Participants' Reports

There is open competition between members of the transatlantic arena to attract the best minds to produce the best ideas to create comparative advantage in the rapidly emerging information economy. In one of the principal arenas of this competition, higher education, Germany and the United States possess concrete advantages, and face distinct challenges. To address in part how both countries could learn from each other in one of the fastest growing markets globally, the German and American governments created the transatlantic working group, “Universities of the Future” (www.universities-of-the-future.de).
The working group established what has become known as the Dresden Theses which essentially indicate a path for both societies to consider as they build appropriate post-modern higher education institutions. The proffered platform for the university of the future indicates in turn a possible global education model, especially in a German-American context, that can play a vital role in the global higher-education market. The critical challenge lays in the relationship between culture, commerce and citizenship and in the effort to redefine the mission of the university to embrace what I term the new democratic challenge.
Nowhere are the stakes for this undertaking higher than in eastern Germany, a region facing daunting “brain migration” issues. Universities of all sorts are seen by local leaders as key laboratories and innovators to help provide cultural meaning, commercial opportunity, and a new sense of belonging (citizenship) that combined will hopefully discourage “brain migration” substantially.
This paper explores lastly what may be pursued concretely to help translate the Dresden Theses into initiatives for the current higher education reform process. Toward that end, this paper proposes the modest concept of a possible Education Entrepreneurship Zone consisting of ten “Climate Zones”. The resulting strategic roadmap could play a tangible role in increasing “brain mobility”, desired by all advanced industrial societies, while simultaneously helping curtail “brain migration”, one of the central challenges currently to building sustainable economic growth and vital communities not just in Germany, but also in the United States and globally.
An ongoing transatlantic dialogue on higher education reform, especially in a German-American context, can thus be seen as a central theme for a transatlantic agenda dedicated to our common global responsibility.


Introduction

Despite the spectacular headlines about the “boat being full in Europe”, we know actually that all European countries only too welcome immigrants, but of a particular sort: well-educated, possessing advanced skills, worldly, able to integrate and to thrive in a new society quickly. These “global citizens” of the “information economy” are sought by all nations in the transatlantic arena. A prosaic example is how countries like Sweden and Great Britain advertise worldwide to lure doctors to their countries to help fill the growing gap in needed medical services (or as the United States does worldwide for nurses).
And in one country at least, doctors are hearing the call and responding by migrating to these locales. Thus we witness German doctors packing their bags to head abroad, a clear form of brain migration in a key sector of any advanced society and economy, and this despite repeated headlines that Germany stands before a massive shortfall of doctors, especially in the eastern part of the country. What is happening here? Doctors in Great Britain and Sweden are not particularly better paid than in Germany, these countries also possess forms of socialized medicine. So why this phenomenon? To attempt an answer to this question we will have to set it aside for a moment and traverse the actual terrain of this paper, namely reform in another major sector of any advanced, information economy—higher education.
What these two sectors have in common is the fundamental challenge of how to adjust the large, modern, institutions that were erected in Germany and the United States to provide these fundamental services of an advanced state—available health care and accessible higher education—to the much more complex and nuanced needs of citizens today. Whether health or education, these sectors are both facing a sobering double challenge: provide ever more services to a growing number of diverse constituencies and do so with decentralized, ever more complex formulas.
To help address that fundamental challenge in the field of education, the German and American governments put together a project entitled “Universities of the Future” (www.universities-of-the-future.de) in which I was lucky enough to participate. The project group held its penultimate conference in Berlin this past June where it presented what has become known as the Dresden Theses. More on this in a minute.
Working with my German colleagues for a year-and-a-half on this project allows me to come to you with encouraging news: Germany has among its midst an upcoming generation of young scholars with incredible dynamism, global perspectives, and eagerness to find ways to transform the higher education landscape of the country. To put into place, to use the pop jargon of the day, a university landscape where the unmistakable chief characteristic will be “brain gain” and not “brain drain”. This generation of young academics is an outstanding human capital asset for Germany to address the aforementioned double challenge to create institutions for the post-modern state. I refer to these young colleagues as Germany’s new education entrepreneurs.
The German-American project on university reform showed unmistakably that in the rapidly expanding global market of higher education, the global model of education that Germany can provide will be found in reformulating the nexus between culture, commerce, and citizenship to reflect its emergence as a highly democratic, open, post-industrial society. That effort in turn can be highly instructive for the United States and its current grappling with finding the proper formula to curtail its own recent challenges with brain migration, or perhaps put more accurately, “brain redirection”, as concrete evidence begins to accumulate that those “desirable immigrants” in the transatlantic arena are beginning to turn away from America to what are now perceived to be more hospitable and opportunistic shores.

The Challenge:
From Brain Migration to Brain Mobility

We do not need to belabor the point. We see regular headlines about how German scientists flock to the United States to pursue research, thus leaving behind their homeland, often not to ever return. The reasons provided for the decision to migrate are usually similar: lack of funds back home, intimidating bureaucracy, stultified university administrative structures that discourage new intellectual endeavors. Productivity per labor hour is much higher in America, these migrated scientists maintain, at least in terms of the definition that counts: creating new knowledge and disseminating it.
Different sources see different magnitudes of the problem to so-called brain migration. That it is a central concern to every Bundesland and to the Bundesregierung can be seen in how often the topic comes up and in the euros spent especially by Berlin to lure back top scientists to give the German higher education landscape a fresh impulse.
For the purposes of this paper, we could define brain migration as one-way brain mobility. The key for higher education in our era of globalism is to create two-way brain mobility. There is certainly no controversy in the transatlantic education arena that students who study in other countries ultimately are “better educated”. This can be defined as being better prepared for the growing complexities of citizenship, still provided by the nation-state but ever more influenced by the international backdrop. Or, “well educated” can also refer to being better prepared for employment in all possible sectors, from government, to non-profits, to the private sector. As Dr. Christoph Anz, Stellvertretender Abteilungsleiter für Bildungspolitik, Gesellschaftspolitik und Grundsatzfragen for the BDA (Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände) recently put it during a presentation in Leipzig, internships and study abroad are no longer seen as giving a job candidate an edge in the private sector, it is assumed that this has simply been done during the course of study.
Students are receiving this message at an ever earlier age and acting on it, a very positive sign for Germany. Alone in Baden-Württemberg, for example, the number of high school students (Gymnasiaten) applying to have a year of study abroad accepted by the state has jumped from 7,800 in 2001 to 9,500 in 2002. Similar trends can be found throughout the country. To put it a bit tongue-in-cheek, German brains are becoming ever more mobile at an ever earlier age. A welcome trend for Germany and its engagement with globalization.
The real challenge for Germany then, is not to stop migration broadly speaking, but to address that space between mobility and migration, to continue encouraging its citizens to go overseas, but not to stay. That space is to a larger extent the space between modern and postmodern societies, between relative stasis and what another colleague today terms hybridity.
The broad answer to that challenge to encourage mobility but not migration is, according to Berlin and Brussels, the Bologna Process. The secret to encourage the virtues of mobility, but to prevent its relative nefarious continuation into migration, lies in a straightforward tool according to proponents of the Process—Quality.
As the leaders of education ministries from all EU member states and all accession states met in Berlin this past September to continue efforts to build an European Education Space by 2010 through the Bologna Process, they made clear in their resulting Berlin Communiqué that the formula for success would lie in coordinated but nationally sensitive definitions of quality education in relation to what I would group under the categories of culture, commerce, and citizenship.
Concretely, the Bologna Process is meant to assure that Europe has a higher education space that allows it to enjoy the most competitive economy in the world by 2010, the so-called Lisbon Agenda, that is the flip side of the Bologna Process in Europe’s self-proclaimed march to achieving the most advanced information economy on the globe. Europeans may chide their American counterparts about the relatively “commercial” and thus “pedestrian” purpose of higher education in America, but the Berlin Communiqué states from the outset that universities are meant to assist countries to achieve the most prosperous economy possible.
Ultimately, however, the purpose of such wealth creation is to serve a broader social contract built upon the values of social solidarity and sustainable development. So reads the Berlin Communiqué, and so reads, for example, the Constitution for the University of Leipzig. Here is where Europe, and Germany as part of the Bologna Process, clearly see a European Model of Higher Education that stands unique in both a Transatlantic and Global Context. And as polling data from around Europe makes clear, its citizens not only agree with that effort, they are proud of being able to see this as a European contribution to global discourse, in this case, in the context of higher education reform.
Beyond Commerce and Citizenship, we have the consideration of Culture in the context of our discussion, and this really deals with the different traditions of higher education in Europe, and preserving these as unique markers of a coordinated but differentiated European higher education landscape. As we all read regularly, higher education is one of the fastest growing global markets with long-term predictions that this will only continue if not accelerate. Thus for the EU and its member states, the essential challenge is to have a higher education market generally seen as encouraging mobility, assuring quality, and offering diversity. For British universities the unique marker or cultural distinction might be the tutorial system. For Germany, as I hear in various forums dealing with higher education reform, it involves trying to refurbish or recapture the virtues of what is understood as the Humboldtian System, that pathway to education involving self-exploration and refinement of analytical skills. In other words, rediscovering Humboldt essentially involves the pathway that post-modern citizens are seeking to provide them with meaning and money in their daily lives.
So does the Bologna Process definition of Quality seem like the solution to prevent the much desired Mobility of students “degenerating” into Migration? In theory, one can certainly make a strong argument that it does. But as the Culture component of the Culture.Commmerce.Citizenship triad makes clear, the ultimate implementation of Bologna remains in the hands of nation-states, and Brussels is going out of its way to underscore that it will not challenge this authority (not yet anyway). And when we add the consideration that education is one of the few areas where the Bundesländer feel they enjoy real authority, then we can see that the road from Berlin to Bologna, via Bayern, is windy indeed.

Where We Are Today:
Celebrating Successes, Facing Daunting Choices

There is no doubt that German higher education is scoring notable successes in improving the luster of the land as a very attractive locale to study and to work in the key sectors of an advanced information economy, including medicine, new sciences, information technologies, media, international business, and international studies.
The Handelshochschule in Leipzig (HHL) for example is on course to earn the highly prestigious AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) accreditation, only the second school of business and commerce in Germany to do so (the other is Mannheim). Such an external acknowledgement of excellence has allowed HHL to establish a formal exchange program between HHL and The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, ranked the second best business school in the United States by the Wall Street Journal and The Economist in 2003. An outstanding example of quality being built in eastern Germany.
And in my seminars on U.S. Foreign Policy at the University of Leipzig this year, I have some dozen Erasmus students in each class who come from the entire continent, including Spain, Italy, France, Great Britain, Norway and Finland. Of the University’s some 29,000 students enrolled, around 2,700 are international students, a very encouraging sign of the attractiveness of studying in Germany, especially in eastern Germany, and of that second key criteria of Bologna, Mobility.
But eventually Erasmus and international students go home, as generally planned. And, in what is actually the troubling news, those highly prized HHL graduates mostly migrate, either to western Germany or abroad, for their first job. In a recent conversation I had with the former Oberbürgermeister of Leipzig, Hinrich Lehmann-Grube, about the structural challenges of encouraging prosperity in the region and keeping the best and the brightest around to help with that effort, he said he liked to cite a nineteenth-century author on the subject, who quipped “Die Ursache des Armuts ist die Pauvreté ”. The only way to break this cycle is through long-term and structural change, something most parties in Germany recognize. Thus we read headlines about it taking another generation, to 2020 or so, before eastern Germany has “caught up” with western German levels of wealth production and can fundamentally curtail brain migration.
In the meantime we will continue to witness a worrisome migration of young and younger talent from eastern Germany to places where steady and well-paid work can be found immediately. Comparisons are often made with what Ireland experienced before its first genuine economic boom, when it then harvested the benefits of a reverse-migration, unleashed by breaking the cycle of Armut and Pauvreté.
Perhaps here would be an opportune time to refresh our memories about the example of Germany’s migrating doctors, because they are not coming mostly from the east, where there are many positions to fill. No, they are mostly from western Germany. Many want to live overseas for several years, and that is of course laudable. Many do it despite the relative wealth of western Germany, because open positions are still scarce. But for many doctors, and this conclusion comes from a variety of conversations with family friends who practice medicine in western Germany, the deeper and more worrisome reason has to do with the state of the German medical establishment defined broadly and nationally. These doctors do not want to take positions in the east (and of course we cannot exclude ressentiments about living in the east and especially in rural areas of the east) because they understand that the same medical establishment reigns there as does in the west, and this they want to escape. So even in countries like Great Britain and Sweden, where, again, socialized medicine is still the primary model, these countries are seen to have undertaken sufficient reforms in the last decade to make these models of functioning social medicine or at a minimum significantly more streamlined social medicine than exists in Germany today.
And here we are at the point of the Modern State, its indisputably important institutions to provide critical services, and yet the ever growing need to create Post-Modern Institutions to attract or just retain the best and the brightest who are best equipped to produce that essential wealth in an advanced information economy that will be needed to finance the human and humane transition away from an industrial economy.
To underscore what we are talking about here, we can cite an ongoing case, albeit sensationalist, but that stills makes the relevant point, and that brings us back to higher education. The case will be well known to all our colleagues coming from Baden-Württemberg. I only need to say one name: Mr. Ralf Bader. He is namely the young man whose educational fate has spurred the state’s Education Minister (Kultusminister) to propose at the next national meeting of Education Ministers (set for 4 December) that they approve the measure whereby universities would have the authority, as opposed to state authorities, to decide whether to accept students who have completed high school (Gymnasium) studies overseas. What unleashed this uproar?
Mr. Bader had shined so brightly in high school that he was able to finish his studies in eleven years instead of the more customary twelve. And this included time studying abroad. But when the moment arrived to have his total record acknowledged by the state of Baden-Würtemberg, he was not granted an Abitur that would allow him to study at university in his home state. The reason? The Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) has a guideline by which one must have studied twelve years total before receiving an Abitur. Mr. Bader has gone on to earn top marks while studying at Oxford, and as the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it pithily, Mr. Bader is good enough for Oxford but not good enough for Reutlingen. Or as Mr. Bader’s dad put it more pointedly, “My son could win the Nobel Prize and still not have his Abitur from Baden-Würtemberg.” Since the KMK is a national umbrella organization, this case clearly goes beyond southwestern Germany, and thus something is afoul here, especially regarding mobility, building the information economy, and preventing migration. Here we see an apocryphal example of a Modern State groping to cope with Post-Modern Conditions, and failing.
Germany faces some stark choices here. As with reform in social security, medicine, and other cornerstones of the modern German state, higher education needs to adapt fundamentally to rising expectations of citizens for more room for choice, a positive signal of the broadening and deepening democratization of German society. Clear steps are being taken in this direction, but the question raises itself if these are being undertaken sufficiently quickly. For unlike social security, but similar to medicine and medical professionals, higher education is a key component of the information economy where customers and professionals can migrate to where they expect better service and more fulfilling working conditions. Just for the field of higher education, what is at stake for Germany is its portion of the expanding multi-billion dollar global higher education market.

Getting from Here to There:
The “University of the Future” Project, and
The Dresden Theses

This challenge not just for Germany but also for the United States—especially in light of the robust and savvy higher education marketing campaigns of countries like Australia, Great Britain, and Canada (getting those students who want to improve their English)—was a central consideration behind the governments of Germany and the United States initiating the transatlantic project “Universities of the Future”. With key backers of the project including the sponsor of this Working Group (the Fulbright Commission), along with the DAAD, the American Embassy in Berlin, the Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, and the Holtzbrinck Verlag, a group of German and American academics and university managers met over the course of a year to address higher education reform.
The initial meeting in Bonn in June 2002 was meant primarily for senior academic management, including presentations by Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University, and Jörg Dräger, Senator for Science and Research in Hamburg. German representatives agreed on the position that reform per se always had to be checked against the concrete ramifications for content and that the spirit of Humboldt should provide the broad framework in which to measure output. Americans and Germans agreed that toward that goal, specific tools of modern management could benefit universities on both sides of the Atlantic: clear strategic goals, clear strategic profile, clear information campaigns so that the broader public understood how a university is a critical public institution, long-term funding strategies beyond the state, focusing on relative strengths and not trying necessarily to cover all possible subjects.
Within this strategic framework, the next meeting of the working group took place in November 2002 and was primarily for younger academics. The Dresden Workshop of the Universities-of-the-Future Project addressed several categories of questions that essentially had to deal with democratizing the university both internally and in its relationship with society more broadly. Details can be found at the Project website (www.universities-of-the-future.de). From this Workshop came seven theses that were presented in Berlin last June at the penultimate workshop for the project.
The gathering in Berlin consisted of senior university managers, young academics, and politicians specializing in education, including Federal Minister Edelgard Buhlman. Ambassadors Wolfgang Ischinger and Dan Coats underscored in their opening comments the importance of the topic for both societies. I was fortunate enough to be asked to deliver the main presentation by an American regarding what the Dresden Theses entailed and what I thought needed to happen next in German higher education reform to implement them.
My essential conclusion, not surprisingly based on what I have discussed so far in this paper, was that the Dresden Theses, and the dynamic energy of a younger generation of German academics that stand behind them, represented a wonderful gift from Germany to itself, that, if properly used, would be a substantial asset with which the country could transition from the Modern to the Post-Modern State. My formula for that process that I proposed, a bit mischievously to be sure, was “Vaterstaat abbauen, Mutterstaat aufpäppeln”. I will not elaborate here on what that paper entailed, but its essential message of a nurturing but not a nagging state came out of what I would argue lays behind the Dresden Theses as a sociological phenomenon. It really concerns the emerging generation of German leadership in education and society overall.
The focus of the Dresden Theses is of course higher education, but the goals reflect an emerging Post-Modern Democracy. Encapsulated in the Dresden Theses are calls for more Individualism, Meaningful Relationships, Transparency and Fairness, Experimentation and Pragmatism. In essence, these values combined confirm that Germany stands before social transformation not unlike that being experienced in the United States, France and other members of the transatlantic community. The values, the spirit, that are captured in the Dresden Theses reflect the emerging transatlantic generation’s drive to create relevant and thus fulfilling relationships based on individual authenticity from which one can contribute to a society striving for similar authenticity, openness and fairness. The new generation’s agenda is powered with creativity inspired critically by the reassuring feeling that truth is found as much in failure as in having found full-proof models.
The values captured by the Dresden Theses drive the call by the emerging generation of German education leaders for a new era of education reform. This expectation reflects at a broader level what I might term “the new democratic challenge”. Germany and other members of the transatlantic community are similarly faced with this challenge and the fundamental question that it raises: how do we further embed and enrich established democracies so that they can support and encourage citizens possessing new and rising expectations which have arisen in turn from the very successful postwar period of democracy creation.
What emerged for me after the Berlin conference is the impression that there is a general uncertainty about what to do with what I call “The Spirit of Dresden”, this entrepreneurial energy that the upcoming generation is exuding but feels somewhat stymied in applying. There is no one particularly at fault for this. The KMK guideline, for example, that stipulates one should study generally for twelve years before receiving an Abitur, is meant to assure Quality in its own right, along with fairness, transparency, and transportability of qualifications, another key goal for the European Education Space (see the Berlin Communiqué and Diploma Supplements). The Modern State and what legal scholars call Hard Law (read Vaterstaat) possess many virtues that help protect the marginal and excluded as much as the Post-Modern State and its Soft Law (read Mutterstaat) are meant to bring in an integrate les exclus. The question can be posed that if the Modern State with its classic institutions like the formal university has done much to eliminate Armut, what can the Post-Modern State achieve with the new university to continue the struggle against Pauvreté and thus meet the new democratic challenge of enhancing meaning and monetary opportunities for individuals looking for the relevant mix and relationship between culture, commerce and citizenship.
In fundamental respects, Germany is moving slowly in this struggle because the choices are in many ways so daunting between increasing freedom while struggling for fairness. But to paraphrase Gorbachev and his remark about history, if one does not make choices on education reform in the context of globalization, then globalization will make those choices for you. Between ominous and daunting, Germany will clearly prefer daunting, and the enormous opportunity it provides.

Encouraging the Journey:
Promoting a Gründerzeit for German Higher Education

As already noted, there are signs of excellence emerging throughout Germany of universities becoming leaders in their fields not just in Europe but internationally. Years of earnest effort and focused financial investments are paying dividends that will help lead Germany into an information economy that can compete with any in the world. Many of the institutions leading the way are sponsors of this conference, including the Robert Bosch Foundation, DAAD, and Fulbright.
Indeed, I have the good fortune of being able to spend the current academic year at the University of Leipzig thanks to the generosity of the Fulbright Program (and am being sponsored at this conference in part through the generosity of the Bosch Foundation). Fulbright is making important efforts to address the challenges raised in this paper. For example, after holding a national competition to place its main distinguished chair in American Studies at a German university for the next five years, Frankfurt am Main was selected for the clear reason of its outstanding program and robust infrastructure. But in recognition of the excellent program at the University of Leipzig, and its clear efforts to build American Studies in eastern Germany, the Fulbright Commission in Berlin decided to establish one more Chair in American Studies, and awarded this to Leipzig. This distinction comes in conjunction with the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung ranking of Leipzig’s American Studies program as one of the top ten in the country. These sorts of external marks of excellence and focused forms of investment in innovation are critical to help programs in the east gather the confidence to undertake new initiatives.
It is a clear duty as part of the new Fulbright-Leipzig Chair to help in that effort, and I am honored to be able to contribute what I can. Perhaps the most important contribution that I can make in this capacity is to distill what I have learned about higher education reform, especially in area and international studies, during my tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and previously at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. For much of the consensus about university reform that emerged from the Universities-of-the-Future Project has been tested at UW-Madison, the Monterey Institute, and other American universities. That essential strategy consists of at least four components, all of which were debated in detail in the Universities-of-the-Future Project: (1) senior management needs to create and then communicate a clear strategic vision, and this vision has to be assembled with a bottom-up process (2) there then needs to be put in place an institutional and value culture where failure is not feared, where experimentation is genuinely encouraged, if not rewarded (3) decision making involves inevitably and productively lines of hierarchy, but it should also be made clear that hierarchy is not the dominant model, and indeed, is supplemented by horizontal and ad hoc forms of communication, and (4) funds need to be available to allow educational entrepreneurship.
At the Berlin Conference last June, there emerged a striking feeling, and this was shared by many in the room, that the Dresden Theses and what they entail, and these are also reflected in the four points I mention above, represented a vision for higher education reform that politicians, university administrators, and young scholars all genuinely seek. There is a clear consensus that the Dresden Theses embody the next democratic challenge, and show a way to address it successfully. And yet there was a broad and deep feeling in the room that June day in Berlin that there is much to be done before the content of the Theses are fully integrated into the German higher education landscape.
The stakes are most pressing arguably for eastern Germany. A critical function for reducing “brain migration” will be to create university’s that are highly attractive internationally (to help local connectivity to global networks); that are nimble enough intellectually to allow students and faculty to explore the cutting edge paths of the information economy (sowing the commercial seeds of the current and next generation); that are highly integrated into local communities (empowering local culture to perceive itself as part of an inspiring intellectual enterprise); and that play a dynamic and visible role in helping a region grapple with the multiple and highly complex adjustments in expectations for national and international citizenship.
As we look forward to creating a longer-term transatlantic agenda, the field of higher-education reform for post-modern societies, especially for the challenges facing eastern Germany, provides a fundamental opportunity.
This is much of what my year in Leipzig involves, especially as the university sets out a new agenda for area and international studies, particularly American Studies, which it is currently remodeling to reflect a philosophy of “area studies in a global context”.
No one is more sensitive than I to the limits of carrying one model of reform that works in country x and trying to implement it directly in country y. But if I look at the broad categories of higher-education reform in terms of values and institutions in the United States, if I look at what was captured by the Dresden Theses, if I consider what we have learned about area and international studies at UW-Madison and at the Monterey Institute, if I review what the University of Leipzig is trying to achieve, and if I consider squarely the pressing challenge of “brain migration” in eastern Germany and how a new type of post-modern university can help mitigate this trend, then one can consider it an appropriate exercise to ask, what sort of recommendations would come out of this culmination of experience and needs to help encourage higher-education reform in Germany, especially in the east. The resulting impulse could play its modest part in encouraging Germany to move in the direction in which it wants to go, and to where it has already done much to arrive, a new Gründerzeit in German Higher Education.

A Modest Proposal:
Education Entrepreneurship Zones, and
The Ten “Climate Zones” of Change

The general thrust of my recommendation can be taken from the title of my Berlin presentation last June, “The New Democratic Challenge, Education Entrepreneurs, and the Shift to a New Gründerzeit for German Higher Education.” As noted, many components of excellence are being pursued in Germany, and many islands of excellence are emerging. But a more integrated and strategic overview might help clarify where energies need to be focused, where precious capital needs to be invested. One possible path toward this goal would be to think in terms of Education Entrepreneurship Zones, borrowing a bit from the logic of Economic Entrepreneurship Zones. The goal with the former is to create an area where old patterns are easier to challenge and to modify to create new dynamism. Such an economic zone is typically also supplied with broad parameters for commercial behavior so that everyone understands the general direction for the exercise.
With that logic in mind, one could propose erecting an experimental Education Entrepreneurship Zone (EEZ) in eastern Germany. This would not be an attempt to create a new Ost-Zone! Rather, a series of EEZs in eastern Germany and anywhere else in the country for that matter, would be established and encouraged by creating ten “Climate Zones” that together would foster the higher education goals mentioned earlier that can in turn play a vital role in reducing brain migration. What might these climates be? They could include the following:
1). Climate of Independence. Grass-roots experimentation and flexibility is something that everyone agrees to in principal, but these virtues often disappear in the implementation. Federal guidelines or laws are important, but eastern Germany should focus essentially on what it thinks works locally and is needed locally. There is a growing feeling in the east that a comparative advantage for the region was lost by the necessary but wholesale integration of institutions from western Germany. This is a job for politicians.
2). Climate of Internationalism.Again everyone calls for it, but to what extent do local communities—towns, universities, civic groups—coordinate their efforts to create an unmistakable message of openness and hospitality. As recent studies show, here is one of the most important determinants for international students and scholars for deciding whether they want to stay in a German community for any longer period. Open, international, and culturally rich communities have also been shown to be one of the two key criteria (the other being work with meaning and solid pay) by which the best and the brightest of the advanced information economy decide where to work, and to live.
3). Climate of Innovation. I have never found lacking good to outstanding ideas in Germany. I have heard endless stories of why bother trying to carry them out, it is just going to be run into the ground through endless review etc. Here is a job for senior administration at universities. They need to preach and build a culture of ideas where ideas are never rejected because they challenge old patterns, but only when an idea can clearly be demonstrated as not helping to build the common strategic vision that has been created at the university through a genuinely community effort. That process, and that vision, is so inherently open and dynamic and entrepreneurial, it will inevitably encourage not just idea production but idea implementation.
Important here would be to avoid the temptation of “praising an idea to death”, i.e., showering initiative with encouraging words and dissipating it in the sands of time. Therefore an essential subset of the Climate of Innovation will be a Climate of Implementation. Here a simple database could be set up to measure how many ideas that were officially taken on to be implemented were actually implemented, and to create a ratio, with all necessary provisos being accounted for (people leaving, sudden budget cuts etc).
4). Climate of Information.Here we can begin with the aforementioned strategic vision and how it is built. But a climate of information involves much more. It includes continuous bottom-up dialogue, regular brainstorming sessions, “company retreats” etc. There are lots of institutionalized platforms for information exchange, but a climate of information as envisaged here is meant as a fundamental challenge to formalistic information management. The university community needs to feel part of a dynamic information exchange, and not as a passive recipient.
5). Climate of Integration. This climate zone deals primarily with the university’s role in the community. The university must be seen as using its own undertaking relating to culture, commerce and citizenship as being part of an integrated effort with the local community and its grappling with the same issues. Only then will the university be seen as a dynamic citizen in the community, and thereby help attract and retain talent from and for the region. A concrete way to implement this climate zone would be to build a multi-level strategy to integrate continuing education institutions, preparatory schools, and other higher education institutions in the region into a comprehensive vision of how a citizen can reach a personal and professional goal through education and by staying in the region. The University could for example in cooperation with community leaders introduce something along the lines of “BürgerBildung Boutiques” where frustrated citizens could turn to map a strategy for higher education that will encourage study and work in the region.
Also critical, the proper Climate of Integration would embrace and amplify the virtues of a diverse society (gender, ethnicity, class) and its importance to university and community. Studies show this type of integration is highly appealing to the vast majority of members of the advanced information economy. Indeed, they seek it out.
Lastly, university, town, and civil society must create a coordinated system of helping new arrived scholar-scientists, and their families, feel welcome in a community.
7). Climate of Individuality.To implement change, we need managers, academics, and administrators who feel genuine ownership of reform, and thus are willing to instill individual initiative into their work. Two broad categories of measures could encourage such individuality. First, careers for managers and administrators could be structured so that they get time regularly to attend courses, earning possibly higher degrees over time. This way they “sample the product” on a regular basis and thus feel ownership for it. Secondly, pathways could be constructed so that administrators could “go on loan” to different portions of the university operation, thus encouraging them to see the totality of the exercise, and thus discouraging becoming embedded in established patterns of problem solving.
8). Climate of Investment.Of course everyone wants more money, and this always help. But I purposely placed this “Climate Zone” toward the end of our list because arguably it is of less importance in our envisaged Education Entrepreneurship Zone. Only when the other Climate Zones have been created, one can argue, is a EEZ in a position to make maximum effect of financial support. But it must be clear that this support is available once the other zones have been established. The Climate Zones in total enjoy in fact a symbiotic relationship.
This is understood by the leaders of Germany’s key higher-education funders. For example, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft underscored in its recent Berlin presentation of a new initiative in the humanities that it would be looking specifically to reward proposals that clearly demonstrate a “planned intellectual voyage of adventure and risk”. This is exactly the right accent to set.
9). Climate of Incentives.The first eight Climate Zones of an EEZ can maximize (a) the attractiveness of a higher education region, and (b) new knowledge creation and dissemination. There is a colloquial phrase in American-English, “Build it and they will come” (from the movie, ‘Field of Dreams’), meaning create an excellent institution and this mostly on its own will attract excellent people. Unfortunately, in the cutting edge information economy, this is not true. American universities of the first caliber have experienced all too often rejections of their lucrative offers to leading scholars because other quality-of-life issues were perceived as going to suffer in the new locale.
The proper Climate of Incentives would thus lure new scientists and scholars to a region through promise of not just a Job, but a concrete offering of a Lifestyle and a Family Vision. Lifestyle is covered largely in the Climates of Internationalism and Integration. Family Vision consists of at least four points: (1) Affordable family housing. Communities in the east could provide land or houses to renovate for very reasonable rates (2) Quality schools. Where these are not available, work with the applicant on finding other options, and methods to pay for them (3) Jobs for both spouses, partners. Typically highly skilled people partner with each other and this means de facto not one but two jobs need to be offered for work in a region, and (4) Quality Day Care. This needs to be guaranteed and of high quality.
These are the de facto issues shaping cutting edge information economy family decisions on where to relocate. Salary is clearly important, but can be legitimately listed toward the end of our Climate of Incentives. The first eight Climate Zones assure that a newly migrated scientist/scholar will thrive once having settled into an EEZ; the Climate Zone of Incentives can be decisive in nudging the scholar-scientist to undertake the move. One without the other naturally makes the whole EEZ exercise clearly less promising.
The Climate of Incentives, as with every other Climate Zone to be erected to encourage a EEZ and its impact on an entire region, demands “round-table decision making” on a very regular basis with university, town, business, civil society, and media sitting together as equals. Only so can a package of incentives be assembled that meets all the expectations of a typical cutting-edge information economy employee.
10). Climate of Indicators. This can be tricky. The art of the exercise lays in creating a climate of measuring progress, of instituting a culture of accountability, without erecting a cynical system of data manipulation. Within these parameters, there clearly needs to be a Culture of Indicators by which Climate Zones 1-9 can be assessed, and thus refined if not recalibrated. Results of the process can also be used to set priorities for the Climate of Investment.

It might make an interesting exercise, the next logical step of the Universities-of-the-Future Project and its resulting Dresden Theses, to put together a working group to examine how eastern Germany and its special higher education needs could be addressed through the concept of an Education Entrepreneurship Zone that would be encouraged and assessed by the ten Climate Zones described very briefly here.
A resulting international information campaign telling the story of the dynamic results in higher education reform in the east could also help this region increase its ability to attract the best and the brightest from around the world.
What the EEZ and its ten Climate Zones of Change can provide is a structure and guidelines (core strategic values) with which to implement the Dresden Theses and thus help encourage the construction in eastern Germany of a post modern university landscape. The EEZ is designed specifically to encourage higher education institutions to act as anchors, lighthouses, and generators for local economic development. As anchors: to hold down the best and the brightest in a region and prevent them from being tugged away. As lighthouses: to stand as unmistakable markers showing life and promise in a region (and not to signal passerby’s to stay away!). And as generators: to create electrifying energy that encourages in turn the construction of new dynamics.
Higher education institutions can certainly be a “Standortfaktor” in principal. But without careful application of a postmodern strategy, they will fall far short of their potential impact. An EEZ and its ten Climate Zones is one modest proposal on how to navigate the shift from a modern to a postmodern institution, thus embracing the energy evident in the Dresden Theses, and unleashing it for the benefit of the New Germany.

Concluding Thoughts

Fundamental challenges and opportunities in higher education reform to encourage mobility and to discourage migration are not unique to Germany. Indeed, as recent evidence indicates, the United States is facing, in a manner unlike any period in at least two decades, the consequences of being perceived as a relatively closed, administratively focused society. The just released study by the Institute of International Education on international student enrollments in the United States shows a precipitous drop in the growth of student enrollments by about eighty percent last year in comparison to the previous three years. There are serious efforts underway now to measure the economic impact of America’s losing market share in the rapidly expanding global higher education market.
The United States now finds itself facing the central challenge of meeting the ten climate zones discussed above that together allow for the sort of post-modern university able to maximize the benefits of brain mobility. In at least four climate zones, the United States faces formidable challenges: internationalism, information, integration, and independence (how much is D.C. dictating policies).
If I had to essentialize the message coming from a wide range of higher education reformers in Germany today about what the country needs to accomplish, I would probably say it comes down to rediscovering Humboldt for the post modern age. The general direction is clear, and important sections of the journey have been taken, but all sides agree there is still a long way to go. My modest proposal of the EEZ with ten variables is an idea to help organize and encourage that journey, especially in eastern Germany.
There is much that the United States can learn from that exercise, especially in light of recent evidence about international student enrollments. American universities find themselves struggling to maintain or even recapture a climate of internationalism, openness, dialogue, and even innovation, elements that combined have made many American universities a model for other countries to study carefully.
More than ever, a transatlantic dialogue on higher education, especially in a German-American context, can play a vital role in establishing a positive agenda for globalization. Adapting modern institutions for post-modern life: Here is where the German-American Dialogue can receive a fresh impulse, encouraging a New Transatlantic Learning Community, whether for post-modern medicine or post-modern higher education. As we embark on that journey together and its central nexus between culture, commerce and citizenship, the German-American Dialogue on Higher Education can provide an essential project for pursuing a global education agenda and thus our common global responsibility.
Thank You.

1. See for example, Der Spiegel, 10 November 2003, pp. 22-25.
   
2. This equates roughly to about eight percent of Leipzig’s students being international. The national average is about 8.4 percent. To provide an American perspective, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, long known for being an international scholarly community, has some fifty thousand students enrolled, and generally about five thousand international students, or about a ten percent ratio.
   
3. Of course one can counter, if that is so, then why is there such a shortfall of doctors in these countries? That does indeed have to do with the reputation of social medicine in these countries (young people want to avoid this), with the relatively low pay, but also with the rapidly graying societies and the real increase in the need for medical professionals, a need obviously facing Germany just as pressingly.
   
4. 20 October 2003, page 10.
   
5. A very concrete and indicative proposal mentioned in the Theses: Do away with permanent civil-servant status for university professors.
   
6. These would be access points that can be compared somewhat with the Jobcentres being created by the Bundesanstalt für Arbeit. The Boutiques though would have a clearly different mission. The essential difference is that the BBBs would be an address to which citizens could turn when they feel that they have not received good advice at school or elsewhere. Personnel working at BBBs need to receive special training to take extra care with people’s “dreams”, with their long-term goals. The objective is not to raise unreal hopes, but to do everything in one’s power to allow someone to work to a personal goal. In this sense, there are very few “unrealistic dreams”.
   
7. An excellent part of this initiative to encourage the integration process early on would be the spread of the KinderUni Movement.
   
8. Very small examples: University could escort families through the various bureaucratic steps one must take when arriving in a new locale in Germany; the City could have a Welcome Adviser that personally helps with everything from turning on the electricity to Sports Clubs; Civil Society could involve everything from Churches to Social Clubs to Volunteer Groups. Obviously these services do not need to be “imposed” but simply “offered”. It could be as simple as an initial conversation over coffee and cake where the arriving party is welcomed and at the end of which is offered a card and the genuine message of call at any time with help on any issue.
9. EEZs could work with the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung to develop a method of external evaluation. These have to be done very carefully so that EEZs do not become a process of simply working toward a good evaluation, i.e., “playing the evaluation game”, a form of building businesses to simply be able to get subsidies from Berlin or Brussels. That is why the “Ten Climate Zones” are selected carefully to create a strategic vision and goals that can then be implemented flexibly as long as the direction and the core values are appropriate.
   
10. In the spirit of not wanting to make the Climate of Indicators too deterministic, a Climate of Investment could be structured so that based on results of an external review, an EEZ could determine where it needs to prioritize the next round of investment, be this from the state, federal government, business, or foundations. The easy reply here can be, where is this money supposed to come from. But in many cases, creating the “right climate” will not necessarily involve huge sums, but monies invested in the most sensible places tactically, like a full-time service position to coordinate Climates of Integration and Incentives. The broad logic here is not so different from that in the world of micro-loans and developing countries where substantial progress can be made not just with billion dollars loans from the World Bank for new dams but also with loans of five-hundred dollars to women in rural areas who have so many good business ideas. That system is predicated of course on minimal paperwork, quick turnaround time, and direct distribution of the cash, all possible challenges in a German context, but certainly not in an EEZ!
    
11. Institute of International Education’s “Open Doors Report 2003” can be found (executive summary) at http://opendoors.iienetwork.org along with related information.