A recent article in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics by a group of American professors on the implementation of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) practices in US universities and an interview with one of the authors, Igor Efimov, Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Northwestern University in Chicago, caused a wide resonance. To what extent can DEI be considered a purely American phenomenon, and to what extent has it been assimilated by scientific communities in other countries? Germany is a curious example in this regard. This is the subject of an article prepared especially for T-invariant by Alexander Libman, Doctor of Economics, Professor of Russian and East European Politics at the Free University of Berlin .
There is no doubt that the removal of discriminatory barriers in science contributes to its progress. At the same time, practices and approaches that were originally designed to counter discrimination can turn into a bureaucratic monster, eating up researchers’ time and resources, or, in the worst case, making group membership a more important criterion for allocating resources and positions than scientific potential or achievements. Political criteria take precedence over scientific criteria. Alas, the risks of such a development are very real, at least in the United States.
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Of course, the US is a trendsetter in science worldwide. However, there are institutional peculiarities of individual scientific communities that make the implementation of DEI practices and the politicisation of science in general much more difficult (or, on the contrary, contribute to this development). Germany is a curious example in this respect. Perhaps I am an over-optimist, but in my view the scale of the problems in Germany remains limited. The German scientific community is concerned about other forms of discrimination that are becoming highly controversial. What is interesting is that immunity from DEI practices in their excessive ideological variant in Germany is related to the peculiarities of German science, which are traditionally (including by German scientists themselves) perceived as archaic.
Alexander Liebmann. Photo: focus.de
Science as public service: institutional frameworks of German universities
An observer comparing German science with American or British science will encounter a kind of paradox. On the one hand, German universities are often much more clumsy and slow than those in the US or the UK. On the other hand, the scale of what a German professor can afford is not comparable to other countries.
The reasons for this paradoxical situation lie in the institutional features of science in Germany. German universities are an integral part of the state apparatus, and professors by their status are civil servants (Beamte). The associations that arise at the word “civil service” for Russian and German readers, however, are quite different. What German and Russian bureaucracy (as well as bureaucracy of almost all countries) have in common is extreme slowness and a huge amount of paperwork, which periodically paralyses work as such. For example, hiring an employee at Berlin universities can take several months (if not six months), and payment of travelling expenses routinely takes place after a year.
However, the German civil service has an important feature that distinguishes it from the bureaucracy of many other countries (not only Russia, but also to a certain extent the United States): it is based on the idea that officials are independent not only from “external” groups of influence (e.g., business interests), but also from political will. Civil servants are supposed to serve the law, not politicians. In the case of “academic officials” – professors – there is an additional factor: the principle of scientific freedom (Wissenschaftsfreiheit), enshrined in the German constitution and categorically prohibiting any political interference in research activities.
The practical realisation of these principles is the supreme autonomy of professors. They – and only they – have the right to determine the content of their courses and programmes (and there are no restrictions on them: if a physics professor suddenly wants to give his students a course in political science or, conversely, a political scientist ventures into quantum mechanics, there is no way to restrict them from doing so), to evaluate students independently, to manage their own budgets, and, most importantly, they enjoy an incredibly high level of protection against dismissal, not even comparable to the American tenure: the grounds for dismissalare the same as in the United States. Like most German officials, professors receive fixed (and quite high, partly again due to civil service privileges) salaries that do not depend in any way on their specific performance: the very idea of “performance appraisal” of professors for life in one form or another would probably be unconstitutional. In practice, German universities are more like federations of departments (usually consisting of one “ordinarius” professor and several staff members), sometimes co-operating successfully and sometimes in a state of cold war for decades.
This structure of scientific organisation has serious disadvantages. It does not encourage co-operation between colleagues working at the same university or institute: sometimes they can only meet each other two or three times a semester at official meetings. This makes it much harder for German universities to build the “critical mass” needed for truly breakthrough research. It is also a barrier to change: a university can only truly transform itself when the current generation of professors retires, and before that the “ordinarii” may ignore changes in their discipline for years.
Finally, students also suffer from it: they have much less interaction with professors than in many other countries (the situation when a professor meets with his graduate student once a semester at a departmental seminar, grades for term papers or diplomas are delayed for six months, and a student has to wait several weeks for a reply to an e-mail is, alas, not an exception). Paradoxically, however, this system also has important advantages: it effectively protects science from external political pressure.
The principle of scientific freedom implies that all recruitment for academic positions is decided exclusively by the universities themselves; the universities’ affiliation to the civil service obliges them to follow the principle of “bestenauslese” (Bestenauslese), again enshrined in the constitution: all positions in the civil service should be given to applicants who are best able to fulfil their tasks. For professors, this refers to the best ability to research and teach.
The importance of the Bestenauslese principle stems directly from the fact that it is almost impossible to get rid of a weak or lazy colleague, so you have to be particularly careful in your selection – but also from the general principle of non-discrimination in the civil service. The principle of bestenauslese can be the subject of legal action: a university’s refusal to hire a highly qualified applicant is likely to result in a lawsuit by the latter, which the court may well uphold.
Professors who enjoy complete freedom to determine the content of their courses and the direction of their research can completely ignore public and political reactions to their actions, including those of their colleagues and students. A boycott by students or the silent (or loud) disapproval of colleagues and university authorities has no effect on the professor’s income, teaching load, or departmental budget. Germans sometimes speak of the “buffoonish freedom” (Narrenfreiheit) of professors: there is probably no other group in Germany that is so protected in terms of its income and status, and yet so free in what it says and what it does. It is precisely in situations where research is the subject of heated public debate that this system has advantages: it allows even proponents of unpopular views not to fear losing their position and status.
Institutional boundaries of DEI
All of this sets clear boundaries for the application of DEI practice in Germany. Of course, discussions on this topic are ongoing in Germany. In 2020, the Netzwerk Wissenschaftsfreiheit (Network for Academic Freedom), an association of professors and lecturers concerned about threats to academic freedom in the country,was even founded. The topics the Network’s members are concerned about, however, are quite different from those of their American counterparts: the Network sees the main threats to academic freedom in restrictions on public discourse (for example, in situations where student protests lead to the cancellation of speeches by certain professors, or where universities cancel public lectures by controversial colleagues), rather than in hiring and allocation practices. Indeed, in the area of hiring and grant policies of the German Science Foundation (DFG), DEI analogues are hard to find.
Alexander Liebmann. Photo: uni-bremen.de
The only set of institutional support measures for specific groups that exists in Germany is related to support for women’s academic careers. All universities and their departments have a women’s rights commissioner, the Frauenbeauftragte; when hiring professors, institutions strive to achieve a certain gender balance, and the DFG evaluates projects, among other things, in terms of whether the proportion of women matches the disciplinary average. There is usually no contradiction between these measures and the Bestenauslese principle: in almost any discipline, it is possible to find a sufficient number of qualified women who fulfil the requirements. In addition, the requirements to support women are quite flexible. As already mentioned, the DFG compares the proportion of women in a project with that of a particular discipline, so that, say, in philosophy or engineering, where the proportion of women is low, predominantly male projects will be the norm. When hiring professors, women’s ombudspersons pay attention to the presence of women in the so-called “top three” – the list of the top three applicants. So a situation in which the first place in the top three is occupied by a man (who eventually gets the position) and the second and third by women is quite “passable” from the point of view of bureaucratic requirements.
Organising institutional support for other groups is almost impossible in Germany simply because there are no universally accepted markers and boundaries for these groups. Unlike the US, there is no generally accepted categorisation of ethnic groups in Germany. Most of the concepts that are more or less acceptable to German society are not suitable for the purpose of identifying groups to be targeted by affirmative action measures. For example, Germans often speak of people with a “migratory background” (Migrationshintergrund). But this term covers all people whose parents were born outside Germany. For example, the son of Germans from what became Polish Silesia after the Second World War, who moved to Germany at the age of four and speaks no language other than German, also has a “migratory origin”. Other ethnic categories have not been developed in Germany and are not used in public discourse or are controversial (often their very use is perceived as discriminatory).
Whereas in the United States scientific journals already occasionally ask their authors to indicate which ethnic group they belong to, in Germany the collection of such information evokes associations not with a progressive agenda, but with the times of the Third Reich and the identification of the proportion of Jewish blood. Similarly, it is impossible to imagine collecting information about sexual orientation: in Germany, it is strictly forbidden to ask any questions about the personal life of job applicants at job interviews (again, Germans recall the experience of the Nazi dictatorship or the GDR regime). It is therefore highly likely that an attempt to require applicants for positions or grants to provide this information will be perceived as offensive and discriminatory by the applicants themselves.
Recently, I have occasionally come across a situation where the presence of representatives of the “new lands” – East Germany – has become one of the criteria. However, this is a recent phenomenon connected with the political transformations in the East (the growing position of the right-populist Alternative for Germany) and the realisation of a part of German society that after the reunification of the FRG and the GDR, almost all elites (including academic elites) in the new states were “replaced” by representatives of the West. It will take years for a set of criteria to emerge from these discussions with which the bureaucracy can work. For now, it is quite difficult to even understand how sustainable the trend is.
Finally, a powerful barrier to the adoption of DEI practices is the principle of “selecting the best”. However complex a quota system in the allocation of funds or appointment to posts is clearly contrary to constitutional norms if it leads to serious deviations from the bestenauslese.
As a matter of fact, apart from measures aimed at supporting women, the other elements of DEI practices hardly attract any serious interest in the German academic community. Of course, in some disciplines one can find those who want to “decolonise” German universities (although postcolonial theory itself is much less influential in Germany than in the US or the UK, at least when it comes to the social sciences; from a cynic’s point of view, this may be due to the fact that there are no groups in the German academy that use postcolonial arguments to defend their position and try to gain access to resources), but they are an absolute minority, and interest in the topic does not extend beyond certain areas of the social sciences. The main debate in German academia is about a completely different issue, one that has to do more with social inequality than with the status of ethnic or gender groups.
Professors and researchers
When talking about the privileges of German scientists, it is not by chance that I have mentioned professors only. They are the ones who enjoy all the advantages described above (and many others stemming from their status as civil servants). The situation of other “university classes” – first of all, postgraduates and postdocs (“research assistants”) – is far from rosy in Germany. First of all, the departmental system implies their almost complete dependence on the professors in whose groups they work. This is even enshrined at the legal level: the principle of academic freedom, which prohibits external interference in the choice of research and teaching topics by academics, applies exclusively to professors. PhD students and postdocs are obliged to pursue the topics that their supervisors determine for them. The hiring and renewal of PhD students’ and postdocs’ contracts, the very chances of PhD students to defend their thesis, opportunities for travelling to conferences and conducting research are determined by the “ordinarius”.
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To make matters worse, with the exception of professors, all other researchers in universities are always on fixed-term contracts, sometimes with extremely short tenure (six months or a year). However, according to the current regulations, the maximum period during which researchers can stay in the university system is 12 years (six years as PhD students and another six years as postdocs). If during this period the staff member has not been able to find employment as a professor (and necessarily in a different university than the one where he/she worked before – it is forbidden to hire his/her own staff as professors), he/she cannot apply for a scientific position in universities.
The above description is somewhat simplified (it ignores the so-called junior professors or staff on grant contracts), but it allows us to understand the general essence of the problem faced by young researchers in Germany. For many years they have been forced to work in highly precarious positions in a position of total dependence on their supervisors. The norm for them is constant travelling, hours spent on trains on the way to their place of work (in Germany there is usually only one university in one city), and a constant search for new contracts, with the sword of Damocles hanging over them as they are forced to leave the academic system. The first professorship in Germany is usually obtained at the age of 40, and the number of applicants can be in the triple digits. A hundred years ago, Max Weber described a career in academia as a risky bet (Wagnis) – since then, the risks have only increased. For many talented scientists, the only way to gain some security is to emigrate to countries where it is easier to obtain a permanent position than in Germany.
It is hardly surprising that in this situation only those who have a sufficient financial safety cushion – that is, above all those in the upper and upper middle classes – bet on a career in science. For them, the situation of being unemployed for six months in the worst case (while the next contract is being formalised) is much less problematic than for those from low-income strata. This is juxtaposed with a strong tendency towards segregation in the German education system: the parents of the vast majority of students have also received a university degree, and, conversely, the children of parents who have not received a university degree usually refuse to go to university themselves. In Germany, higher education is free of charge, but it is almost impossible to understand how a German university works, with its bureaucracy, professors and lecturers with an extreme lack of time (and sometimes lack of desire) to help individual students and the traditional notion that studying is the sole responsibility of the students themselves, without the necessary social skills.
Incidentally, this explains why the system of promoting women’s careers in science has not met with any serious resistance. After all, in practice, it benefits women from the same social strata that traditionally dominate universities. In any case, the children of a professor, judge, doctor or entrepreneur have a much better chance of becoming professors than the children of a nurse, kindergarten teacher or car mechanic.
The long-standing dissatisfaction with the problem of the uncertain status and dependency of scientific researchers finally broke through in 2021, when the #IchBinHanna movement was created (“My name is Hanna”; the name is an ironic reinterpretation of a Federal University of Science commercial in which postdoc Hanna describes the benefits of the current fixed-term contract system). In Germany, there are a number of initiatives demanding that universities, at a minimum, increase the number of permanent positions for researchers, creating an analogue to Lecturer positions in the UK, and, at a maximum, abandon the departmental system altogether and move to a departmental system similar to that in the UK or the US. The movement is supported by many professors and in some German states (the states are responsible for the higher education system) has already started to be implemented. In Berlin, for example, universities are only allowed to hire postdocs with the prospect of a lifetime contract. However, many people (and I am among them) view the #IchBinHanna ideas with a certain scepticism.
The problem with increasing the number of permanent positions lies precisely in the peculiarities of the German scientific system – its organisation as a branch of the civil service. It is practically impossible to achieve high productivity from a permanent employee, to “incentivise” him in any way (for example, through financial bonuses or threat of dismissal). Professors get their position as a result of many years of fierce competition, which can withstand, perhaps, only those who really can not imagine life without science – and will continue to put all their efforts into it and after receiving a lifetime position (and even in this situation, there are examples of colleagues who after achieving the cherished goal sharply reduce their productivity). Researchers, as #IchBinHanna suggests, would get permanent positions almost immediately after defending their thesis. In the worst case, universities would be overcrowded with professors whose main incentive would not be science per se, but the desire for a permanent position, flexible working hours, and no rigid performance requirements. Again, the principle of civil service prevents Germany from creating a tenure track system similar to the American one: when hiring an employee on a fixed-term contract that implies a transition to a tenure-track position, universities are obliged to formulate clear quantitative requirements necessary and sufficient for such a transition. Moreover, if the requirements seem excessive (for example, there are other universities with lower requirements), lawsuits with unpredictable outcomes are inevitable. The optimal solution would be not to create Lecturer positions, but to increase the number of professorships, reducing the role of chance in scientific careers, but maintaining strict selection criteria. However, such a solution requires large-scale investments, which the German states will certainly not make in the foreseeable future.
The situation of German science is ambiguous. Its structure serves as a much more effective defence against external pressures from society and politics than the system of American or British science. At the same time, however, this same structure contributes to the reproduction of inequality and turns a career in science into a privilege for the few. Is it possible in principle to find a balance between preserving the advantages of the system and the necessary reforms? For now, the question remains open.
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Text: Alexander Libman
Alexander Libman 14.10.2024