Head of France's prestigious Sciences Po grande école was champion of access for poor students

This article is more than 8 years old

This article is more than 8 years old

New York police say there are no obvious signs of foul play in the death of a French scholar found in his hotel room, but his laptop and cellphone were found on a ledge several floors below.

Police spokesman Paul Browne said Wednesday that Richard Descoings' seventh-floor Michelangelo hotel room wasn't broken into, and his body didn't have obvious trauma.

The naked body of 53-year-old Descoings was found Tuesday afternoon.

Browne says a laptop and cellphone believed to belong to Descoings were found on a third-floor ledge. It's unclear how they got there. Browne says they may have been tossed out the window.

Descoings was known for his crusade to blow apart the stuffy, elitist image of France's top higher education institutions, the grandes écoles, opening them up to students from disadvantaged backgrounds such as the housing estates outside Paris.

He was director of one of the country's top institutions, the Institute of Political Studies, in Paris, known as Sciences Po, where he shook up the entry system, describing France's higher education as unfair, unequal and undemocratic.

The police spokesman said investigators were awaiting a medical examiner's report to determine the cause of death.

Sciences Po is considered a training ground for France's political, media and administrative elite. Alumni include the former presidents Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand.

The incumbent French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said Descoings' efforts to give underprivileged students the chance to study at the institute had marked "a historic turning point in awareness of scandalous social elitism in France".