Countries and Regions

NUMBER 57, FALL 2009

Germany: The Quest for World-Class Universities

Barbara M. Kehm
Barbara M. Kehm is professor at the International Centre for Higher Education Research, University of Kassel, Germany. E-mail: kehm@incher.uni-kassel.de.

Despite widespread criticism of global rankings, it has become politically attractive in nations across the globe to position at least one if not more of their universities among the top-ranking institutions. It is a matter of national prestige to have a global player among the higher education institutions in almost every system around the world. Germany, which has been known for the organizational diversity as well as legal homogeneity of its higher education system, shares this course of action. In 2004 the education and research federal minister thus made a proposal to identify Germany’s top-level institutions. “We need lighthouses” was the minister’s argument to secure Germany’s competitiveness and economic future in the emerging knowledge society and to strengthen the international visibility of German universities as high-quality institutions with cutting-edge research.

This plan formed the birth of the German “excellence initiative.” After complicated negotiations with the German states, which are politically and financially responsible for higher education, a competition was organized in three categories: graduate schools, clusters of excellence to carry out strategic research in interdisciplinary teams with various partners, and institutional development concepts with the potential to become top-level universities. In each category a considerable amount of extra funding was provided for altogether five years. The selection was a very complex and time-consuming procedure, and at the end 9 universities were identified in the third category, to become future elite institutions.

The initiative not only triggered more competition among German universities; it also marked a conscious shift toward a more vertical differentiation of the system as a whole.

A Critical Analysis
The competition and its outcomes included two principal impacts. First, in the process the longstanding fiction was given up that all universities in Germany were basically equal. Second, universities that participated in the competition but were not selected and those that did not apply, given their slim odds for success, now feel related to the “second league” or even classified as losers. These attitudes were not surprising because no rational thought had been given to the issue of other forms and types of excellence rather than just research to merit support and reward. However, universities outside the excellence initiative still have a serious role to play of providing the pool of talents from which the top-level institutions might eventually recruit their students and academic staff. The institutions must be motivated to engage in these goals.

But what can be learned from the trends and impacts emerging out of this exercise in a more general way? At least eight critical issues should be mentioned:

First, based on a political prognosis about the competitiveness of the German higher education, research, and innovation system the initiative had identified a number of problems, some of which were purely reputational.

The selection process suffered from a lack of distinction between proven performance and potential to perform. Thus, the validity of the selection and award decisions suffered.

The open acknowledgement of existing differences among German universities did abolish the longstanding fiction of a relatively homogeneous system, in terms of quality. However, by focusing the process only on research, the importance of excellence in teaching was relegated as a second-rate qualification.

In general, the pressure to perform is passed on from the level of central management to the basic units, which tends to make the latter risk averse. However, avoiding unorthodox and “risky” research might turn out to be the opposite of innovative and “cutting-edge” research.

Undecided, at the beginning of the process, was whether the initiative should be a sole event or one to repeat in the future. It remains unclear if a one-time approach may actually serve a catalytic function to achieve a sufficient critical mass so that unassisted development can continue after five years.

It was a serious political oversight not to consider the effects of the initiative on the overall configuration of the German higher education system and the implications for institutions that did not manage to win. It needs to be determined at one point in the future whether the extra funding will lead to better performance of the “lighthouses” only—and possibly the winners in the other categories—or of the system as a whole.

The term “excellence” has acquired a highly inflationary meaning, infiltrating widely into the expression of calls for proposals, tenders, and applications. However, the claim of excellence should not be mistaken for real excellence.

Finally, the excellence initiative can also be seen as a process for the distribution of reputation. Reputation, however, forms an attributed status or a social construct that can no longer be objectively measured and assessed, based on actual performance within the classical forms of peer review led by scholarly and scientific criteria.

Costs and Benefits
On the macrolevel, the identification of world-class universities through rankings or other types of competition is supposed to serve as a type of market regulation of the sector as a whole. This arrangement does not only imply the abdication of the state as a key regulator, allowing rankings to become the drivers of development, but can also lead to ruinous competition among institutions, thus threatening the balance of the system as a whole.

The institutional rankings and other types of competition to identify “the best” may serve as some form of institutional characterization. However, the race for prestige and position can easily lead to mimetic isomorphism—that is, the imitation of “the best” by all the others. Thus, instead of focusing on a given institution’s individual strength, such a development will eventually lead to less profile and identity with questionable usefulness for the system as a whole.

It is common wisdom that no university is “excellent” across the board. A considerable amount of tacit knowledge—nationally as well as internationally—also covers which institutions are “the best” in any given system of higher education. Whether this needs to be reproduced by rankings or by the identification of world-class universities, often with questionable methodologies, remains an open question. As early as 1983, Burton Clark emphasized that the knowledge created in universities is contextual, integrated, and culturally embedded. It is not something that can easily be measured.

[Online] Available: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number57/p18_Kehm.htm