Are scientific excellence and good personnel development mutually exclusive at a university?

In Berlin, people are once again acting as if one thing can only be achieved at the expense of the other.

As is well known, the amendment to Berlin's higher education law, quickly enacted by the then Senate in the fall, caused dismay at the state's universities and triggered resignations.

The current Senate has now amended the law and, in particular, postponed the entry into force of its controversial measures to October next year.

That didn't help much, the HU is already suing the law before the federal court, the factions of the CDU and FDP in the House of Representatives before the state constitutional court.

Various legal opinions have underscored the irreconcilability of the positions.

In its newly formulated paragraph 95, it formulates for the first time the "order" of the universities to hire scientific and non-scientific staff for an unlimited period.

In particular, "unreasonable" time limits are expressly excluded.

This gave rise to the rumor that the Berlin universities would have to provide permanent care for every postdoc until retirement.

HRK President Peter-André Alt quickly calculated in the “Tagesspiegel” that not even the promised 3.5 percent increase in the budget of the Berlin universities by 2050 would be sufficient to finance this “imposition”.

According to the critics, the universities' ability to recruit new staff would be blocked for decades.

Clear scientific achievements

However, as a report by the trade union for education and science (GEW) shows, this regulation only affects postdocs with fixed-term budgetary posts without an objective reason, since third-party funded employees are not included at all, at least in the revised law.

The calculation is difficult because there are no corresponding figures from the HU making the complaint, according to the GEW.

But you can calculate it for the FU, for example: It currently has a total of 2,202 scientific employees, of whom 814 are postdocs, of whom 410 are budget-financed and of whom 233 are temporary and 177 are permanent.

So it would be about the future prospects of ten percent of the current young scientists at the Free University, at the Technical University it would be just under five percent.

In view of these dimensions, it is difficult to claim that permanent positions for postdocs will stop the ability to be renewed, according to the GEW.

One can only claim that if one assumes that a permanent employment relationship leads to an immediate loss of scientific creativity and willingness to perform.

This nonsense does not even stand up to logical examination, because if it really were