A week of Excellence

I spent most of last week caught up in excellence:

Perhaps most importantly we completed the process of promoting colleagues to Readers and Professors.  Engineering did particularly well with  8 new Readers and 6 new Professors.  Announcements will be in the next Faculty Newsletter (1 Feb, I think).

Apart from that, I spent four days in Germany as part of a review panel considering submissions for Clusters of Excellence in the frame of the German Government's Excellence Initiative (EI).  Can you imagine travelling to small provincial city (Swindon, perhaps) as part of a 20-strong delegation from your University to sell your vision of how you could develop a world leading cluster?  Imagine taking your Vice Chancellor and your State Minister of Science (Education is traditionally a state, not federal, matter in Germany) and then being grilled for 4 hours by a 20-strong international panel.  The prize?  €40M per successful cluster.  So far the EI has handed out €1.9B in the first round with a further €800M to be distributed in the present second round

The Science was good - though no better than three or four similar clusters we might advance in Sheffield - but most striking was the need for very significant reform in hiring and progression policy,  most obviously in connection with gender equality.  The norm seemed to be about 5% women among professors in German engineering.  Since one of the objectives of the EI is gender equality, it is not surprisingly these interconnected issues were scrutinised carefully.  Given the priority that we are giving to Women in Engineering at the moment, it was very interesting to see some of their quite bold ideas.

The most sobering point from a UK perspective was the intense political will - at both federal and state levels - to make good German universities even better and to harness that improvement for the good of the country.  While our own government speaks of the value universities can add, there aren't many €40M pots to bid for at the moment and David Willett's recent speech advocating a growth in world-class science with no more money, seems faintly ridiculous by comparison.