What does a ministry do that has the means to help German universities, but can only distribute them with the handbrake on because of the cultural sovereignty of the federal states enshrined in the Basic Law?
It devises initiatives and strategies to be able to improve the slack university budgets with federal funds.
Although the new version of Article 91b of the Basic Law in 2014 has taken the ban on cooperation from its harshness, the cooperation that is now permissible is limited to cases of "supra-regional importance" and only serves "to determine the performance of the education system in an international comparison".
The eleven "excellence universities" and 57 "excellence clusters" owe half a billion euros in funding per year, 75 percent of which goes to the federal government, by far the largest financier of the "excellence strategy".
The funds end up almost exclusively in the budgets of research-intensive institutions such as the two Munich universities, RWTH Aachen University and the University of Heidelberg.
They alone bring enough critical mass to the scales to be able to carry out research in large groups with a lot of staff.
You won't find the names of smaller universities or even technical colleges in the Hall of Fame of Excellence.
The federal and state governments have come up with another joint venture to offer the second and third league scientists a consolation: The "Innovative University" initiative, launched in 2017, cannot compete with the Excellence Initiative in terms of volume, but it will have two funding rounds in ten years To distribute 550 million euros, 90 percent of which is borne by the federal government.
The focus of the program is what is now known in the best Germanic as the "Third Mission" of the universities.
According to the website of the funding initiative, “research findings in all scientific disciplines” are to be used to “even more efficiently create creative solutions for the pressing challenges of our time”.
The universities seek contact with the companies
At the end of May, the great exhibition of the "Innovative University" could be admired in Essen.
Project Management Jülich, as the coordinating institution, called and everyone, everyone came.
The venue was innovative: in the Grand Hall of the Zeche Zollverein, the participants were surrounded by the world cultural heritage of the Ruhr area.
Where there was a lot of hard work up until 30 years ago, the projects of the subsidized universities are now presented.
The structural change from heavy industry to high tech must have been successful if the spearhead of the innovators meet in this place where coal was once roasted into coke.
Dense clouds of innovative spirit also spill out from the titles of the funded work projects: "WiR - Knowledge Transfer Region Augsburg" aims to "strengthen the transfer structures with regard to the major challenges" of digitization.
"HiRegion" creates "real laboratories, learning networks and dialogue series between university and society" in Potsdam.
With "Campus to World", the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences is building an "Innovation Mall" with "showrooms for transfer".
And the "Lighthouse NR" is not on the coast, but on the Lower Rhine.
The lighthouse keepers are "cooperation managers" with the task of "making the university transparent for companies".
A lot of brain power went into such texts.
The Ariadne thread between the projects and their booths in the Grand Hall was the Third Mission: How does science talk to audiences beyond the academic ivory tower?
There was a consensus among the conference participants that one or the other shovel of coke could be added.
This is one of the reasons why the physicist and Youtuber Jacob Beautemps was invited as a speaker, who explained to the participants how to explain science in clear sentences.
In any case, you shouldn't do it the way many projects are presented on the website of the "Innovative University" - in flawless academic application prose, enriched with English buzzwords from the Frankfurt Business Speak.