Excellence – Still Dripping

I. The Announced Press Release

In May we wrote in “Mediocre Excellence in a Desolate Setting”: “On 2 October the next press release on the new Universities of Excellence will be issued.” That was no bold forecast. It was the simplest prediction one can make about this system. It came true.

From 2027 the newly admitted are Freiburg and Cologne, which had both lost the title before, Jena for the first time, and two alliances: the Rhine-Main universities of Darmstadt, Frankfurt and Mainz, and Bochum and Dortmund in the Ruhr. Six of eleven new applicants came away empty-handed: Bremen and Oldenburg, Giessen and Marburg, the University of Hanover, Hannover Medical School, Kiel and Würzburg. Together with the ten existing ones there are now fifteen sites of excellence. Their funding line rises from 148 to 208 million euros a year, the Excellence Strategy as a whole to up to 747 million.

II. Everyone Orders the Biggest Schnitzel

The most revealing detail was not in the headlines. Almost all applicants had requested amounts close to the maximum. Together the requests exceeded the pot. So the funds of all fifteen sites will be cut over seven years by an average of about 21 per cent.

Imagine an innkeeper whose every guest orders the biggest schnitzel because he knows he will otherwise go short. The innkeeper cuts a fifth off everyone’s plate and calls it selection. A competition in which every participant demands the maximum no longer distinguishes. It produces applications. This is the application poetry we described in January in “Mediocre Excellence”, now as an invoice: whoever applies modestly loses, so nobody applies modestly.

III. Excellence as a Counting Rule

From 2027 the University of Konstanz is no longer a University of Excellence. This has nothing to do with the decision of 2 October. Since the cluster round of 2025 it no longer has the minimum number of Clusters of Excellence the title requires. A university that was excellent a year ago no longer is, because a number slipped below a threshold. This is the bed of Procrustes we described in “The Ignorance and Inefficiency of the German Caste System and Its Procrustean Beds”, this time for an entire university. The bed is the minimum number of clusters. What is measured is not the research done there but whether it fits. And whoever is too short is not even stretched. He has to sleep outside.

The sociologist Richard Münch calculated as early as 2007 that in this competition it is above all size that wins, not outstanding results. Whoever has many professorships can apply for many clusters; whoever has many clusters gets the title; and whoever has the title gets more money for more professorships. In the Gospel this reads: to him that hath shall be given. A small, very good institute has no chance in this game. It cannot even take part.

IV. The Measurers Do Not Measure Themselves

In “Whom Can You Trust?” we set out a rule: whoever is measured does not measure. The Excellence Strategy shows the reverse side. Here the measurers do not measure themselves.

Twenty years after it began, there is no accompanying evaluation. The report of the Imboden Commission of 2016 states explicitly that it cannot assess the connection with the quantity and quality of research. And when the Network for Sustainable Science asked in 2024 about the costs of applications, the German Research Foundation and the German Science and Humanities Council replied: “Surveys of possible further costs that might arise at universities in the course of an application are not carried out by the DFG and the WR.”

A doctor who has prescribed a drug for twenty years without ever checking whether it works, and who says on enquiry that he does not record the side effects, would lose his licence. In science policy he gets a bigger budget.

V. Still Dripping

In May the main building of the Technical University of Berlin was closed: wet walls, defects in the fire-water system, faulty fire doors. The winter semester begins on 12 October. According to the university, a full return to the building is not possible this semester. Exams are already being held in the Audimax again; teaching is being spread over other buildings and early and late time slots.

TU Berlin belongs to the Berlin University Alliance, one of the alliances of excellence. It puts its own renovation backlog at 2.4 billion euros. That is more than the entire Excellence Strategy spends on all sites together in three years. A University of Excellence whose main building may not be entered is no contradiction in this system. It is its most exact image: there is money for the title, not for the roof.

VI. The Fixed-Term Staff

In May we predicted that the reform of the Academic Fixed-Term Contract Act would miss the core issues. On 29 July the cabinet adopted it. The maximum fixed-term period remains twelve years. New are minimum contract terms: three years for contracts before the doctorate, two years after it. That is a real improvement, and it is fair to say so.

But the core remains. Whoever does research remains on fixed-term contracts until their mid-forties, and the priority of qualification contracts over short third-party-funded contracts was dropped again under pressure from the universities. The Clusters of Excellence will continue to be staffed with fixed-term posts. Whoever wants to drill thick boards has two years to do it.

VII. The Voice from Within the System

What is new is who is now speaking. On the eve of the decision four professors wrote in the F.A.Z. that the Excellence Strategy is drawing its “trail of fire” through the science system, its benefit doubtful, its drawbacks huge. They describe the coaches and application consultants who work for the winners, and the new permanent posts that arise in science management rather than in science. This is remarkable, because they come from the system they criticise.

Read unsparingly, they are wrong on one point. They blame the “cooperation ban” for the federal government not being allowed to finance universities directly. Since the constitutional amendment of 2014, however, it may, and the Excellence Strategy itself rests on exactly this amendment. So the federal government may pay. It only wants to pay for competitions, not for roofs.

And their solution, more basic funding and a different staffing model, is right, but it remains a solution of universities for universities. Whoever does research outside them does not appear in it: the independent inventor, the master craftsman with an idea, the small firm that makes a discovery and cannot pay an application consultant. For them there is no excellence line.

VIII. How This Trilogy Could Be Refuted

The three texts claim that the Excellence Strategy has no measurable effect on the quality of research and is continued because nobody tests it. That can be refuted, and simply.

If an independent study, neither paid for nor selected by the DFG or the Council, shows that after twenty years the funded sites produce clearly better research than comparable unfunded ones, and if it includes the costs of the applications, then we are refuted and will gladly say so. That this study does not exist after twenty years is itself a finding.

IX. Until the Next Competition

The four professors end their text with the sentence: “See you in the next competition!” It is meant ironically and is nevertheless true. The next competition will certainly come, and so will the next press release.

Excellence will go on being proclaimed. The ceiling will go on dripping. The one does not exist without the other.