Generally speaking, when we talk about the role of a university president, it's to emphasise that since the Faure Act, the president's powers have continued to grow at the same time as the board has taken precedence. But don't worry, I'm not going to tell you for the umpteenth time how much things have changed since the Faure Act and then go into an exegesis of these changes. Instead, taking advantage of the freedom given to me by the organisers of this conference, I'm going to share a point of view on the role of president as I see it and, more broadly, on the university. As you will understand, these comments are my own and do not claim to reflect the experience or thoughts of all university presidents. What's more, I'm saying them in relative retrospect, because although I'm now at the start of my 2nd term of office, the 1st was very short, barely a year and a half, since it ended with the creation of our new institution, Nantes Université, in the form of an experimental public establishment. What's more, it took place in the midst of a health crisis, and therefore in a very special context. That said, there are many ways of approaching the subject that has been proposed to me. I could have talked to you about the permanent gap that a president has to bridge between major projects and the day-to-day lives of colleagues and students, between the internal and external spheres, between the hyper-personalisation of the position and the democratic functioning of the institution, between this hyper-personalisation and the collective work with the vice-presidents and the directorate-general of services, between the millions in calls for projects and the deficit in the budget, and so on. In the end, I decided to focus on a question that may seem provocative, and perhaps it is: why give powers to a university president? More precisely, to do what? Because it seems to me that the powers of a president should be assessed in the light of what we expect of universities. In other words, questioning the role of the president means asking ourselves what kind of universities we want, and considering the ‘transformations of the figure of the president’ is tantamount to questioning the transformations of the university. This will naturally lead me to broaden my discussion, going well beyond the purely technical approach to the role of president. In order to tackle this subject, which I obviously cannot hope to cover in just a few minutes, I would like to talk about the challenges which, in my view, are those of the university and therefore those of a president, concentrating on two of them: consolidating the ‘idea of the university’ 1 (I) and, in order to do this, ‘transforming the role of the president’ 2 (II).