Hidden losses

selfish director, however, might restrict himself to poaching the best staff members from the university without giving anything back. Writing for the daily paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the nine university professors, led by biochemist Günter Blobel from Rockefeller University, have outlined what they call the “unsolved MaxPlanck problem” of German research, namely the artificial separation between the best researchers and the students. They suggest that German universities will only be able to climb into the top 50 of international rankings, such as the recently published one from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, if the local MPIs were integrated to an extent that they could be counted as part of the university for ranking purposes. The authors mention the planned merger of the Technical University of Karlsruhe with the nearby research centre into a Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) as an example that should be followed more widely. The KIT is one of the nine centres of excellence rewarded by the excellence initiative. In an interview published by the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, MPG president Peter Gruss showed himself unimpressed. “The conglomerate being set up in Karlsruhe will have half the budget of Max Planck,” he said. “I am curious to see whether the research success will be comparable.” Gruss is all in favour of collaboration between MPIs and universities. “We provide services to the universities,” he insists. But he appears keen to keep the MPG as a separate organisation, and possibly as a lesson for the Länder governments — the state governments which are crucial in Germany’s federal system — teaching them how to achieve that elusive excellence in some of their universities as well. “They have to understand that universities can produce top results, but not everywhere,” Gruss said. “Creating contours requires courage. And this courage has often been lacking in the past.”