Des alumni à l’université française. Comment créer ex nihilo un réseau de diplômés ?

Abstract

Launching initiatives aimed at graduates of French universities, described by the term alumni is of recent date. It seeks to create a “memoryless” social group on a university wide scale, given that very few initiatives have hitherto been taken in this sense, and that there exist neither associations, nor directories, nor meeting places for “reunions”, as in Anglo-Saxon universities or French “Grandes Écoles”. The article presents the full range of activities involved in “fabricating” this network (directory, meetings, events) as well as those linked to creating the university’s mark (logo). We show that this process of constructing an organisational identity among the graduates is complicated. It requires carrying out activities of communication, promotion and organizing meetings for various target groups (students, older graduates, enterprises, local communities) which do not have same logics of attachment to the alumni community- and whose borders are themselves to be defined.

Keywords

• university
• France
• alumni
• former students
• network