Tension is mounting in Germany’s academic world as the exzellenzinitiative (“Excellence Initiative”), launched in 2006 by the federal government, moves into its second and final phase. The programme, aimed at stimulating competition among the country’s universities with a view to upgrading the overall quality of tertiary education, has changed the face of academic life in the country, winning it many plaudits — but also some critical notices.
It all started in 2005 under the auspices of Gerhard Schroder’s Social Democrat government when Edelgard Bulmahn, then federal minister of education and research, decided to instigate a programme dedicated to the pursuit of excellence and to ensuring that German universities could rival the elite Oxbridge and Ivy League institutions of the anglophone world. The federal government announced it would shoulder 75 percent of the costs to get the project under way, with the remaining 25 percent provided by the states where the universities involved were located.
But this met with fierce opposition from some states, particularly regional conservative governments which feared that the centre-left administration was using the initiative as a way to muscle in on education policy, a highly-prized traditional responsibility of Germany’s 16 länder (states).
However despite right-wing reservations, the initiative went ahead, endowing selected universities with extra funding to enable them to attract and support top researchers and renowned scholars. A total of Euro 1.9 billion (Rs.12,730 crore) has been allocated to the academic winners over the programme’s initial five-year period between 2006-2011.
From a list of nearly 300 candidate universities, an independent panel of judges narrowed down the list of applicants to a quarter of its original size. The final decisions were taken by the German Science Council (Wissenschaftsrat) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or DFG). Funding was provided in three tranches:
• Cash for 39 graduate schools to train highly gifted Ph D students, as well as offering them first-class research facilities and opportunities
• Money to support 37 “Clusters of Excellence”, designed to promote Germany’s international reputation as a centre of high-profile scientific and academic research
• Last but not least, nine higher education institutions were declared “elite universities” in recognition of their long-term strategies to promote top-level research.
The nine elite universities have come to symbolise the programme, not least because they all had to meet tough standards to qualify for funds: namely, having at least one cluster of excellence and one graduate school, as well as presenting a comprehensive strategy for the future development of their research elite. At present, the institutions — the Technical University of Munich, the Rhenish-Westphalian Technical University Aachen, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, the Free University of Berlin and the universities of Constance, Heidelberg, Göttingen, Karlsruhe and Freiburg — carry the prestigious title “elite university”.
So has the programme succeeded in its main aim — to make Germany attractive to its top academics and researchers in order to convince them to stay in the country? Christian Jehle, who oversees the implementation of the Excellence Initiative at the University of Freiburg, has no doubts. “Of course, the (programme) promotes research, first and foremost.. Yet the extra funding has been responsible for many beneficial side-effects, too. For example, students choose to come to Freiburg because of the excellent research facilities we can offer them,” says Jehle.
Yet not everyone is a wholehearted admirer of the initiative. Many academics in central and northern Germany, for instance, feel the programme is skewed towards institutions in prosperous, high-tech länder such as Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg, where many universities select their students on the basis of school grades. Only 2.3 percent of the Excellence Initiative’s funding has found its way to universities in eastern Germany. This is symptomatic of the plight of the region as a whole, as young people continue to leave in droves and many schools close down, with dire consequences for local universities.
Regardless of the criticism, the programme is poised to enter its second and final five-year phase, which will run until 2017. Funding this time around will top Euro 2.7 billion (Rs.18,090 crore). Predictably, this has generated howls of protest from opposition parties, which want more funding for all universities rather than favoured national status for some. It is clear that passions continue to run high when it comes to the Excellence Initiative and the federal government’s role in Germany’s academy.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)