Excellence Initiative: first round completed
Dieser Artikel in Deutsch
"This is an important day for science and the humanities in Germany", stated Federal Education and Research Minister Dr. Annette Schavan in Bonn on the 13th October 2006. The occasion was the announcement of the funding decisions for the first round in the context of the Excellence Initiative, in which top-level research at German universities is to receive funding totalling 1.9 billion EUR up to 2011. Out of the 88 proposals submitted, in addition to 18 Graduate Schools and 17 Clusters of Excellence, three universities managed to qualify for the most comprehensive funding measure in the category "Concepts for the Future": Munich's Ludwig Maximilians University as well as Munich Technical University and the University of Karlsruhe (TH).
The aim of the Excellence Initiative launched by the Federal Government is to achieve long-term changes in the university landscape. Funding is to help create "beacons of science" that can be spotted from far away, from abroad as well. In a multi-step procedure with the joint organisational support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Science Council, around 300 reviewers, most of them from abroad, assessed the quality of the proposals submitted in the three categories of Graduate Schools, Clusters of Excellence and Concepts for the Future. What is special about the initiative is that only academic criteria were permitted as a basis for decision-making. Structural policy or economic aspects were excluded.
In spite of the dynamics, generally considered to be positive, with which the Excellence Initiative has already triggered enormous processes of change in German higher education institutions, it is not undisputed. For example, there is concern about a lasting division into a "two-class society" of research and teaching institutions. Professor Dr. Ulrich Teichler, Director of the International Centre for Higher Education Research Kassel (INCHER), is critical of concentrating on a small number of universities and would like to see more acrossthe- board support: "No new money is being printed. Instead, it is just being concentrated at the top." The media suggested that the universities that already had plenty of experience with acquiring third-party funding would have a competitive advantage. Such universities are also well-positioned in the DFG rankings, an overview of funding approvals a new issue of which has only recently been published by the DFG. In addition to the chief indicator of DFG funding approvals per institution and further aspects of public-funded research, for the first time, the latest issue also takes thematic priority funding areas such as bio-sciences or nanotechnology into account. The results of the Humboldt Rankings, which among other things list the popularity of individual research institutions among visiting academics from abroad, are incorporated as well. The results of the DFG rankings underscore the findings of the Excellence Initiative, for here, too, Southern Germany has taken the lead with the University of Karlsruhe and, in regional terms, the Munich district and Bavaria as a whole.
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