GERMANY: Excellence Initiative gets strong backing

Three years after its inception, Germany's Science Council or Wissenschaftsrat and the German Research Foundation or Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft have published a white paper on the further development of the Excellence Initiative. The funding scheme has received good marks for results so far and the two institutions strongly favour extending it and increasing the money provided.

The initiative was agreed between the federal government and the German states in July 2005, following lengthy negotiations. It was prompted by the auctioning of licences for Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS) making fresh funds available for higher education and research.

Its object is to simultaneously support top-flight research and enhance Germany's higher education system as a whole while raising the nation's competitiveness as a location for science and research, and drawing attention to peak performance in certain areas.

A total of 39 graduate schools, 37 clusters of excellence and nine institutional strategies have been supported since October 2007. Funding of graduate schools is aimed at facilitating the training of PhD candidates in selected areas by providing excellent supervisors and conditions and concentrating on research conducted by the candidates themselves.

Each graduate school is being allocated around EUR1 million (US$1.56 million) a year. Clusters of excellence focus on an institution's research in a broadly defined area of topics. Twenty-five researchers who have demonstrated excellence are brought together to work on an issue of social or economic relevance. An overall impact of these activities in the institution is explicitly desired.

Some EUR6.5 million a year is allocated to each institution for clusters. Institutional strategies describe long-term developments in research, an institution's focus on certain areas, its overall goal and how it aims to attain this goal. Candidates for support for institutional strategies were required to have at least one graduate school and one excellence cluster.

The DFG and the Science Council were in charge of the selection procedure involving two rounds of evaluations carried out by international reviewers in 2005-06 and 2006-07. The total EUR1.9 billion from the auctioning off of licences lasts until 2011.

Only three universities were ultimately eligible for institutional strategy support: Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University and its Technical University, and the University of Karlsruhe. They are now receiving EUR21 million a year each out of the Excellence Initiative fund.

In the other funding lines, 18 universities were each awarded several million euros of annual funding. While many of the media hailed the two Munich institutions and Karlsruhe as Germany's future elite universities, the organisers of the Excellence Initiative stressed that selecting elite universities had never been the object of the exercise.

The Science Council and the DFG claim the initiative's impact has already surpassed initial expectations, with framework conditions for top-level research having improved in particular within the universities enjoying special support. Several new positions have been created for academics, also resulting in better quality research and teaching.

Universities are acting more strategically, have honed their profiles and have initiated long overdue reforms. Career prospects for junior academics have improved considerably. Not only have conditions improved for cooperation within institutions, but links with institutions outside universities have been extended too, with new forms of institutional cooperation emerging.

Furthermore, the Science Council and the DFG hold that Germany is now being much more strongly perceived in terms of its academic achievements at home and abroad and universities have become more attractive to private sponsors. Competition among higher education heads and managements is developing, and the state governments are considering better conditions for higher education and research.

The two organisations have called for the procedure, guided by science and by competition among institutions, to be continued. They would like to see the budget lines retained and fair competition ensured between the continuation of approved applications and new ones.

They say overall funding for the next round of bids should be increased by 20-30% and funding be made more flexible. Spending on continued schemes should be scaled back in accordance with assurances by the state governments and institutions that they will provide funds of their own.

For the graduate schools, the Science Council and the DFG recommend that funding vary between EUR1-2.5 million. Also, postdoctoral students should play a greater role in promoting the independence of young scientists and scholars wherever suitable. They say that finance for the clusters should be between EUR4-8 million and, for institutional strategy support, between EUR8-16 million.

Additional criteria, apart from the existence of at least one graduate school and one excellence cluster, should be introduced as proof of excellence. Also, the option should be provided to include innovative concepts for organising institutions as well as the development and improvement of teaching in higher education in an institution's strategy.

michael.gardner@uw-news.com