In last year’s letter, I told the story of how the academics on the Commission set up to allocate €1.9bn over five years under the German government’s ‘Excellence Initiative’, caused alarm and consternation among the politicians representing regional interests by choosing only three universities — two in Munich and one in Karlsruhe — as suitable to be ranked as excellent. So the question was whether, in the second round held this year, the politicians would strike back and restore the ‘watering can principle’, under which funds are spread around the regions more or less equally, and independently of differences in academic merit. There have been some claims that this was the case. A further six universities were awarded the accolade, including the grand old institutions at Göttingen and Heidelberg, while many more universities were given funding for specific graduate schools or ‘excellence clusters’ — large inter-disciplinary research groups. The three universities that were successful last year received virtually nothing in this round, and indeed had their funding cut back marginally. So, was this the revenge of the politicians, the triumph of regional interests over excellence?

The criticism that the watering can principle had returned seemed to stem largely from disgruntled applicants, particularly in the arts and humanities, who had had their projects rejected. The head of the country’s Scientific Council, the equivalent of the ESRC, and himself a professor of German Literature at the University of Munich, denied that this was the case, and said that the academics on the Commission were fully in support of the proposals. The only criterion had been academic merit. The awards tend to bear this out. There was again a strong bias towards the South and West of the country, with the big civic universities in important cities such as Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Bonn and Kiel being denied — absolutely realistically — excellence status. In Berlin, the smaller Free University was chosen over its rival the Humboldt University, and no other universities in eastern Germany were anointed. Had one been so, that would have been a sure sign of the triumph of regional policy.

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Note added at 50 mins (2014-04-24 11:36:40 GMT)
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galima versti „laistytuvo principas“ ir šalia skliaustuose pateikti trumpą paaškinimą, pvz. (viskas paskirstoma po lygiai)