Let the best universities win

Greek MEP Ioannis Tsouklas

“I am not interested in the universities that underperform,” Tsoukalas told Science|Business in an interview. Europe should be tough on universities that don’t deliver. “My ideology is, let the best one win. I am a real European, which means that I want to have a strong Europe. If that means that we will have strong competition, then let’s have it.”

Tsoukalas is serving his first term in the European Parliament as a member of the conservative European People’s Party, the biggest parliamentary group. He sits on the influential Industry, Technology and Energy (ITRE) committee.

Before entering politics, Tsoukalas had a long career in research, holding positions including chairman of the physics and informatics departments at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and Secretary-General for Research and Technology in the Greek Ministry of Development.

Acknowledging that concentrating grants on existing centres of excellence, rather than distributing funding equally, could mean that universities in his native Greece get less money, Tsoukalas said gifted Greek scientists would simply move to where the funding is. “If we have the scientific DNA, we will prevail,” he said, pointing out that the first President of the European Research Council, Fotis Kafotos, who is Greek, works at Imperial College London and was a former Director General of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

Tsoukalas, did however, note that a lack of mobility of researchers is yet another barrier to Europe’s scientific productivity, saying, “The European Union is rather immobile when it comes to research; the Americans are twenty times more mobile.”

Many continental universities fear a system in which they assessed on the quality of their research and can get their grants cut if they underperform, as is the case in the UK. Tsoukalas is in favour of such a system, “Perhaps more European universities should follow the British example,” he says.

He is also a proponent of reform and consolidation in higher education saying, “Greece doesn’t need 36 technological institutions, it could do with only seven,” He suggests Denmark as a role model, noting, “In 2007, the Danish reorganised their 29 technical universities into 11 institutions.”

Tsoukalas doesn’t have much faith that the European Parliament can resolve these issues: “The European Parliament is a depository of past political values. Some clever countries invest in it with extreme competence and derive clear political value, but they are few.”

And one year into his mandate, Tsoukalas doesn’t paint a very bright picture of the state of the European project. “It looks as if we don’t believe in Europe. Unlike the American founding fathers, we don’t have a genuine dream. We miss inspirational figures like former Commission president Jacques Delors. [Current commission chief Jose Manuel] Barosso is certainly no Delors. Barosso is an administrator.”

Tsoukalas said he is not ready to accept Barosso’s 10-year EU 2020 strategy for reviving the European economy – due to be published this month – unless Barosso admits that its predecessor, the 2010 Lisbon Strategy was a failure. “When I asked him, Barosso claimed the Lisbon Strategy just failed in certain areas. But the Lisbon Strategy had 26 measurable objectives, and we failed in all of them.”

The problem, Tsoukalas believes was that the Lisbon Strategy was too ambitious. “There was a misplacement of a digit; it should have been 2100 instead of 2010.” And the target of raising R&D spending to 3 per cent of gross domestic product was too modest. China has seen annual increases of 12 per cent and now spends 4–5 per cent of its GDP on research. The impact of this is beginning to show, Tsoukalas noted, with the latest data showing 30 per cent of papers in peer review journals now come from researchers in Asia Pacific, against 28 per cent from the US and only 24 per cent from Europe.