Jean-Paul Festeau retires after 38 years at EPFL
Jean-Paul, who was in charge of the Registrar’s Office ever since it was created, consistently played a key role in adopting the new technology that would transform the way university courses are managed. We spoke with this forward-looking man who will leave a lasting mark on our school.
When Jean-Paul Festeau first got his job at EPFL, his supervisor made him promise to stay for at least three years. And he kept that promise – a dozen times over. Jean-Paul came to the school as a student assistant in October 1976 and was hired as an employee in 1979. He was appointed head of the Registrar’s Office when it was created in 1980. In the years that followed, he served under no fewer than five EPFL presidents before officially taking retirement on 31 May 2017. An energetic man brimming with fresh ideas, Jean-Paul successfully navigated EPFL through decades of innovation in school administration, from punch cards in the 1980s to online exam scores in 2017.
The little school on the prairie
Jean-Paul’s first office was on Lausanne’s Avenue de Cour where part of EPFL was still located. In 1980, when the Student Bureau was merged with the Academic Bureau to create the Registrar’s Office, Jean-Paul – selected to head up the new department – moved to what was then a small lakeside campus with just 1,700 students. “EPFL was nothing more than a few buildings in the middle of a field, surrounded by construction trailers for the engineers and contractors working on the site,” he says.
The school was far from being as international as it is today; only French could be heard in the lecture halls. “No classes were given in English, not even in Master’s programs. Most of our professors were native French speakers,” says Jean-Paul. And almost all of the students came from French-speaking Switzerland. “It was very much a regional school.” However, students in 1980 were not much different from students today, except in a few ways. “They were more reticent about making complaints. And you didn’t see their mothers nearly as much! Today, parents are much more involved – which makes sense for students who come from far away and don’t really know where they’re going to live, for example,” says Jean-Paul.
Before office software
The Registrar’s Office at the time looked nothing like it does today. Desks were still equipped with dial phones and typewriters; Excel spreadsheets were nowhere to be found. The workstations that did exist didn’t have office software. Exam schedules were mapped out by hand on huge sheets of paper. “Transcripts were written on carbon paper so that we could have copies. And grades were entered on punch cards that we took to the processing center to be recorded.”
Jean-Paul, who completed no less than 37 in-house training courses in his 38 years at the school, championed the adoption of new technology throughout his career. “I was the first administrator to have a printer in my office,” he says. In the 1980s, he suggested creating student cards with embedded microprocessors – an idea that came back in 1996 with the Camipro card. He was also the one behind the student handbook and later the bilingual course guide. Jean-Paul came up with the idea of staggering class times to reduce congestion on the subway, he fought to keep the first-year program at EPFL and he suggested creating course blocks when the credit system was introduced. On a lighter note, he was also known for his clever April Fools’ Day pranks.
Jean-Paul has now handed over the reins to Laurent Ramelet and said goodbye to the 45 employees in the Registrar’s Office (including 20 who administer PhD programs). “Not bad for a department that started with seven people,” he says with a smile.
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Those of us at Educational Affairs and the Vice Presidency for Education, on behalf of everyone involved in course administration at EPFL, wish to thank Jean-Paul Festeau for his years of loyal service to our school.
His hard work enabled us to efficiently manage large numbers of students and classes at a time when the school was expanding rapidly and the rules and regulations governing our activities were becoming increasingly complicated. He took great care in everything he did, consistently making the best use of the resources he had available and being a faithful leader to his team.