linking back to brembs.net






My lab:
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After the first sessions right after lunch, the meeting went on to several parallel sessions all discussing the same topic in the same way: representatives from universities/research institutions, funding agencies and politics form panels and discuss the future of science in Germany. In my case, I joined the panel consisting of Bavarian secretary for science, research and art, Wolfgang Heubisch (Facebook page), Green member of parliament Krista Sager (Facebook page), DFG president Matthias Kleiner, and Caroline Kisker from the Rudolf-Virchow-Zentrum for Experimental Biomedicine in my hometown of Würzburg.

Heubisch answered a question about tenure-track in Germany by saying that he opposes tenure anyway. Sager admitted that there is a structural problem in Germany with too low a percentage in academia being tenured professors. She said that the so-called Junior-Professorships are not a very well developed concept and that the bottleneck between postdocs and professors is currently not well tackled. Kleiner agreed about the structural problem.

All panelists agreed that the problem of research funding from funders (increasing) as opposed to university funding (relatively decreasing) needs to be addressed. They emphasized that the federalist structure of Germany exacerbates the problem. These comments echo the recent Science editorial by Bruce Alberts, describing analogous problems in the US.

Of course, the topic of tuition came up. In Germany, studying at a university is largely free or comparatively cheap. Heubisch emphasized that he is for the introduction of tuition in Germany. Kleiner concurred. Sager contended that financial support for students not able to pay tuition is essentially lacking in Germany, preventing disadvantaged but gifted students from entering a tuition-based university system. In the end arguments for and against tuition were brought forth, without any conclusion, obviously

Right after these sessions will be our own workshop where we will discuss research opportunities and pitfalls in the biomedical fields, so I had to leave a little early. Since I'll be participating, I won't be blogging from that session

All in all it was an interesting panel with a bunch of very relevant topics and interesting insights into the thoughts of politicians and funders.
Posted on Friday 10 September 2010 - 22:54:45 comment: 0
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