Academy and Studying in Germany

Academic education in Germany is a duty of the state. But there are also professorships endowed by private money. They could become drivers of innovation – and give profile to individual universities.

At lectures the professor wears the promotional T-shirt of a cell phone company: fifteen years ago that was the fear of 32 year-old Gerhard Fettweis of the Technical University of Dresden (TUD), who assumed the new Vodafone endowed chair for Telecommunications.

His misgivings, however, were unfounded. Hannes Lehmann, Head of the Department for Research at the TUD, emphatically makes that plain: “Because of the legally guaranteed freedom of teaching and research, every professor and every university can always decide for themselves how their work and cooperation will look in practice”.

African Studies and climate protection

In Germany there are currently 660 professorships endowed by private persons, companies or other benefactors. That is just under two per cent. They supplement and enrich the range of teaching and research in fields that would not otherwise be fostered so vigorously: for example, in the medical treatment of eating disorders or in sports marketing and African Studies. In technical subjects, endowed chairs are drivers of innovation particularly, for example, in energy efficiency and climate protection. This support is usually in the interest of the donors, such as German electricity companies.

The German public in fact often looks upon sponsored chairs as foreign bodies in the university: as a lever to exert private influence on the profile, program and self-administration of state universities and polytechnics. Education, from kindergarten to doctoral examination, is regarded in Germany as essentially a state mandate.

Front runners: Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg

In order to reduce prejudices against endowed chairs, the Donor’s Association for German Science has now presented an empirical study. According to the study, most endowed chairs are to be found in economically strong regions with a concentration of elite universities. Front runners are Bavaria (114) and Baden-Württemberg (103).

Donors seem to be mainly interested in cutting-edge research. Only every fourth donor, on the other hand, endows a chair at a polytechnic. In four out of ten cases, the sponsors are businesses. Independent and non-profit foundations fund more than every fourth chair. The Volkswagen Foundation (which is independent of the corporate group) is especially engaged in the cultural sciences and their small, but important, “hot-house subjects”. Other sponsors include churches and private persons.

Economists in the front ranks

Within the spectrum of subjects with endowed chairs, economics leads science and engineering. The rest follow. “This picture doesn’t significantly differ from the normal distribution of state-funded professorial posts”, emphasizes Volker Meyer-Guckel of the Donor’s Association.

Endowed chairs in the natural sciences and computer science tend to get the most money, on the average one and a half million euros. Medicine and economics typically have a good million at their disposal. Engineers usually receive slightly less, but often get a good deal more money through individual research projects. Humanities scholars are quite satisfied with half a million.

This funding is distributed over the entire length of the grant, usually five, and no more than fifteen, years. The donors see themselves throughout as initiators in the starting phase, not as permanent sponsors of a professorship. In due course, the universities continue at their own expense two of three endowed chairs, while the third is cancelled without replacement. “The continuation of a professorship is naturally a particular burden for us with our slender budgets”, notes Jens Morgenstern, Dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Dresden. “This problem puts a swift end to all hopeful intentions.”

Gaining profile with private donors

 Donors’ restriction of their financing to start-up funding is forcing universities to check in advance whether the endowed chairs offered really fit their profile and concept for the future. “In this way donors have very much speeded up the realignment of our university reform in the past few years”, says the spokesman for the Technical University of Munich.

But anyone who wants to see in endowed chairs the formative power of financially strong companies has miscalculated. With a sum of nearly thirty million euros annually, direct research contracts from industry, for example, bring in about five times as much as endowed chairs at the Technical University of Dresden. The Rhine-Westphalian Technical University at Aachen has eight sponsored professorships with annual funds amounting to five and a half million euros: “The volume of purely industrial projects”, according to spokesman Toni Wimmer, “is more than ten times higher”.

Nevertheless, endowed chairs are an excellent means of academic profiling. “With private sponsors, we state-run educational institutions can develop something of our own and stand out in the competition with something unusual”, says Hans-Joachim Völz, Managing Director of the Berlin Academy of Music. The Donors Association recommends the universities to play even more on this instrument.