III. Render the above article into English and say if its content corresponds to the present day reality.

IV. Say whether you agree that:

1. A university degree doesn’t guarantee a good pay.

2. There is a steady decrease in the scientific Establishment.

3. There are too many PhDs today.

4. There is a strong connection between research and geopolitics.

5. Fewer universities will go on with serious scientific research in the foreseeable future.

FAILING GRADE: Students protest at one of Germany's crowded, cash-strapped universities

A German Harvard?

Universities are plagued by bureaucracy and a false a false sense of egalitarianism. New reforms may not help.

Just over 60 years ago, Germany's universities were world beaters. Berlin, Heidelberg and Göttingen churned out Nobel Prize winners when Harvard, Princeton and Stanford were sleepy coun­try clubs that could only dream of one day being as grand. These days Germans are aghast at the diminished state of their uni­versities. Overcrowded and underfinanced, they produce too few students with often outdated skills. Those who survive a drop­out rate of 27 percent are, on average, 29 years old when they graduate with their first degree—a world record. Innovation and entrepreneurship have suffered. The last time a German won a Nobel was three years ago—and he was doing his research in the United States. Today it's the Germans looking up to the likes of Harvard.

To be sure, the rest of Europe faces a sim­ilar problem. In Britain, controversy over a new law giving the country's cash-strapped public universities a much-needed tuition hike almost cost Prime Minister Tony Blair his job. In France, top universities like the Sorbonne or INSEAD are still competitive, but nonelite institutions are struggling. The Germans, though, have set their sights high­est Declaring that 2004 would be "the year of innovation," Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in December vowed to create noth­ing less than "a German Harvard." A new tier of "elite" universities, Schröder promised, would reinvigorate the German economy and be on par with America's leading institutions by the end of the decade.

Never mind the gargantuan task ahead. The idea alone is close to a German revolu­tion. For decades Germans have prided themselves on their egalitarianism in educa­tion, just as elsewhere in their society. The entire university system has been geared to ad­vance that holy grail. Selective admissions were abolished decades ago, along with tu­ition payments. A degree from one universi­ty was supposed to be worth just as much as another. Laws and regulations ensured that every university would be run exactly the same, turning these once proud institutions into virtual extensions of the government bureaucracy. Professors and staff became civil servants, earning the same pay at every university, based on seniority rather than merit. Even today the idea of students’ rating their professors— standard practice in America—is unheard of, reeking of nasty competi­tion and unholy pressure to perform. Elite? Nein, danke!

This craving for state-controlled equality has fueled the problems German univer­sities must deal with today. Unfortunately, much of what's now being discussed in Berlin as educational "reform" does nothing to get at the basic rot. Instead of freeing up universities to compete with each other, the socialist Education Minister Edelgard Bulmahn has come up with yet another bureaucratic "solution." The government, she announced recently, will decide which five universities deserve to be­come German Harvards and give them each an extra €50 million a year. Never mind that €50 million is nothing when you compare the annual budget of a better German insti­tution like Berlin's Humboldt University (€200 million) with that of Harvard (€2 bil­lion). Worse, the money barely makes up for recent funding cuts. Earlier in her tenure, Bulmahn closed a key avenue to better fi­nancing with a law forbidding German uni­versities from charging tuition, as some had begun to plan. Says Steve McClain, head of Johns Hopkins University's European office in Berlin: "Regulating from the top down is not going to improve the quality of any Ger­man university."

Some universities aren't waiting for the new regulations. At Munich Technical Uni­versity, one of the country's leading schools, president Wolfgang Herrmann is actively reorganizing his institution along American lines. Testing the limits of Ger­many's bureaucratic wiggle room, Herr­mann has toughened admissions stand­ards, introduced professional managers to run the university and begun headhunting for the best professors at home and abroad. Pressure to shape up is coming from the EU, where a new rule to ease student trans­fers between member states is opening uni­versities to competition like never before. And, as Herrmann points out, the coming demographic decline in the number of young Germans will force universities to compete harder for students from abroad. "Our economy and society will only survive if we learn to draw bright foreign students to fill these empty spaces," he says.

Sadly, the education debate is a perfect microcosm of Germany's broader social and political ills. An egalitarian ideal taken to the extreme, coupled with the hubris of politicians and bureaucrats who think they know how best to run the nation's universi­ties, has produced a system straitjacketed by regulation and disincentives. And you don't need to go to Harvard to figure out
what's wrong with that.

Stefan Theil

/Newsweek, February 23, 2004/

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