New ETH-Zürich boss wants more faculty, private funding

Eichler: ambitions for change and growth.,

Ralph Eichler, the new president of ETH-Zürich, still remembers the advice of his thesis advisor when he was a young physicist: “He said to me that one has to take risks – but be sure it works.” Eichler smiles at the memory: “That’s the Swiss way.”

That could also be his motto as he takes on one of the highest-profile jobs in academic life: head of the top-ranked university in continental Europe, home to 21 Nobel laureates – and, not incidentally, Einstein’s alma mater. Even more daunting: Eichler takes the helm a year after the institution went through a tumultuous management feud, ending in the surprise resignation of the then-president and a public complaint to the Swiss government for more funding.

In his new position, Eichler has ambitions for change and growth. He says he wants to add 80 new professorships; expand cross-disciplinary research in energy, systems biology, high-performance computing and medical technology; increase private and industrial funding; and keep raising the bar for quality at ETH-Zürich overall. “Why should you always grow” in size? he asks rhetorically. “You can grow also in quality.”

But Swiss caution is in evidence as Eichler, former director of Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute for research, starts work. He appears to be carefully building a constituency inside and outside the university. When asked in an interview about his strategic plan, he says it is being developed “bottom-up” in the traditional ETH-Zürich way, through visits with each of the school’s 16 major departments, “because the president cannot be knowledgeable in all the fields in this college.” Last year’s management turnover arose partly out of conflict between then-President Ernst Hafen and the ETH-Zürich faculty.

Among Eichler’s priorities so far:

• More faculty. Over the next 10 years, he says, ETH-Zürich needs 80 additional professors – of which about a fourth should be funded by non-government sources. Each professor, including lab and support staff, costs about a million Swiss francs. The reason for the increase: To improve the faculty-student ratio. “ETH-Zurich is very good in the (international academic) rankings, but the weakest point is in the ratio of students to professors” – about 37:1. “We need more professors.”  One of the professorships, he adds, may be a new chair for risk management – someone who would, among other things, advise the Swiss government on analysing correlations among such seemingly different risks as terrorism, financial crisis and environmental hazards.
  
  
• Competition. Among the new hires, he hopes, will be some from such leading US universities as Harvard, MIT and Caltech. ETH-Zürich already has 43 per cent of its faculty from outside Switzerland or Germany. And Eichler’s newly appointed deputy, Vice-President for Research Peter Chen, is a former Harvard associate professor. While ETH-Zurich is a very Swiss institution, Eichler says, “you have to create an environment that the best people come here. The competition: we are watching.”
  
  
• More private funding. For 2008 the federal Swiss government has allocated 994 million Swiss francs for ETH-Zürich, plus additional sums for new “competence centres.” It’s unrealistic, Eichler says, to expect government funding will grow “substantially”; so a lot of the extra cash will have to come from corporate partners and private donors. How? In 2006 ETH-Zürich got about 5 per cent of its funding from private companies, according to the annual report. His answer: “Show you’re good and the industry will come.” As for private donations – which have no tradition in Switzerland and currently make up about 1 per cent of the budget – “the specific tax law needs to be changed.”
  
  
• Cross-disciplinary research. The “big questions” of our age, he says, are often inter-disciplinary: climate change, medical care, energy supply. ETH-Zürich already has several research units and what it calls “competence centres” that cross old academic boundaries, but Eichler wants more. Four priority areas:

1. Energy. In Switzerland, “we have 40 per cent nuclear energy and half of the nuclear power plants will be shut down in eight to 10 years. What will replace them?” Related energy topics: energy for transport, and housing.
2. High-performance computing. It’s time for a “petaflop” machine – a computer system capable of a billion billion floating point operations a second. The university has in Ticino, Switzerland, the current state-of-the-art “teraflop” machine from US-based Cray Research. But many scientific disciplines now require ever-rising computing power. “We will ask the (Swiss) Parliament next year for an extra chunk of money for a petaflop machine,” he says.
3. Medical technology. He aims to strengthen collaboration between ETH-Zürich and the University of Zürich’s medical school. “There is a unique opportunity, where our engineers can do work just across the street.”
4. Systems biology. This “is a field that is being built up – engineers, informatics, mathematicians, physicists working with biologists.” Eichler is chairman of a consortium of Swiss universities in systems biology called SystemsX.ch.
   

For any disciplines not on his list, Eichler cautions patience. “It doesn’t mean that we neglect basic research in physics and chemistry and basic biology. People look carefully: ‘With a new president, is my field on the list?’ A lot of things will just continue.”

Naturally, the university’s staff could hardly be blamed for keeping close watch on the new president’s first moves. Last year’s resignation – though not the first in the university’s recent history – was certainly a messy affair. Hafen, a newly appointed president, had launched a public debate, first in faculty meetings and then online on the university Web site, about future strategy and management structure; in the process, he raised hackles among many faculty members. At the same time, a fight was going on over how the government money was being apportioned between ETH-Zürich and its sister, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. At the height of the affair, Hafen resigned suddenly, and Osterwalder stepped in as acting president until Eichler’s appointment this year. In the end, Zürich got a bit more of the federal cash for 2008.

Eichler’s analysis of the affair: “The professors didn’t feel represented to the outside world, so they had to fight their side. So they wrote letters to the government and to the press. You have to fight for budgets, or reasons why you should have more, and fight for contacts with industry, and all this a president has to do.”

But he adds: “There was no crisis internally. The research continued, the number of spin-offs increased (to a record 21 so far this year), the number of (research) papers I’m sure will be as usual. The teaching went on.”

His own goals now: “To keep ETH-Zürich at the top performance it is. To build, to educate for Swiss industry the engineers that we need. Then of course, you want to help in solving the big challenges of our society: energy, climate, and environment, and an ageing population.”

Professor Eichler is a member of the Science|Business Advisory Board