Paris — France’s National Assembly voted on Wednesday to pass a bill that will grant increased autonomy to the country’s 85 universities, allowing them greater control within the next five years over their finances and more discretion over hiring and other personnel decisions, Le Monde reported.

The controversial measures proposed by the new government of President Nicolas Sarkozy have provoked intense criticism from student groups and opposition parties, but even opponents of the government’s new university law agree that the country’s higher-education system is in dire need of reform.

The main student group, which had threatened to unleash large-scale protests over the provisions of the bill, reacted to its passage with a statement praising some of the amendments that had been added. For example, the National Assembly rejected a measure, added in the Senate, that would have allowed individuals outside French academe to participate in the election of university presidents. But the statement said that students remained “extremely uneasy about the consequences of this law.”

The Conference of University Presidents expressed its satisfaction with the bill’s passage, saying in a statement that the measure would “allow all universities and higher-education institutions to acquire new powers for the benefit of students, research, and the development of our country.”

The text of the law will be examined by a commission comprising seven deputies and seven senators before its final adoption, which is expected on August 1. —Aisha Labi