In France, to be a presider is to be a president and today I spent my time being a president. I chaired the morning convening of the symposium that my colleague Pascal Dauvin organized on the “Jobs in communication”. I often joke saying that my department of political science specializes in both the problem and the solution, since we have a master’s degree in communication and another one in conflict studies. Kill each other, and then understand that it might be a good idea to talk. This morning was about the talk part obviously, though I was in a fighting mood since the catering department of UVSQ had forgotten that the 18 people of the colloquium were supposed to have lunch there. My colleagues had to find a restaurant able to welcome that amount of guests, and if you know France, you may know that for some reason, having lots of patrons is more considered as a problem than as good news. I opened the morning session asking for a minute of silence as homage to our late catering service. People laughed of course, and I thought that making people smile was a civilized way to express furious resentment. Despite this unfortunate beginning, it was a very interesting colloquium, I was happy to attend. I could not stay for the afternoon session though, since I had to attend my second half presidency of the day. I chaired the Habilitation Thesis or one of our Lebanese colleague Simon Haddad on the support to terrorism. Obviously from talk, I had backed up to kill. Haddad’s work is extremely interesting, by what it shows (the definite link between support to terrorism and radical Islamism) and what it demonstrates not to be (the link between terrorism and poverty). All ended well, which is that we have a new colleague who can supervise research in France.

NB for those who would not know: What is the “habilitation thesis”? A PHD in France allows competing for associate professorship and conduct research, but is not sufficient to become a full professor or to supervise research. Depending on the field, to become a full professor and supervise research you have to defend a “habilitation thesis”—which is sometimes as heavy as the previous PHD—or to pass a national competition for full professorship (which I did for political science). In this case, you may also defend your habilitation, which allows associate professors to supervise research.