Georgia Tech-Lorraine - An American Island in a French Sea (Part 2) 

by Andrew Kerr
November 2007

In this four-part series we look at Georgia Tech-Lorraine, a campus of Georgia Tech located in Metz, France.

Location, Location, Location

You have heard of Paris. It's the city of love, the city of light, the place where you can find the Mona Lisa (practice saying this in your most pretentious voice: "It's just soooo overrated") and the Eiffel Tower. It is a noisy, bustling place where swarms of tourists seek out the French ethos and swarms of locals demonstrate the French ethos. As you sit on a wicker chair turned towards the foot traffic (outdoor restaurant chairs in Paris are always arranged to offer the best people-watching perspective), you think to yourself, the French are cool! All that stuff in the American media was so wrong! Well, OK, some of it was right, (oh those confounded strikes), but when you see Paris life happening right before your eyes it makes more sense than it ever did in your Atlanta or Savannah or Vidalia City haunts. Paris is, like New York, a Great City. You cannot change it; it will only change you. And, also like New York, it can really, really, really wear you down.

So if Paris is wearing you down, you just might want to buy a ticket for a comfortable one hour and twenty minute long train ride through rolling green hills, farms, and small towns to another France, a region called Lorraine and a city called Metz. Because here the pace of life is very different. Only about 125,000 people live in Metz, so you can forget all about how it felt being CRUSHED into a Paris subway car, abandon the obsessive-compulsive brushing of your pocket with your hand to make sure your wallet is still in there, and unscrew the complimentary foam earplugs you received on the flight over.

Despite its relatively small size, Metz is big and affluent enough to offer the visitor tons of restaurant options, a shopping mall boulevard that sells clothes you and I probably cannot afford, and a lively Saturday morning market in front of the city's most massive cathedral. You can walk from one end of the town to the other in about 30 minutes. It's pretty perfect, size-wise. And if the pace of life here is too slow, well, there's always that short train ride back to Paris. Or, for that matter, to three other countries—all within an hour's reach.

In other words, Metz is very well situated. This is what we might call "a selling point" of the city. And with half of Europe's GDP within 400 miles of Metz, Georgia businesses are especially encouraged to drop in.

Getting Down to Business

I left the picture of Buzz and the Ramblin' Wreck behind and ascended the stairs to GT-L director Yves Berthelot's office for a history lesson.

Berthelot's office overlooks the aforementioned beautifully-landscaped lawns and lake, beyond which one can see dorms (used by GT-L students) and the SUPELEC (L'École Supérieure d'Électricité), a technology school that Berthelot describes as "one of the best in France." The entire area and its buildings (a mix of universities and businesses) is collectively called the Technopole.

The trim and smooth-shaven Berthelot makes me especially self-conscious about my contrasting travel slovenliness (two weeks in France and Romania; shaving razor went dull and, in lieu of a replacement, led to my accumulating a few days of [hopefully] fashionable stubble). He speaks crisp English in a light French accent and strikes perfect poise between cordiality and frankness, pride and modesty. The very first words out of his mouth are the admirably selfless, "I will start with the students, because that's really what it is all about."

He explains that Georgia Tech-Lorraine was one of the many fruits of a long-running partnership between Georgia and the province of Lorraine. I've heard a lot about international "sister cities" and all that, but I always felt such stuff was just ceremonial and not really taken seriously by the participants (sort of like "Diana DeGarmo Day" in Snellville—a nice excuse for a party the day it's declared, but who will be celebrating it in 2015?). But when Lorraine's president, Jean-Marie Rausch, signed a "sistership agreement" with then-Georgia Governor Joe Frank Harris in the late 1980s a real relationship blossomed between the two regions that has led to major economic gains for both.

"This was just farmland," Berthelot says of Metz. "In the 70s the economy here was going downhill because it was a steel-based and the steel industry was suffering. [Rausch] said, 'Let's transform it into a more high-tech region. Telecoms and chemicals and computers.' He said, 'Let's create a Technopole.' " Berthelot then notes with a dash of sentimentality, "It's a beautiful Technopole."

And he's right. Looking out over the rolling green lawns and the stunning fall foliage one cannot imagine a much nicer place to come to work.

Rausch sought an American university to add to the Technopole community, and after considering a number of cities narrowed his focus on the Atlanta area. Atlanta's technology culture was booming; the phrase "technological capital of the south" was being bandied about, and Atlanta was readying its 1989 bid for the 1996 Olympic Games. BellSouth helped push the deal along, and by 1990 Georgia Tech-Lorraine had become a reality.

Seventeen years on, GT-L plays a major role in encouraging businesses to invest on both sides of the pond. Explains Berthelot: "If you have a company in Lorraine that is eager to set a foot in the U.S., we encourage them to do that in Georgia, because of Georgia Tech. And so they open, they have access to the U.S. market, and hopefully they create jobs in Atlanta. That's the bottom line. The reverse is also true. We encourage Georgia companies to come and visit here, access the European market, and contribute to the economic growth of the region. So it's really developing opportunities for those companies."

All fine and well for business, but what exactly is Georgia Tech doing here?

"If you want research to grow, just think," Berthelot says. "What was Georgia Tech, maybe 50 years ago? It was really a Georgia school. Well, something happened in the late 20th century. Georgia Tech started becoming a national school in terms of research, in terms of students, in terms of everything. They opened up to the U.S.

"It's the same thing that's happening at the international scale now. Georgia Tech is opening up to the world and with a very selective strategic partnership that will benefit the flow of ideas, research, and innovations. Innovation cannot come just from our little pot. We have to partner with strategic people, strategic groups doing great stuff. So if it benefits Georgia it benefits France also, it benefits science, it benefits innovation, that's how it is. It's really 'win-win.'"

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Part One: Introduction
Part Two: Location, Location, Location/Getting Down to Business
Part Three: The Global Nature of Work/"Uh, English, Please?"
Part Four: The Student Perspective/So in Conclusion...