Success before the storm

We are so proud of the fact that we are all pulling together, but we don't realise that the rope is around our necks," remarked chemist Siegfried Pohl at the January meeting of the University Senate of Oldenburg, when it was once again a question of allocating the savings imposed by the state government to the individual areas of the university in a consensus procedure. Pohl's drastic picture is by no means exaggerated, especially as it seems that the waves of savings over the past two years only indicate the beginning of a major storm. The government is even predicting a hurricane. According to current decisions, the Ministry of Science is to cut 450 million marks from its four-billion-mark budget from 1997. Nobody really wants to take these figures seriously, but if only a quarter of this remains, it will no longer be possible to proceed according to the motto: "A little less everywhere." The consequences would be the closure of entire university locations in Lower Saxony, or at least of departments and subjects.

At such times, there is an easy danger that successes will disappear under the dark clouds of the approaching storm. This is also the case in Oldenburg. Many people still do not realise that the university has had the most successful year in its young history. In 1995, it reaped the harvest of years of well-planned work - probably just in time:

• The German Council of Science and Humanities cleared the way for the new lecture theatre centre;
• Lower Saxony and Bremen agreed to build the Hanseatic Science Centre in Delmenhorst;
• the building for the OFFIS Computing Science Institute, designed for 150 employees, was completed;
• the Ministry of Science approved Philosophy and Jewish Studies as independent degree programmes.

But that was not all. At the end of the year, the University, together with the University of Bremen, was awarded a Collaborative Research Centre "Neurocognition" by the German Research Foundation. For the biologists, physicists and psychologists working on this major project, this means at least six years of financial support for their research from the DFG.

In the storm that will hit the university landscape in the last few years of this millennium and will undoubtedly change it profoundly, these successes are important pillars for maintaining the University of Oldenburg in its current size and creating the conditions for its expansion. The latter seems illusory in view of the financial situation of the public sector. However, the state government is still committed to establishing an engineering faculty at the university. The university, politicians, industry and trade unions all agree that this investment is needed in the economically weak region as the most important infrastructure measure of the coming period.

Yours

Gerhard Harms