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This paper studies the calls for proposals launched by the French State to select the “Initiatives of excellence” as a means of transforming some higher education institutions into “world class universities”. It shows that a new competitive order has been created within the French academic system. These calls have promoted competition between consortia of institutions located in the same territory, and simultaneously incited these institutions to transform their governance. By so doing, they have reformed the entities that entered this competition as well as the hierarchy between the criteria that had previously prevailed in the French higher education system. This new order has generated new inequalities that favour consortia possessing the strongest capabilities to act together, but also whose institutional characteristics better match the new hierarchy of criteria. In order to understand these transformations, the authors argue that they are the result of the articulation between different regimes of mobilization of policy instruments – compliance, appropriation and resistance – and the product of long-standing interactions between those who govern and those who are governed.