Fredrick Robin has the kind of intellectual curiosity and wide-ranging interests that many universities seek. When the native of India decided to pursue a doctorate in chemical biology, he discovered that a professor here at the University of Konstanz was looking for someone with a knowledge of biology, computer programming, and applied chemistry, all of which Mr. Robin could offer.
But the fact that a top Indian student ended up at a small institution in the alpine forests of southern Germany was not happenstance. The project Mr. Robin works on, developing a software tool to view the structural changes of proteins and other biological molecules, is a direct result of millions of dollars in federal financing Konstanz has received through a competitive, and controversial, grant program designed to put Germany’s institutions on the global map.
“The Excellence Initiative,” he says of the program, “was my main attraction.”
Konstanz is one of nine universities that have earned a coveted designation by the German government as being among the nation’s strongest.
The project, which began in 2005, has unleashed a new dynamic that has reshaped German higher education, demolishing the pretense of egalitarianism and forcing universities to focus on defining their mission and sharpening their focus.
“This kind of competition set free a lot of new forces within the universities,” says Margret Wintermantel, president of the German Rectors’ Conference, which represents the heads of the country’s 258 institutions of higher education. “Over all, we are very positive about it.”
Annette Schavan, Germany’s minister of education and research, says the intent of the program has been to enhance the international visibility of the country’s universities as centers of research, and to make them more attractive for outstanding students and researchers from around the world.
“The challenge of global competition (in the academic sector) between universities as institutions was openly addressed for the first time,” she said in an e-mail message.
While many academics are indeed happy with seeing billions of dollars pumped into the country’s higher-education system, questions linger about the sustainability of the changes given the short-term nature of the financing. Others question the emphasis on research over teaching or remain uncomfortable with the idea that some universities are considered better than others.
The historic excellence of many of Germany’s universities is beyond question. Some institutions enjoyed such renown that the names of the cities in which they are located, such as Göttingen and Heidelberg, have long been synonymous with German academe.
In the 19th century, Germany gave the world the Humboldtian model, widely considered to be the forerunner of the modern research university.
In the post-World War II era, however, as the country recoiled from the elitism encouraged during the Nazi years, egalitarianism became the defining ethos for German universities, nearly all of which are public institutions.
“We had this tradition that all are kind of equal,” says Ms. Wintermantel. “Of course, everyone knew this was not true, this was a fiction.”
All too real, however, was the fact that the country’s once pre-eminent universities no longer commanded universal esteem, and the depths to which they had fallen was driven home by the relative dearth of German institutions in the top echelons of the newly influential global-rankings tables, dominated by American and British universities.
In 2004 the federal government proposed the Excellence Initiative in a bid to foster outstanding research and propel more German institutions ahead in the rankings. Yet the notion of rewarding individual universities for excellence was still controversial enough that the word “elite” was quickly expunged from official discussion of the program.
Cash Prizes
The project also faced political resistance from Germany’s 16 Länder, or states, which control higher education in the country. Only after lengthy negotiations was a framework agreed upon to provide the necessary 1.9-billion, or $2.3-billion, for the multiyear project.
The program was structured as a competition, with winners selected in three areas by the German Research Foundation and the German Council of Science and Humanities.
The first category was the creation of graduate schools—itself a departure from the traditional German doctoral-training model based largely on a personal professor-student relationship.
The 39 winning programs represented a range of disciplines, with an emphasis on science and technology. Winners in the first category received an average of $1.23-million a year over five years.
The program’s second category selected 37 proposed “clusters of excellence,” consisting of networks of research institutes, companies, and government organizations working together around a central university hub “in research fields of particular promise for the future.”
Here, too, the winning entries were skewed toward the sciences. The winning clusters received $8-million a year for five years.
The most competitive strand was the third, in which institutions were able to compete only if they had submitted at least one winning entry in each of the first two groups.
Universities were asked to present strategies for how they would develop their cutting-edge research and cultivate young talent.
Just nine were chosen in this category, which brought with it $16.6-million a year in additional money. In effect, the government had created Germany’s Ivy League.
Ms. Wintermantel, of the rectors’ association, acknowledges that failing to secure the coveted designation has forced many universities into a sometimes painful process of self-examination.
It has also encouraged many to begin looking for other sources of external financing, she says, as money from the states alone is no longer sufficient.
“They must now sharpen their profile and try to get other resources,” she says.
Changes in Konstanz
Even before it won acclaim, the University of Konstanz was something of an anomaly. Founded in 1966, the university is small by German standards, with just 10,000 students and 184 full professors.
It is also unusual in consisting of a single contained campus on the outskirts of the city in which it is based—a setup that may be common in the United States but is very different from the typical urban German campus of disconnected buildings scattered throughout a metropolis.
Sabine Sonnentag, a professor of psychology and the university’s vice rector for research, says that its small size means that the $123-million in extra money it will receive through the Excellence Initiative from 2007 to 2012 “is a major financial impact.”
The campus buildings are almost all interconnected, further facilitating communication among researchers in different departments who, in other circumstances, might not interact as easily.
The university’s new graduate school in chemical biology won financing in the first round of the awards, and the extra $1.2-million a year has helped to support some 70 students.
“We decided the only way to succeed in the natural sciences was to combine forces,” says Martin Scheffner, a professor of biology, of his collaboration with the chemistry professor Andreas Marx.
The program has helped attract students from abroad as well as retain top students who did their undergraduate work in Konstanz and might otherwise have been tempted to pursue graduate studies elsewhere, says Mr. Marx. The money has also allowed new research liberties, he says. “We get to spend very freely on projects—in my time as a scientist, we have never experienced this before.”
The Excellence Initiative has also helped Konstanz circumvent Germany’s hierarchical and rigid university structures.
The university has created a new Zukunftskolleg, or institute aimed at promoting young researchers. That is a special challenge in a country where the path to a full professorship is notoriously long and arduous.
“We don’t have assistant professorships in Germany,” says Giovanni Galizia, a professor of neuroscience and the institute’s director, who did his doctoral work at the University of Cambridge and was an associate professor at the University of California at Riverside before returning to Germany.
“You can be an assistant to a professor, but you don’t have the independence of American assistant professorships,” he says. “We lost many good ideas because young researchers don’t have independence.”
The university cannot create new permanent positions because staffing levels are controlled by the state, but the college now has 38 young researchers on one- to two-year fellowships in a range of disciplines. It also awards a handful of senior fellowships, which have been especially attractive to researchers in the humanities, Mr. Galizia says.
Karsten Lambers has a Ph.D. in archaeology and is working on a project in conjunction with the computer-science department. He hadn’t originally considered applying for a postdoctoral position at the university because it has no archaeology department, but its interdisciplinary approach piqued his interest, and he won a fellowship allowing him to explore the use of satellite remote sensing in archaeology.
His research, which relies on high-resolution images from space, is expensive, and the financing that he has secured through the Zukunftskolleg could be career-defining.
“This is probably the only chance for me to get a job to do this kind of work,” he says. “With the traditional structures of archaeology in Germany, I wouldn’t get this kind of chance.”
Paying for more young researchers to travel abroad to attend conferences is another direct result of the Excellence Initiative. “This is no big deal elsewhere, but in Germany the system has been very difficult,” says Ms. Sonnentag.
The university’s Welcome Center, set up in 2008, is another innovation. The center occupies a ground-floor office in the main administrative building from which four staff members offer visiting scholars and researchers help with immigration advice, housing, and even pickup from the Zürich airport.
The university’s holistic approach to supporting young researchers is one of the cornerstones of its institutional strategy. The focus includes specific outreach to female researchers, who are even more underrepresented in German universities than in other Western countries.
“We’re really asking, How can you build an infrastructure where young researchers can combine research and family?” says Ms. Sonnentag. There are legal limits on how money from the government program can be used for building projects, but a new child-care facility will be one of the physical legacies of the program.
Return to Mediocrity?
The pride and excitement at Konstanz’s success are evident everywhere here, in the many posters dotting the campus with ubiquitous references to “exzellenz” and the plans for the official opening of the new Zukunftskolleg building. But the temptation to bask in the glory has been tempered by concern about what lies ahead when the money runs out.
Focus has already shifted to the next round of the competition. “It’s very, very important for us to be successful again,” says Ms. Sonnentag.
The program’s limited duration will hinder the creation of lasting legacies, its critics say. In the past year, France announced its own program for fostering excellence in higher education. The program was inspired in part by the German model, with the key distinction that it will provide long-term financing through a large government loan.
“The big problem of the Excellence Initiative is that this is running for five years, then another five years,” says Mr. Marx, the chemistry professor and co-founder of the new graduate school in chemical biology.
Strengthening German universities will require a long-term financial commitment, he says. “What does it mean if it ends after 10 years? Are you saying excellence is over, then it’s back to mediocrity?”
The federal minister emphasizes that the program’s most important role is as a “kick-off for change,” and not as a long-term source of financing. “Permanent additional funding would not automatically foster the competitiveness of our universities,” Ms. Schavan says. “The Excellence Initiative is an important, but not the only, means we have to strengthen our universities.”
Mr. Galizia, of the Zukunftskolleg, agrees that success in the next round of the competition will be important but says that enough changes have already been made to sustain the university’s momentum, even if its bid fails.
“We have backup scenarios,” he says, noting that private money has become a more acceptable source of financing for German universities than was the case just a generation ago, and constitutes a growing share of the university’s revenue stream.
Universities like Konstanz may soon face even greater pressure to seek additional sources of income. Recently announced state budget cuts have hurt universities and prompted fears that the even some programs affiliated with the Excellence Initiative could be imperiled.
Critics have also said that the program’s emphasis on research has shortchanged teaching, which even some supporters concede.
Benjamin Wohnhaas, a second-year student of politics and management at Konstanz and a member of the student government, echoes the view of many students when he says that “we would prefer an Excellence Initiative about education, of course, and not just about research.”
Still, he welcomes the program’s overall impact. “Personally, I’m glad we are one of the winners of the Excellence Initiative. We got more money, and our image improved in Germany and abroad.”
The competition for the next round of financing will include a greater focus on teaching, a shift that the rectors’ conference and other groups have welcomed, and a separate program has earmarked additional money “to enhance the quality of teaching in higher education,” Ms. Schavan points out.
Despite its limits, there is consensus that, in just a few years and with a level of financing that by American standards is relatively small, the program has had a transformative impact on German higher education.
Ms. Schavan says it is already helping to make Germany a more attractive place to study, research, and work, drawing students, such as Mr. Robin, who would otherwise have ended up doing their graduate work in the United States or Britain.
