Ranking wrangling

Abstract

German academics are publicly worrying about the best way of bolstering recent academic successes. Michael Gross reports. German academics are publicly worrying about the best way of bolstering recent academic successes. Michael Gross reports. Last autumn saw German science in a flush of excitement over the Nobel prizes and the results of the second round of the ‘excellence initiative’, confirming a total of nine ‘elite’ universities, which will receive extra funding amounting to 2 billion Euros in total (Curr. Biol. 17, R940). By now, however, the morning after feeling has set in, as scientists realise that it may be a long time before another excellence initiative, or indeed another Nobel prize comes along. A group of nine university researchers have now rocked the boat by suggesting that the excellence initiative was “touching, at best” and that the best way to make German universities competitive on a global scale would be to integrate the Max-Planck institutes (MPIs) into their organisation, making them semi-independent elite labs within universities, similar to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) labs in the US. It was to be predicted that the drive towards a small number of elite research universities would create friction with the Max-Planck-Society (MPG), as the latter sees itself very much the same way, as a focus of research excellence. Traditionally it has lured top researchers away from the universities (and in some cases, back from overseas) with the promise of generous conditions for research without teaching obligations. While some MPIs already have close ties with nearby universities, there are also locations where university and MPI labs run in parallel with only minimal diplomatic relations. Whether or not the interaction works out depends mainly on the directors at the MPI and the professors at the university. It is the MPG's strength and weakness that each “Abteilung” (department) is defined as the kingdom of its director (and is usually dissolved upon the director's retirement). If the director is good at cooperating with university colleagues, the Abteilung can serve as a local centre of excellence with close ties to the university. A more selfish director, however, might restrict himself to poaching the best staff members from the university without giving anything back. Writing for the daily paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the nine university professors, led by biochemist Günter Blobel from Rockefeller University, have outlined what they call the “unsolved Max-Planck problem” of German research, namely the artificial separation between the best researchers and the students. They suggest that German universities will only be able to climb into the top 50 of international rankings, such as the recently published one from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, if the local MPIs were integrated to an extent that they could be counted as part of the university for ranking purposes. The authors mention the planned merger of the Technical University of Karlsruhe with the nearby research centre into a Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) as an example that should be followed more widely. The KIT is one of the nine centres of excellence rewarded by the excellence initiative. In an interview published by the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, MPG president Peter Gruss showed himself unimpressed. “The conglomerate being set up in Karlsruhe will have half the budget of Max Planck,” he said. “I am curious to see whether the research success will be comparable.” Gruss is all in favour of collaboration between MPIs and universities. “We provide services to the universities,” he insists. But he appears keen to keep the MPG as a separate organisation, and possibly as a lesson for the Länder governments — the state governments which are crucial in Germany's federal system — teaching them how to achieve that elusive excellence in some of their universities as well. “They have to understand that universities can produce top results, but not everywhere,” Gruss said. “Creating contours requires courage. And this courage has often been lacking in the past.”