LIFE’s PhD fellowships reserved for the Elite – isn’t there a better way of using them?

Yesterday, my attention happened to be drawn to the fact that the ordinary LIFE PhD fellowships will soon be announced. Actually, it’s not a bad piece of news – that we haven’t cut them completely or diluted them to third-party fellowships; for that we must be grateful. However, I also felt disappointed and angry: The fellowships are now only being awarded to the so-called elite research areas and emerging elite research areas.

 

I am still not clear about what the elite research areas are actually being used for? They were, as I recall, set up during a summer holiday, because the rector could only decipher who we are if we are called something ‘elite’. Setting up the elite research areas was and has subsequently been a completely closed and undemocratic process: What are the criteria for being included in the existing elite research areas? How do you set up a new elite research area? How are the subjects and the names decided? How do you join an elite research area – and how are you eased out again? What functions do the elite research areas have which we don’t already cover? What do they have to do to earn the title? In short: If elite research areas are the solution – what is the problem? Moreover, the names of the elite research areas do not provide much help at understanding their function: Within my own field there is, for example, an elite research area called Plant Biosystems. This might cover all sorts of things from macroecology to quantum physics, with plants as the main area. It’s not any better with the other elite research areas. With such all-embracing and meaningless titles, there is no question of real academic problem-oriented groups with clearly defined research and development goals but rather groups of, for example, people with professor status? Or groups because we now have to have elite groups? But what do such groups contribute to the country, the university, LIFE and the rest of us which we don’t already have or which we could develop in other ways?

This is something which I could either ignore, or be happy about: Because we also need to show that we are going along with the current elite trend. Or do we? By advertising that we have elite research areas here at LIFE, we are also saying that we also have research areas which are not elite! And isn’t it mind-blowingly unambitious for a university which wants to advertise itself as being an elite university to only have disparate groups with elite status? Wouldn’t it be more ambitious if the entire university was elite?

 

And now we come to the PhD fellowships: It now looks as though they are going to the elite research areas, in other words to the researchers for whom it is already going extremely well. Many of them have, and have had, sizeable grants, enabling them to employ numerous PhDs and postdocs to conduct research and publish articles, which may be one of the reasons why they have become professors. However, others here at the university, among the ‘non-elite’, have a far greater need for the PhD fellowships: This might be newly appointed assistant and associate professors who, when they are employed, do not have any grants, and who do not receive any help from LIFE to launch ambitious research projects! It might be current employees who are finding it hard to obtain grants, not because they are bad researchers but because their research area is not popular. Or it might be researchers who have spent a lot of time teaching, on administration or something else and who need to get back into research. It can be hugely helpful for this group to be awarded a PhD fellowship from LIFE to promote new research and improve their chances of future funding.

 

The university’s job must be to support the opportunities for all researchers to engage in elite research.

 

Thure Hauser