Christian Humborg wants German universities and corporations to know they’re being watched.
As managing director of Transparency International Germany, a nongovernmental organization focused on anticorruption efforts, Mr. Humborg sees a troubling trend in German higher education as more top-name universities embrace “strategic partnerships” with corporations and seek to commercialize their research.
Such collaborations are not entirely new to Germany—and are certainly common in the United States. But as the education budgets of Germany’s 16 federal states, which are largely responsible for funding universities, have stagnated, more institutions have sought alliances with corporations.
Mr. Humborg’s group is working with the Free Association of Student Bodies, a student-union umbrella group, and Die Tageszeitung, a left-leaning newspaper, to expose what they see as a creeping corporate influence on public higher education. Last year they started Hochschulwatch, or University Watch, a crowdsourced website that tracks university-business partnerships.
“We’re not against corporations’ funding higher education, but we demand that the details of this cooperation be open,” says Mr. Humborg. “How much influence does a pharmaceutical company have on the agenda of a university hospital? What are the terms and conditions?”
In the past German companies augmented their own research and development by contracting with university institutes to conduct one-off research projects.
But today’s long-term partnerships are a different story. Companies outsource parts of or even their entire R&D programs to public universities by financing whole departments or institutes. For example, the Düsseldorf-based utility E.ON, Germany’s largest supplier of fossil-fuel and nuclear energy, picks up the $52-million annual bill of the E.ON Energy Research Center at the RWTH Aachen University.
“This kind of broad, opaque sponsoring on such a large scale has shown itself open to conflicts of interest,” says Mr. Humborg.
University Watch has collected information on nearly 400 universities and colleges. Students, faculty members, and administrators are encouraged to contribute information about the nature of corporate sponsorships at their institutions. Die Tageszeitung evaluates the source and the information, and sometimes follows up with reporting. Recently, every sponsored professorship in the country was added to the website, along with the name of the sponsor.
The project came to life in the aftermath of revelations that two of Berlin’s top universities, Humboldt University and the Technical University of Berlin, had secretly allowed Deutsche Bank, Europe’s largest bank, wide-ranging discretion in the operations of a joint institute for applied mathematics and finance. At a total cost of $16-million over four years, the bank also directly sponsored two of the institute’s full professors.
In return, according to a contract, Deutsche Bank stipulated that it would participate in selecting the academics, and that bank staff members would teach seminars at the institute. Moreover, it would have the final say on research strategy and salaries, and publication of sponsored research would be “in the interest of the Deutsche Bank.”
A retired political-science professor at the Free University of Berlin who was also a bank shareholder made the contract public, prompting an outpouring of criticism in Germany. In response, Deutsche Bank declined to renew the contract, which expired in 2011.
An Anomaly?
“It’s only through public scandal that any of this has come to light in the first place,” says Erik Marquardt, a chemistry student at Berlin’s Technical University and, as head of the national student-union association, a founder of University Watch. He says that the project asks universities to make their corporate contracts public, but that so far all have declined to do so. (German law does not require disclosure of such deals.)
The University of Cologne, for example, has a partnership with Bayer Schering Pharma, the pharmaceutical company known around the world for its aspirin. For several years, critics of the collaboration, which supports research and a graduate program focused on drug discovery and development, have demanded access to the fine print of the deal.
The two parties have refused, saying that making such details available to rival institutions and pharmaceutical companies would compromise the originality of the research.
In the 2011 fiscal year, Germany’s universities received about €833-million, or $1.3-billion, in research funds from corporations, about 6 percent of total research funding. By comparison, American universities received more than $3-billion from companies for research and development that same year.
With public funds scarce, supporters of cooperation between the private sector and universities argue that such programs are an important part of German higher education’s future and help prepare graduates for the job market.
The private sector has promoted “some very exciting new models of research collaboration,” says Volker Meyer-Guckel of the Stifterverband, a foundation focused on supporting German higher education that facilitates the involvement of the business community in research. “There are many different kinds of cooperation and different aims, but the universities have full independence to research according to the highest academic standards.”
He says that the Deutsche Bank affair was an anomaly and that the relevant terms of the partnerships should be on all of the universities’ websites for all to see.
That’s the problem, say University Watch’s founders, they’re not—yet.
