in my Holiday in Sicily series. Here we are. The full eruption. It’s no coincidence I’m writing this from Sicily, flying back over Etna’s crater. I call it Mafia, and I’m a quarter Italian, so I get a pass. But this isn’t a vendetta; it’s a reflection. And yes, I love my lab, I love my job, and I know how incredibly privileged I am. Tenure with no grant pressure, no publishing quotas. Most researchers land a permanent job after one or two postdocs. Then you’re a civil servant—and short of criminal activity, you can never be fired. Sounds amazing, right?
People warned me: the French academic system is incredibly closed. I didn’t fully understand what they meant until I saw it. In many labs, people come from the same advisor or their academic offspring. Me? I’ve been called “the American,” even though I’m French and did my undergrad in France. I just spent a few years abroad: four in the UK, three in the US. Someone once told me not to speak English in the coffee room, “We won’t hire internationals otherwise.” Not a joke.
More broadly, coming back to France was a cultural shock. I missed the COVID-era chloroquine debates. I wasn’t prepared for the hijab discourse. Bias here is subtle but pervasive, and you don’t realize how saturated the environment is until you’ve seen the outside world. Most people haven’t, I can’t blame them.
It wasn’t easy to infiltrate the Mafia. But I finally got in two years ago. Today, I’m a permanent researcher at Inria, i.e., a civil servant for life, and I also hold a teaching position at École Polytechnique as a Professeur Chargé de Cours. I landed my dream jobs, and I’m genuinely grateful to those who supported me along the way. Now, let’s dive into the different types of positions and how the Mafia protects its own.
The French academic Mafia operates through two main channels: CNRS and Inria. These are the elite research-only positions. There's also the Maître de Conférences (MCF), the backbone of university teaching. A few new positions exist, such as CPJ, Chaires de Professeur Junior, but I won’t go into those here.
These are the top research roles in France:
This is the standard university role: 192 hours of teaching per year, plus research. The pay is low, the teaching load heavy, and the conditions aren’t great, often at underfunded universities, with little support and students who struggle. It’s an unappealing option compared to the research-only tracks.
Let me now explain how you get made in the French research Mafia. The CNRS process is mostly the same as Inria’s, with a few small differences.
Let me illustrate Step 3 with actual data. What’s nice is that, for all these civil-servant jobs, the final rankings are publicly available online. The table below shows the number of visible re-rankings, i.e., candidates who changed positions between oral and final results. This does not include people who disappeared entirely from the list (likely because they accepted other offers).
| Inria Center | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saclay | [N/A] | 1 | 3 | 0 |
| Paris | [N/A] | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Bordeaux | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Nice | [N/A] | 1 | 0 | 1 |
It’s closer to the UK/US model but with very French twists:
Once you’re inside the system, it’s easy to understand why many people never leave. The work-life balance is extraordinary: long lunches, generous vacation time, and flexible work arrangements. That’s a gift, but it can also come with a hidden cost: insulation. In many labs, productivity norms are self-referential. A strong PhD here might publish one or two papers. In the US or UK, that would often be the baseline.
This isn’t a question of metrics for their own sake. It’s about the ambition to push boundaries and the cultural energy that supports that ambition. I had the luck of being shaped by environments where people combined rigor, drive, and joy in their work. That shaped my expectations, probably forever. So yes, I sometimes find it hard to adjust to the local tempo. But I’m learning that excellence can wear many masks: with publications, quality can matter more than quantity.
I couldn’t not mention French administration. As civil servants, we deal with it constantly and its rigidity is part of daily life. I used to think all bureaucracy was terrible. Then I left France and realized: French admin is uniquely dysfunctional.
Take letters of recommendation for MCF. When I called HR because I didn't know what the rule was, the person on the line said, with a condescending tone, “By law, you can’t submit letters of recommendation. Period. I can’t help you.” It was astonishingly unhelpful—and frankly, dismissive. Not to mention that reimbursements for conferences or payments for extra teaching hours can take anywhere from three to five months and that very same HR can't be bothered to speed it up.
Hiring an intern is a full-blown bureaucratic saga. One of the administrative assistants told me, almost apologetically: “You need to submit the hiring request at least two months in advance.” Not because of her, of course, she’s just following the rules, but because the process requires seven different people to sign off, and each signature takes about a week. Two full months to rehire someone we already knew: a brilliant student from our Master’s program and a former intern of mine. The delays were especially stressful for him, as he's on the autism spectrum. Thankfully, one extraordinary administrative assistant helped us navigate around the system and hire him through a different channel. She’s incredible, and the thought of her retiring soon honestly terrifies me. She’s spent her career quietly fighting her own version of the Mafia—namely, the patriarchy. She reminds me of my mother: a strong woman who raised five kids on her own. (Funnily enough, as I write this, another administrative assistant just emailed to say the books I ordered back in November finally arrived—a month ago. But they still haven’t been stamped or catalogued. Classic.)
French admin isn’t much better outside of work. My carte vitale (national health card) took four months. A passport photo was rejected while I was applying in person because the date printed on the sheet was from 13 months ago, just over the official 12-month limit. I cut the date off with the clerk’s scissors—“Voilà!”—but she simply replied, “They’ll know.” I asked how. She said the government can track photobooth systems. Honestly, go touch grass.
The real issue isn’t the rules themselves, it’s the robotic, blind enforcement of them. On the road here, no one follows rules: bikes run red lights, cars never stop, pedestrians cross wherever they want. In admin, it’s the opposite: zero flexibility.
The ground has stopped trembling, the lava has cooled, and the ash has settled. In the stillness, it’s easier to see the landscape for what it is. Scarred, yes, but fertile too.
I don’t blame them. Most people haven’t seen how it works elsewhere, and maybe it’s better that way. But we can do better. The Mafia is strong but not unbeatable. Despite all this, I still believe in the French system. We’re not obsessed with metrics. We don’t treat academia like war. Most of us just want to make good math, good science. Let’s keep that spirit but show up a bit more, stay open to the world, and realize how privileged we are.