Munich

Germany's Bund-Länder Kommission (BLK), which negotiates joint financing of education and research between federal and state governments, will discuss next week the implementation of a new special fund for financing reforms in universities and other higher-education institutions.

The programme, to be launched in 2001, will increase the number of women in top academic jobs, promote the technically orientated higher education establishments known as Fachhochschule, and improve research infrastructure in east Germany. It will also earmark funds for improving information technology in universities and for modernizing university management and organization.

The latter moves are intended to encourage universities to become more competitive. They include paying professors according to performance and reorganizing faculties and departments to facilitate interdisciplinary teaching and research.

The programme will be the fourth in a series which, until now, have been called Hochschulsonderprogramm (HSP). Although Länder (state) governments are responsible for universities, the HSPs offer a mechanism for the federal government to provide additional funding in areas it wants to promote.

In the past, federal and Länder governments have contributed equally to HSP financing. But the new Social Democrat–Green coalition federal government wants to drop the name HSP and introduce the measures on an annual basis, instead of the four- or five-year basis of previous programmes. It is prepared to provide DM420 million (US$234 million) for 2001. It also wants to take over full funding of some of the measures designed to promote competition in universities.

A decision may not be reached next week, as Länder governments are reluctant to give the federal government full responsibility for any part of university policy, seeing it as an erosion of their constitutional rights.

A total of DM60 million per year is likely to be set for boosting the role of women in academic life, similar to the sum for this in HSP3, which expires next year. The money will be used to introduce gender studies more widely in universities, to increase the number of female students on scientific and technological courses and, most important, to increase the chances of women qualifying for top academic positions.

According to the plans put forward by the research ministry, less than 15 per cent of the new funds should be used to support PhD programmes, on the grounds that women are well represented at this level. The ministry proposes measures to increase the representation of women at higher levels, including the creation of short-term group leader positions to give women experience in leading research teams.

The ministry is proposing earmarking professorships for women by paying for the overlapping years of a number of duplicate professorships for women — an approach already used to provide posts for young researchers before the retirement of those occupying senior positions.

The federal research ministry did not want to extend the funding of research infrastructure in east German universities provided for in HSP3. But the eastern Länder have persuaded it that a significant gap still exists between east and west. The new programme now foresees DM20 million per year to help bridge the gap.

Josef Lange, general secretary of the German University Rectors' Conference, broadly welcomes the proposals but says that all HSP measures should lead to stable changes in universities.