Off to Japan…but before that, the budget: ETH Zürich President Konrad Osterwalder.
ETH Zürich is critical of what it calls the arbitrary manner in which the ETH Board has allocated funding for 2008 between the two ETH universities of Lausanne and Zurich and the four ETH research institutions.
After 152 years, first woman nominated as rector
ETH Zürich has announced the nomination of Professor Heidi Wunderli-Allenspach to be their next Rector. It’s the first time a female Rector has been nominated to the post in the 152-year history of the university. The ETH board will be asked to ratify the nomination to replace Konrad Osterwalder, who is moving to Japan to head the United Nations University in Tokyo.
Wunderli-Allenspach received her biology masters at ETH Zürich’s department of natural sciences and has been a full professor in biopharmacy at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences since 1995 as well as deputy head of the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences.
“Lately the board has been keeping money back for ‘strategic initiatives’,” says Verena Schmid, the ETH Zürich spokesperson. “This has created bad feeling since institutes themselves know best what research they need to do.”
Just balancing things out?
The ETH Board is unrepentant. According to its spokesperson, the “board has used most of its strategic funds to adjust the budget of EPFL for 2008 for the first time” in order to take into account “the substantial performance increase of EPFL in the past few years”. He added that “in earlier years, the allocation of the strategic funds was in favour of ETH Zurich. Over the last six years this allocation of the strategic means balances out for ETH Zürich and EPFL.”
According to ETH Zürich’s Schmid, budget decisions were taken without the proper documentation which should have been provided two weeks prior to the board meeting of May 23-24, 2007. The result is that ETH Lausanne will receive a bigger boost to its budget than ETH Zurich. “The decisions were only taken in the meeting, the documents were not prepared in advance and no figures were available to make these decisions,” insists Schmid, “This has not been done in a serious way. They need a clear strategy and this has to be in line with what politics wants.”
ETH Zürich is also objecting to the publishing of “unclear figures, with the increase for Lausanne seemingly lower than it is in reality”, and says that the budget increase for ETH Zürich is CHF 12 million less than claimed in the board’s press release.
‘The numbers are right’
Although Alexander Zehnder, President of the ETH Board, was unable to comment on the legal details of the case, he was prepared to talk about the CHF 12 million increase. “The complaint is a question of interpretation,” he says, insisting that the boards’ “numbers are right”. He also points to CHF 25 million going to the development of a new institute at Basel and an additional CHF 10 million for running different projects and “a small increase for the augmentation of living costs”.
Nicolas Henchoz, the communications spokesman for the EPFL, agrees that Lausanne has had a higher relative budget increase than ETH Zürich, but says this reflects Lausanne’s rapid growth over the last ten years. “Between 1999 and 2006, there has been a 35 per cent increase in the number of students, a 42 per cent increase in the number of titles and diplomas delivered, and from 2003 to 2005 there has been a 50 per cent increase in the number of PhDs delivered,” he says.
According to Henchoz, “the board made a good decision. In fact Lausanne could ask for even more resources but we also want them to keep their increase because they also have to stay competitive at the international level, and that’s good for Switzerland.” He adds that “this is more an internal problem than a real problem of finance because both of the two institutions will have an increase next year.”
He stresses the importance of working together to reach their goals: “In all the international rankings the two institutions are doing extremely well in Europe. Most of the time we are in the best 20 or best 10 in Europe, and in the top 50 in the world, which is really amazing for such a small country to have such a high level in the world. What we have to do is work together.”
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