Pap Ndiaye

Pap Ndiaye (French pronunciation: ​[pap ɛndjaj]) is a French historian and government minister. He was a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and then, since 2012, at Sciences Po. Since 20 May 2022, he has served as Minister of National Education and Youth in the government of Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne.

In May 2022, he was designated the new Minister of National Education and Youth by President Emmanuel Macron in Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne's government. Ndiaye had previously been a critic of Macron, stating in 2019: "it is difficult to discern a policy, or even a consistent point of view".

In February 2021, Ndiaye was made director of the French national museum of immigration (the Palais de la Porte Dorée, Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration and Aquarium tropical).

His surprise appointment came with widespread criticism from the far-right, Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, and Éric Zemmour, but also some people from Les Républicains. The weekly Marianne presented him as "the importer of black studies in France" and called his positioning an "ambivalence". In 2017, Ndiaye had comments on structural racism in France, explaining that according to him there is racism in the State, which can be found in some institutions like Police, but it's not a racism from the State In a 2021 interview with Le Monde, Ndiaye stated he did not experience racism growing up in France and only "realised that [he] was black" when he was 25 while studying in the United States.

In 2012, Ndiaye became a faculty member at Sciences Po. He has been a member of the Centre d'études nord-américaines (Center for North American studies) and has been an editor of the journal L'Histoire. He has also published pieces in the news media.

Ndiaye was born in Antony, Hauts-de-Seine, south of Paris, to a Senegalese father and a French mother. His sister is the writer Marie NDiaye, winner of the 2009 Prix Goncourt (she spells their surname with two uppercase letters, whereas he spells it with one).

Ndiaye graduated from the École normale supérieure de lettres et sciences humaines in 1986, and obtained the Agrégation in history. Ndiaye obtained his PhD in history from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. From 1991 to 1996, Ndiaye conducted research in the United States as preparation for a thesis about the history of the petrochemical corporation DuPont. As the son of a Senegalese father and a French mother, he has credited his time at the University of Virginia with exposing him to themes of racism in the United States that prompted his interest in seriously studying the topic.