|
3.2.3.1. Members
The FU is a full-service university hosting 35.500 students of which 60 % are women, and 15% foreign students (FU web). As previously elaborated, the university had to reduce its faculty to 408 Professors, which resulted in a student-professor proportion of 87:1. The FU’s administration is conducted by about 2,200 personnel. The Professors collaborate with about 1,150 professional scientists and scientific assistants, while the relation between social-sciences and the natural sciences is planned to become 2:1 (FU Chronik)
3.2.3.2. Location
At its foundation, the FU obtained many buildings from the old Friedrich-Wilhelms University and from the Max-Planck-Society in Dahlem, Berlin. Today, most of the FU’s 74 institutes are situated in this relatively high-class residential area of Berlin. Due to the high degree of autonomy enjoyed by the individual departments, teaching and research space was added to the institutes in the form of annexing nearby buildings (many of them villas.) Therefore the FU has a legacy of a host of non-educational buildings, which is widespread across several city districts. The architectural disconnect is of certain interest. The mansions provide very comfortable and sociable spaces at very high maintenance costs. Given the university’s financial stress, it is interested in selling these luxury homes and relocating the institutions into “proper” lecture and research centres. Dahlem however, was a hub for all West-German research institutions like the Max Planck Institute etc. and they still have subsidiaries next door. In consequence there are both positive and negative attributes to this legacy of non-academic spaces being used by the FU. Architecturally, a collegiate atmosphere and interconnectivity is encouraged, and proximity to nearby foundational institutes maintains an academic linearity, but high costs and budget -shortfalls may outweigh these otherwise positive trends.
3.2.3.3. Specialization
The FU offers instruction and research on all academic disciplines, while naturally, most professors and researchers work in highly specialized sub-fields. On an institutional level, the trans-disciplinary regional centres (for North-American, Eastern-Europe and Latin-America) have greatly contributed to the FU’s good international standing since its foundation, and can be understood as representing a specialization. More recently, Collaborative Research Centres have emerged as foci for the different departments. However, as can be observed by reviewing the specialization of these centres or by looking at the list of Leibniz Prize winners from the FU, one hardly finds the same discipline twice.
Branches of study and the scientific output of scientific journals that are part of the ISI science indicator.
Table 3.2.1 - FU ISI Indicator
3.2.3.4. Business-Model
Like most Higher Education Institutions in Germany, the FU is a public university, which is not allowed to charge student fees [i] and thus receives the grand majority of its budget from public funds. Fund allocation is based on statistical rules and there is very little influence the FU has on the amount it receives for teaching. The scenario is somehow different for research, where several funding agencies (especially the EU and the DFG [ii]) are offering grants on a competitive basis. The FU administration is successfully raising awareness, training and generally foster the practice of pro-active funds acquisition by professors and scientists. Additionally a small office for patent and intellectual property rights utilization is working to spread the word and support researchers in optimizing their research findings. In some cases the FU has also acted as investor in spin-offs created by university members [iii].
The electronic Administration and Services (eAS) department deserves special mention in this section; even though it does not bring in resources, it has the mandate to ensure the efficient use of the funds received through the introduction of an internet based, process-driven architecture with embedded controlling functionality.
3.2.3.5. Finance
In 2004 the FU was allocated 291 million Euros by the state and raised an additional 55 million through third parties. Over the last 15 years the FU had to manage a budget cut back of state funding at about 50% (FU Chancellor 67). This caused complications within the institution because German Employment Laws make it almost impossible to lay off staff. Therefore the accounts are being stretched on all fronts and new investments (like the new library building) have to be organized through finance deals negotiated with donors in an entrepreneurial spirit. As a result FU departments have been under constant watch by the central administration (which needed to supervise a fair distribution of the scarce funds.) On the other hand, researchers have learned the hard way to get a hold of third party funding (FU web). The FU has repeatedly reached top positions for third party research funding.
From the administrative side, their occurred a standardization and digitization of processes as well as the introduction of a cost-benefit based resource management that encouraged more precise central controlling functions. By giving the individual departments higher autonomy regarding the distribution of budgets (budget responsibility (FU, 2001)), these trends have been assessed as a major step forward (FU management 68) towards the overall goals of university competitiveness (FU, 2001).
This performance based resource allocation model has been introduced gradually since 1992 and has evolved to distribute 40% of the funds through either indicator or negotiated performance based distribution keys.
It is difficult to assess the financial dimension of the spending on IT infrastructure because the IT functions do not have a single joint budgeting and reporting committee. The main IT infrastructure provider ZEDAT has a capacity of about 40 full time employees (FTE), plus 600 hours of student assistant jobs per month (FU web). CeDiS the centre specialized on e-learning employs the equivalent of 35 full time people . Its entrepreneurial style is reflected by the fact that one third of the staff is financed through FU external funds.
-----------------------------------
[i] Students pay a low subscription which contributes less than 15% of the budget. This condition is in the process of being changed and some counties are beginning to raise student fees.
[ii] German Research Foundation
[iii] Being a public institution it is however only legally allowed to do so in case the university can not offer this service and even more restricting the university can not use this instrument with the objective to make profit. It is as such an instrument for social or knowledge entrepreneurship.
Users' Comments (2) 
|
|
|
