07. November 2005 External partners

Welcoming Address by Senator Jörg Dräger, Ph.D. (Cornell U.) 2005 Annual General Assembly (Translation)

Senator Jörg Dräger, Ph.D. (Cornell U.) at 2005 Annual General Assembly of the Helmholtz Association of National Research Centres in Berlin.

Translation

Welcoming Address by Senator Jörg Dräger, Ph.D. (Cornell U.)
2005 Annual General Assembly
of the Helmholtz Association of National Research Centres
"Helmholtz and the Universities - No Half Measures"

Berlin, 17 November 2005, 18.00 hrs

Rather than beginning with "hot potatoes", dear Professor Mlynek, I would like to start out by thanking you for your kind invitation. I am very pleased indeed to have been able to take it up. On the one hand, the Helmholtz Association is of great importance to Hamburg - and as a physicist, it is also a fascinating topic. On the other hand, there can hardly be a better time to talk about the future of science and research in Germany than now, at a time when the coalition agreement for the future federal government aims to extensively rearrange and restructure the responsibilities in the field of science and research.

Even though I will mostly talk about structures today, this should not hide the fact that the great success of science, and this applies to the Helmholtz Association as well, only became possible through the performance and achievements of outstanding researchers and, not least, of leading figures.

Over recent years, dear Prof. Kröll, you steered the Helmholtz Association through a phase of radical change that we all sought.

This change includes the introduction of programme budgets which represented a change in the state funding policy for the Association whose significance could hardly be rated highly enough. In this process, you set clear goals, took a resolute and decisive approach, and showed the requisite tact and sensitivity to hold together quite differing interests as a large whole - or to be quite correct - you brought together and united these interests. I would like to take this opportunity to express the great respect I have for your commendable services and work and for your great commitment and would like to thank you for your dependable cooperation at all times.

And you, dear Professor Mlynek, are, in your capacity as a successful university president, anything but an unknown factor for us. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate you most cordially on your appointment to your new, distinguished but, above all, demanding office. I am convinced that you and your team will be able to master the coming tasks and challenges - indeed the start-up phase has already proved to be quite turbulent with the coming changes caused by the distribution of ministries and the coalition agreement.

In your welcoming words you asked me, dear Professor Mlynek, how German science and research have to develop and what role non-university research will play in this process; two examples from DESY in Hamburg will perhaps shed some clear light on the challenges.

Firstly: the City of Hamburg and the federation were able in the 1950s to provide, from their own resources, the decisive initiative for the foundation of DESY - in the form of a promise of appointment for a single returnee from the United States. This investment sufficiently funded world class research work in the field of high energy physics.

This would be completely unthinkable nowadays. Today, we experience limitations not only at a regional research policy level but also and even at national level. The coming investment of almost one billion euros at DESY for the x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) can neither be borne by a federal state alone, nor by the federation, nor by another European country. Today, we need international cooperation.

Secondly: at the site of DESY's competitor, in Stanford, only one signature by the Department of Energy is needed, more or less, for the decision to build the laser there.

In Germany, we need the approval of the following for the self-same decision

• the German Science Council,
• federal government,
• the home state or several participating home states for the facility in question,
• the Helmholtz Association,
• the community of the federal states in which the Helmholtz Association facilities are based,
• in effect also of the EU under the 7th Framework Programme respectively for the project funding required for such a facility, and finally
• of the 12 participating European - and probably also of other non-European - countries.

So which of the two competitors is quicker in its decision-making processes in order then, indeed, to begin with the research (and not just to talk about it)?

What conclusions can be drawn from these two examples?

Firstly, as I see it, there is a commitment to the necessity for large-scale research. In order for Germany and Europe to be able to assert themselves as centres of science and industry in the competitive international market, we need to achieve a critical mass for the investments in science and research, this means the sensible formation of core areas and concentration at European level, at a minimum.

And this also means that projects - such as XFEL at DESY for example - need to be carried out across internal (state) and national borders - and, what is more, more efficiently and quickly than is currently possible.

But secondly, this also means that the significance of the German federal states will fall in the field of large-scale research and that of the federation and the EU will inevitably rise - and that much the same would then also have to happen as far as the corresponding competences of the federation and the federal states in this field are concerned. Without a working federal system at European and German level we will not stand a chance against international competition. "Working" in this context means being able to make decisions, i.e. the role-oriented apportionment of responsibilities instead of a unnecessary mix of responsibilities. In other words, not everybody has to have a say everywhere.

We have to begin with ourselves. The process of reforming the system of federalism and the associated disentanglement of responsibilities are direly needed, and I am pleased that the coalition agreement provides for this at federal level. But disentanglement can then mean - even though this question has not yet been addressed - that the federation is given an even greater role to play in the field of large-scale research.

For me as a minister of a federal state that may seem to run counter to my own interests (since I will no longer be able to have so much of a say) - but from a German and European perspective it makes sense and so is also good for the federal states in the long run. The same also applies to large-scale research, because less is sometimes more. If, in the future, there were to be only one instead of 17 heads of government as today (federation and the 16 states), then the Helmholtz Association would be much more capable of making decisions (everyone would consider that good), but it would also have a bigger "boss" in the sense of central control (not everybody would consider that so good). This is why all of us, in politics, science and research, need to keep a wary eye open in the coming process of disentanglement to ensure that we do not lose sight of the requisite overriding goals in the battle for responsibilities.

For reasons of time, I neither want to nor can I go into all the fields in which I consider direct, joint responsibility of the federation (Bund) and the federal states (Länder) to be extremely sensible and future capable, such as in the Max Planck Society, for example. Only the first step involves the same challenges as apply to all research organisations, namely a certain degree of pragmatism in the process of disentangling the decision-making levels, instead of spending too long on hopeless discussions on principles and policies. What we absolutely do not need is to lock ourselves in battle over the question of whether the federal states should completely disappear from the Helmholtz Association or not.

Rather, we should ask ourselves whether the German Science Council and several other bodies really have to address the same question time and time again, even though the decision has actually already been taken by the first body. And, of course, there are good reasons for completely dissolving the Bund-Länder Commission (BLK). However, the question as to how many committee levels within the BLK deal with the same question without actually deciding anything is of much greater importance to how we really act.

Ladies and Gentlemen, a meaningful concentration of responsibility for large-scale research as well as the disentanglement of the decision-making processes only represents one side of the coin. Because I am just as convinced that higher education policy must be a core responsibility for the federal states. Only in a dynamic competitive federalism will it be possible for the university to decide autonomously and independently on contents and structures. If we now abolish the Higher Education Act (HRG), we do not do so to strengthen the federal states but rather the universities.

Each and every of the federal legislative or nationwide restrictions abolished over past years led to just such a strengthening.

• Universities are now allowed to select their students themselves, instead of simply having them allocated.
• Fees open up an opportunity for differentiation instead of state-imposed egalitarianism.
• In the future, salaries will be able to acknowledge the contribution made to the performance of a university, instead of just being based on increasing age.
• New forms of organisation are being trial-run and so decisions relocated to where they can be made on a responsible, well-informed and customer-friendly basis.

  And I am convinced that this development towards more autonomy and competition will now continue once the strait jacket of the HRG no longer applies, the federal states are free to decide on the payment of civil servants and university construction is placed in the sole responsibility of the federal states. This freedom which the federal states and the universities are very likely to receive thanks to the coalition agreement and the federalism reforms adopted in it is also accompanied by a similarly large degree of additional responsibility. We must now newly design and structure the organisational framework for science and research: competition oriented, but not provincial.

It is, at this point, also unfortunately necessary to state that it was not only the corset of federal guidelines and the cumbersome nature of nationwide decision-making processes that contributed to the signs of increasing inflexibility that are lamented everywhere.

Many agreements made within the scope of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs also serve (whether expressly voiced or not) to rule out competition between federal states and universities. This is why I ask myself why nationwide agreements on the teaching duties of professors are needed. Why are universities not allowed to allocate teaching loads flexibly instead of, regardless of research strength or teaching orientation, having each professor teach 8 or 18 hours per week? If courts deciding on admissions processes make the "cheap-jack" into the measure of everybody and all things, then we have to do something against this, instead of resigning and rolling up and stowing away the flag of flexibility and satisfying ourselves again with an egalitarianism for which we are partly ourselves responsible.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have so far named two demands: firstly, a more Europeanised system of large-scale research accompanied by a disentanglement of the decision-making processes and, secondly, the strengthening of the universities by decentralising political responsibility. I would now like to name the third, as I see it, central aspect of a future-oriented science and research policy: the urgently-needed networking of non-university and university research. In your invitation to this assembly, you called it "Helmholtz and the Universities".

I know that the call for networking is not new. And I also know that we have been working hard together for some years now to combat the evil of segmentation between our research organisations themselves and in their relations with our universities - based on the resources deployed, actually still the most significant centres of research in Germany.

Today, I am no longer concerned with the question of "whether" but rather of "how" the universities and the research organisations can become partners (the question of "whether" has already been answered with an emphatic "yes" for too long). However, do we need additional control instruments at federal and state level to promote this networking - and especially in view of my expectation that the actions at federal level will in the coming years focus very strongly on large-scale research and that as far as the federal states are concerned their sole responsibility for the universities and for university research will play an even more important role?

Does the greater intermeshing of university research and non-university research really have to be accompanied by correspondingly strong intermeshing in the relationship between the federation and the states - counter to all the political demands of recent years?

I believe absolutely and unequivocally not. I place my trust in a healthy self-interest, in the initiative and dynamism of science and research, i.e. in the free play of market forces. I do not believe that we need complex political decision-making processes in large-scale research to enforce this networking and cooperation. Rather, I am convinced that we have in recent years already given many incentives to those involved to themselves want to practise this collaboration as well. The facts and figures mentioned by Professor Mlynek on how the Helmholtz Centres participate in collaborative research centres, clusters of excellence and graduate schools show this.

Why is the free play of market forces sufficient for networking and why will this become, in my opinion, even better in the future? Allow me to name five reasons which I, at the same time, would also like to have understood as an appeal for extended cooperation and collaboration.

Firstly, and this was long not the case, universities and research centres increasingly meet each other as partners and equals, because the federal states and the universities have meanwhile done their homework. Through a willingness to reform and through reforms the universities have become attractive and professional partners for non-university research.

Professor Mlynek said that the true egoist does cooperate. I would put it more positively and say: learning from the research organisations means learning to win. Because you already experienced and practised the policy of determining excellence and quality through competition and evaluation at a time when the universities still all wanted to be (respectively, had to be) equally good (or more likely equally bad) and rankings and comparisons were the work of the devil. You already placed an emphasis on clear decision-making structures and responsibility within the Helmholtz Association at a time when the universities were still caught up in the dead-end of the democratic group university.

But the times have changed. Today, our universities increasingly measure their strengths and weaknesses just as routinely as you do and gain the energy and resources with which they cannot only recognise the decisions that need to be made, but also take them and implement them.

Secondly, the need for a critical mass also speaks on favour of cooperating. At a time of lean budgets, the financing of the required large-scale structures cannot be adequately assured by means of additional financial resources. This is why - if we want to achieve the critical mass and so become internationally competitive - the existing resources must be concentrated, regardless of whether these are organisationally based at a university or a research centre.

Thirdly, and this applies to the universities just as much as it does to the research organisations, teaching and research belong together. It will only be possible to maintain this unity in the medium term if the universities do parts of their research at Max Planck Institutes or Helmholtz Centres and if, in turn, the researchers from Max Planck and Helmholtz teach at the universities.

That the broad and wide-ranging approach to research taken by each German university cannot be maintained is shown by a look at the United States, where a survey shows that there are around 80 research universities out of a total of around 3,000 higher education institutions. In Germany, all the 100 and more traditional universities (still) claim to be research universities. If we count the universities of applied sciences as well, then the ratio of research university to mainly teaching university in Germany is at around 1:3, while in the United States it is just under 1:40.

So, given the background of ever more expensive research, it would seem that the parallel existence of non-university and university research can no longer be afforded or financed, and only those universities will be able to survive as research universities in Germany that have a firm institutional partner in the field of non-university research.

Fourthly, the new qualification paths for young researchers and scientists call for natural and not enforced cooperation.

Here, too, the situation has changed fundamentally, because young researchers and scientists must nowadays, if they want to keep all their options open, prove that they have experience in teaching and research by taking the route of a junior professorship, because the purely research-based habilitation will no longer exist, at least not in the natural sciences and engineering. Without stable cooperation with a university in the sense of joint appointments (and not only for senior positions but also as early as for junior professors) non-university research will find it extraordinarily difficult to recruit qualified young staff.

Yet, there is also a fifth and final aspect that brings the universities and research organisations together of their own accord: international rankings. So far, German universities have regularly only been represented in the nether regions of the rankings, and German research organisations have hardly been represented, if at all. But this does not necessarily have to be the case. Because there is certainly no lack of outstanding minds and innovative spirit in Germany. What we sometimes do lack is only the proper way of counting. Were DESY and the University of Hamburg to add their publications, their amount of external funding, the number of doctoral students they have trained and qualified, etc. together, then we could be sure that together we would do well in the ranking in the natural sciences.

So, the necessary combination will intensify, even if we disentangle the decision-making processes. And what's more on the own initiative of the scientists, researchers and their respective organisations, because everyone's a winner. However, the system will only work as long as the siting decisions for non-university research are based on scientific criteria, and are, additionally, made at clearly developing or existing clusters - and not just as a means of regional policymaking.

Allow me at this point, Ladies and Gentlemen, to go on a brief excursion. Because the need to join forces also applies within and between the research organisations. The Helmholtz Association, too, will only be able to fulfil its potential if it never allows its six research fields to become instruments for drawing borders within the organisation. A large-scale facility such as the XFEL will, in its capacity as a service centre for many disciplines, exert a great appeal: biologists, materials scientists, chemical scientists or engineers will all want to research here. And so, neither must the research field Health view the XFEL as a facility belonging to the field Structure of Matter and nor can Max Planck say that the equipment belongs to Helmholtz. Here, too, the rule applies: only together are we strong, only the overall shared interest counts.

This is why I am pleased that the extent of cross-border cooperation has been increased over recent years - politics will certainly continue to follow this necessary development with very close attention.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are, hopefully, just a few days away from the beginning of a new federal government. Science and research as well as the reform of the system of federalism - and so a restructuring of research funding - are right at the top of the agenda here. I see this as a great opportunity.

Rarely, if ever has such a clear and unequivocal political commitment been made to science and research:

• The large-scale facilities already approved are to be placed on a reliable financial basis.
• The Pact for Research and Innovation and the Initiative on Excellence are being implemented.
• And there is a clear commitment to the 3% GDP goal in the field of research spending.

Never have the universities been strengthened to such an extent, now

• without a national Higher Education Act,
• with flexible university construction opportunities,
• with better university research funding
• and with a more flexible civil service law.

And so we will also master the yet-to-be-tackled challenges - some of which have been addressed by me today -, such as

• quicker decisions on the construction of large-scale facilities and on large-scale research,
• more sensible structures for the present-day research organisations, inclusive of departmental research carried out by the various federal ministries,
• and trimming down and disentangling the decision-making processes between the federation and the states.

It seems to me that we are at the same point now in the reform of the federal science and research system that the university reforms carried out by the federal states were at around five or ten years ago: all the ideas have been tabled (and, allow me please to repeat myself, naturally I don't find them all good when looking from the perspective of a state minister - only as a whole package are they on the right path); actually everything has been said now and most of us are clear on what needs to be done.

Now all we need is for someone to come along and take up the task so that we, as Germany and Europe, can continue to have a chance in the competition.

With the new federal government, with the strengthened universities and federal states and with forward-looking research organisations we now have a chance to create the framework for what really counts: outstanding science and research, borne by scientists and researchers with the very same attributes.