Mediocre Excellence in a Desolate Setting

I. The Second Phase

On 1 January 2026, the second funding phase of the German Excellence Strategy began. Seventy new Clusters of Excellence will be funded through 2032 with a combined 687 million euros per year — up from 539 million euros in the first phase, an increase of twenty-seven per cent. On 11 March 2026, the Excellence Commission decided on the continued funding of the previously designated Universities of Excellence. On 2 October 2026, it will decide on the admission of new ones.

The system is running. It delivers what it was set up to deliver: press releases, distinctions, international visibility, application procedures. What it does not deliver we already documented this January in Mediocre Excellence — How Germany Learned to Spend Billions on Organised Self-Deception (German original): measurable effects on research quality. The impact studies conducted between 2017 and 2020 could not demonstrate any positive effect on citations, highly cited publications or patents. More application writing, the same quality. More bureaucracy, the same effect. More excellence, the same mediocrity.

What the impact studies do not measure is the setting in which this system operates. It is worth examining this setting in its three layers — the buildings, the finances, the labour relations — because only the juxtaposition of excellence staging and actual conditions makes the scale of the self-deception apparent.

II. The Material Setting

The German Rectors' Conference (Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, HRK) estimates the renovation backlog at German universities at a three-digit billion-euro figure. An HRK survey from May 2025 puts the minimum at ninety billion euros for building infrastructure and energy-related refurbishment alone. An extrapolation by a Hamburg-based higher-education construction service provider puts the renovation requirement at over one hundred and forty billion euros. Berlin alone needs eight billion. Over the past five years, twenty-six university buildings in Berlin have had to be closed because of structural defects.

This May, the main building of the Technische Universität Berlin had to be closed after a walk-through by the building authority and the fire department found wet basement walls, defects in the firefighting water system, and faulty fire doors. The TU's renovation requirement alone amounts to 2.4 billion euros. This is not an isolated incident but an escalation in a long-known plight. In Bavaria, the richest of the federal states, it rains into lecture halls. The TU's architecture building is described internally as on the verge of collapse.

This is the setting in which excellence is produced. It has not arisen overnight. It is the result of a two-decade political procedure in which the resources that should have flowed into substance were directed into staging. Whoever no longer has teaching done in rooms but in tents while sending out press releases about Clusters of Excellence has not lost their priorities. They have set them.

III. The Financial Setting

The setting can be quantified. In the federal budget for 2026, sixty million euros are earmarked for a fast-build initiative and a federal-state research building initiative combined — a first annual tranche, financed from the Infrastructure and Climate Neutrality Special Fund. From the same federal budget in the same year, 687 million euros flow into the Excellence Strategy. The ratio is one to eleven.

In February 2026, the federal and state governments agreed on an investment programme that provides the states with up to one billion euros per year from 2026 through 2029 for the construction, renovation and modernisation of science infrastructure and childcare facilities. The taz called the programme the billion that helps no one. Of the 500-billion-euro Infrastructure and Climate Neutrality Special Fund, the states are to allocate four billion euros over four years across universities and childcare. How much of this actually flows into university construction is for the states to decide. An extrapolation from April 2026 puts the early-stage total at just under ten billion euros nationwide.

Ten billion against a renovation backlog of between seventy-four and one hundred and forty-one billion euros.

On top of that comes what the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (IW) calls a shell game: a substantial share of the Special Fund replaces expenditure previously financed from the regular federal budget. Of the Special Fund's planned spending for 2025, forty-two per cent was actually drawn down. Until March 2026, not a single euro had reached the municipalities.

This is the financial situation in which the 687 million euros for excellence continue to be transferred each year. The funds for the substance are missing; the funds for the staging arrive on time.

IV. The Labour-Law Setting

The work that takes place within this setting is organised in a form that would not be permitted in any other branch of the economy. The Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (the Academic Fixed-Term Contract Act, WissZeitVG) allows chains of fixed-term contracts that in any other sector would be classified as inadmissible. The fixed-term rate in the academic mid-level staff stands at ninety-three per cent. Among those under thirty-five, it is ninety-eight per cent. Between thirty-five and forty-four it is still eighty per cent. More than half of all doctoral candidates work on half-time positions on which, on average, fifteen and a half unpaid hours per week are performed. We documented this situation this February in The Freedom of Science … in the Light.

A reform of the WissZeitVG has been announced since 2022. The #IchBinHanna campaign, which erupted in June 2021, had brought the law into public view. The previous traffic-light coalition had written a reform into its coalition agreement. It did not materialise. The new black-red federal government promised in its coalition agreement to amend the law by mid-2026. The state of affairs in April 2026: the new draft is to be presented in June. A cabinet decision is expected after the summer recess. Parliamentary deliberation is likely to begin in September. The deadline will be missed — for the fourth time in four years.

On the maximum permissible fixed-term period and on the situation of postdoctoral researchers — the two core questions on which the dispute has turned for five years — the known draft contains nothing.

The scientists who carry the load-bearing structure of this system continue to write the third-party funding applications that equip the Clusters of Excellence. They continue to publish under conditions that would not be permitted in any other sector. They continue to teach — currently in part through digitally relocated sessions, because their main building is closed. And they know they will have to leave the system in their mid-forties, unless by then one of the rare permanent positions has fallen to them. This probability is not high.

V. The Synthesis

Three layers, one setting. The material setting — decaying buildings. The financial setting — priorities that channel funds into staging rather than into substance. The labour-law setting — an employment structure that holds its bearers in a dependency that structurally excludes their voice.

These three layers do not stand alongside each other by chance. They condition one another. The money for excellence can only flow because the money for substance is missing. The money for substance can only be missing because no one demands loudly enough that it must flow. No one demands it loudly enough because the personnel who bear the consequences of the shortfall are held in an employment form in which loud demands jeopardise one's professional existence.

This is not a mechanism that has come about by accident. It is an equilibrium. It functions as long as each of the three layers stabilises the other two. The excellence discourse provides the legitimation by which the skewed priorities are maintained. The priorities produce the setting in which substance decays. The decaying setting remains politically without consequence because the personnel who work within it are on fixed-term contracts.

Mediocre excellence is not what is left over when the system fails to achieve excellence. It is what the system produces when it functions. It is the product of an apparatus that produces the top symbolically and gives up substance materially. It is the form in which a two-decade political retreat from scientific infrastructure can be presented as a programme of success.

VI. The Tendency

There is no turning point. The seventy new Clusters of Excellence are funded for seven years. On 2 October the next press release on the new Universities of Excellence will be issued. The renovation billion of the federal-state programme runs until 2029 without reaching the order of magnitude of the need. The WissZeitVG amendment, if it reaches parliament in 2026 at all, will most likely pass over the core points — maximum permissible fixed-term period, postdoc phase.

What consequences the current closure of the TU Berlin will have for this tendency can be estimated. There will be a transitional solution. A temporary reading room will be built. A crisis unit will be set up. In April 2026, the Berlin Senate decided to establish a university construction company to centralise building activities. The state parliament still has to agree. The effect on the actual condition of the buildings will, as the Tagesspiegel put it, remain open.

The next closure will follow. It will take place in another city, at another main building, with other defects. In parallel, further funding decisions will be announced. Further press releases will recall the top of German research. Further reform announcements for the WissZeitVG will be formulated and not implemented.

The setting remains desolate. The excellence remains mediocre. Neither can continue without the other, and no one in the system that produces both has any interest in dissolving the relationship.