Courting academics world-wide
New concepts to attract coveted brains to Germany and Europe
Dieser Artikel in Deutsch
The sights are set high - and failure, it appears, is programmed. If the EU Commission has its way, by 2010, Europe should have become the leading research region worldwide.
But there are still cases such as that of a young Indian woman who came to Germany a few months ago with her husband. The engineer was working as a post-doc at a university in the Rhineland; his wife soon acquired a taste for it and wanted to study here, too. But the Immigration Office didn't play along: she had entered the country as a tourist, the Indian woman was told, and was therefore not allowed to enrol. To do that, she would need a study visa which could only be applied for in her own country. There was no alternative - the young woman had to fly back to India, collect her new visa there and then get in the next plane back to Germany.
It was absurd cases like this that, on two occasions already, moved the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft and the Humboldt Foundation to elect Germany's friendliest Immigration Offices. "We want to praise the committed, motivate the hesitant and marginalize the defeatists", the President of the Stifterverband, Dr. Arend Oetker, commented. The competition is part of a new self-image which is gaining ground in academia: good researchers have to be courted if we want them to plump for Germany and Europe. Thus, service has to be written with a capital S: in Foreign Offices across the globe, the German Research Foundation (DFG) is trying to remove the stumbling blocks on the road to Germany. The Humboldt Foundation started a Mobility Centre in mid-May; the Max Planck Society has named representatives responsible for integrating foreign guests. After all, the experts are now all agreed: if Europe is going to find the 500,000 additional researchers experts say will be needed by 2010, then scientists' mobility must not be hampered by social security problems, forfeited pension rights, or precisely the aforementioned missing work or study permit for husbands and wives. Looked at from this angle, the scientific organizations are already well ahead of the politicians.
| Armin Himmelrath | 16.06.2004 |
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