Germany singles out universities for excellence

Three categories of competition make up the excellence initiative. In the first round, 18 graduate schools were selected to receive about €1 million a year apiece, and 17 research clusters will each get €6.5 million a year. The three elite universities were chosen from among those that won the first two types of awards, and they get an additional €15 million a year on average. Three-quarters of the initiative money comes from the federal government, and the rest is from the state governments, which are responsible for supporting higher education. Germany has about 80 public universities, and the aim of the excellence initiative is for 10 of them to become globally competitive; with 3 selected so far, up to 7 more may yet be named.

Four of the graduate schools—in Erlangen, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, and Munich—are in physics or have a strong physics component. Broadly, the graduate schools will require more course work and cultivate a stronger sense of community for students than has been the norm in Germany, where PhD students typically join a research group rather than a department or school. Some of the graduate schools focus on interdisciplinary research or aim to shorten the time it takes to earn a doctoral degree. The idea is to “put the doctoral student, not the professor, at the center of thinking,” says Beate Konze-Thomas, director of infrastructure and program research at the German Research Foundation, the agency responsible for administering and funding the excellence initiative’s graduate schools and clusters.

The clusters of excellence, several of which are physics related, are intended to bolster research in specific areas, and most involve nonuniversity research centers as partners. In Dresden, for example, a research cluster focusing on tissue engineering and regenerative medicine has about 70 members from the Dresden University of Technology and from local Max Planck institutes. Petra Schwille, a biophysicist at the university, says the money will mainly be used to create new positions. Dresden was also awarded funding to set up a graduate school in biomedicine and bioengineering. “Five years ago, nobody would have thought Dresden would be a key place in these fields in Germany,” says Schwille. “In a way, we are the winners of this initiative.”

Overall, says Eberhard Umbach, president of the German Physical Society and a professor at the University of Würzburg, “the life sciences are the big winners. The humanities are the losers. And the physical sciences and engineering are somewhere in between.” In the first round of the excellence initiative, only four graduate schools and one research cluster went to the humanities and social sciences.

At the three universities that were anointed elite, physics is anything but low profile. Two of the three research clusters funded at LMU are in physics—one in nanosystems and one in advanced photonics; one of TUM’s two research clusters is in fundamental physics; and Karlsruhe’s graduate school focuses on optics and photonics and its research cluster is in nanostructures.

The universities were selected based on their strategies for attaining international prominence. TUM and LMU each have plans for an institute of advanced study to attract international scientists and promote dialog across disciplines. Both want to temporarily free faculty from teaching—which is currently required even of Nobel Prize winners. LMU plans to aggressively recruit new faculty members and strengthen ties with researchers at other universities and at Max Planck institutes. The university has a “gigantic chart” showing plans for restructuring, says Axel Schenzle, LMU’s dean of physics. “It’s largely bureaucratic things [to make the] university more independent from the state.” Faculty will feel the changes more than students will, he adds.

A chunk of TUM’s strategy funding will be used “for gender issues and to support bright female scientists and students,” says university president Wolfgang Herrmann. The university will pay for several days of childcare when a mother attends a conference, say, or hire someone to take care of lab administration when a woman is on maternity leave. “We want to become the technical university in Germany that is most friendly to talented women,” says Herrmann.

The University of Karlsruhe is joining forces with the nearby national Karlsruhe Research Center to form the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The first steps will be to merge the computer centers and libraries, recruit joint research groups and lecturers, and install a shuttle system, says biochemist Anne Ulrich, who already holds positions at both institutions. “We hope that the strict separation between universities and extra-university centers can be softened so that these equivalent partners in size and funding can work in scientific synergy,” she adds. KIT—if the name reminds you of MIT, it’s intentional—will start by emphasizing nanotechnology, materials science, astroparticle physics, and grid computing.

The selection of three universities in Germany’s south, two of them in a single city, was considered “politically impossible,” says Schenzle. It occurred because academics on the reviewing committee outwitted the politicians on the committee by unanimously dividing applicants into categories of “fund” and “don’t fund,” leaving nothing open for discussion. “The politicians couldn’t do anything,” Schenzle says.

Researchers applaud the unexpected turn the process took, while “politicians think it’s a scandal,” says Michael Grunze, a physical chemist at the University of Heidelberg, which was awarded one graduate school and one research cluster and, along with the University of Aachen (one graduate school and two research clusters), was widely expected to make the elite cut. “I think it was the brave and proper thing to do.”

“What Karlsruhe did was ingenious,” Grunze adds. Research centers “are flourishing. Universities are struggling to cope with increasing student numbers while staff is reduced and budgets are decreasing. We have an ongoing discussion [in Germany] about how [research centers and universities] can work together.”

Indeed, no one disputes that the Munich and Karlsruhe universities deserve the kudos they got. Still, says Ulrich Schollwöck, a theoretical physicist at Aachen, “for many people, the fact that we were not successful in the third benchmark has overshadowed the joy of how successful we were on the other two.”

Decades of comparatively robust state funding gave the three elite universities a leg up in the competition. “A well-equipped university has better visibility, and bigger and better faculties,” says the German Physical Society’s Umbach. In contrast to the success in Munich, take, for example, Berlin in the north, where three universities were awarded a total of three graduate schools—and no research clusters. But no one will be surprised if in the next round of the excellence initiative the winners are distributed more evenly around the country.

“If we compare our university system to the US, on average our universities are better. But we were always missing top universities that were visible internationally,” says Jürgen Mlynek, president of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres and former president of Humboldt University in Berlin. “I see this as a first step in some differentiating among German universities. The good ones will get better.” The excellence initiative “is a clear sign that the word ‘elite’ is no longer taboo,” adds Karlsruhe’s Ulrich. “It is becoming more acceptable to state that there exist differences.”

Still, the excellence initiative won’t fast-track anyone to Harvard-like heights. “The usual suspects in the US—Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and so on—spend roughly €100 000 per student per year. In Germany the average is €10 000 per year,” says Mlynek. The ratio of students to professors is also higher in Germany. “For those who made it [to elite status] in the excellence initiative, there will be a 10% effect on their overall budget. It’s not that much,” Mlynek says. “Most of all, it’s the reputation you gain when you win,” says Schenzle. “Secondly, it’s the money.”

Although the best universities may become both better and better known, the initiative “forced all universities to think about their strengths and weaknesses,” says Joachim Rädler, a member of the LMU nanosystems research cluster. “It has generated a lot of movement. Also, universities that were not successful in the first round will refine their plans. They still have a chance in the second round.”

Indeed, says Umbach, “now there is much more discussion between people who never had contact before. Maybe the best result of the whole initiative is that discussion between various leading people in the university has improved.”