In total, the third-party funds raised by the universities amounted to 8.9 billion euros in 2020, which corresponds to a share of about 20 percent of the total budgets and in many cases exceeds the universities’ basic funding. “Elite” universities such as RWTH Aachen University raked in an average of around one million euros for each individual professor.
According to this, Germany’s largest technical universities each recorded hundreds of millions of euros in earmarked “third-party funding income” in 2020. The extent to which academia is “bought” and corrupted by industrial and state interests is shown by an official list from the Federal Statistical Office. Arbitrary bureaucratic behaviour and official harassment have also long since found their way into universities. The interests of business and government determine the direction of scientific inquiry and the academic climate.
Corporations, think tanks, private foundations and government contract research are omnipresent on campus. This important ideal was shared by such great thinkers as Hegel, Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt-but today’s reality could not be further from the mark. It is supposed to enable professors and lecturers, junior researchers and students to strive for new knowledge without state coercion, uninfluenced by the profit interests of corporations, and to give unhindered expression to their scholarly curiosity. Main building of the University of Hamburg in 2005 Īcademic freedom-an important achievement of the bourgeois revolutions of the late 18th and 19th centuries-has been under attack at universities in Germany and around the world for decades.
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