It took a long time, but the compromise that the federal and state governments finally reached this summer on funding excellence at German universities was worth the time. It is a good thing that the federal government, which was beckoning with a lot of money, was unable to assert itself. Germany's young universities would probably have fallen by the wayside,

However, the federal government's plan to provide funding to just a few universities and create a few elite universities in a short space of time based on the American model would also have been doomed to failure. This is because in Germany - not least due to the open competition that only emerged in the 1990s - there is no university that is at the top in all areas. The 1.9 billion euros would not have been enough to achieve this for a few universities. It would take a lot more. Havard, the US elite university with all the top places, has an endowment capital alone of well over 20 billion dollars. In addition, horrendous tuition fees and other large sums from sponsors and patrons flow into the annual budget. You can imagine what it would cost to put even one large German university in a similar position.

The position of the federal states, which ultimately prevailed in the promotion of excellence, makes more sense: namely to strengthen research and teaching where it already has international significance - regardless of which university it takes place at.

This also gives young universities a great opportunity, as they can usually also demonstrate top-level research. The University of Oldenburg is no exception. This was recently certified by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which approved funds totalling almost five million euros for the third Collaborative Research Centre. Its aim is to develop a hearing aid by 2010 that will give older people back the quality of hearing that young people have. In an ageing society, the importance of such a project can hardly be overestimated.

But the University of Oldenburg is not only at the forefront of hearing research - which is part of the Research Centre Neurosensory Science - its scientists can also boast great achievements in Computing Science. This is why the two centres "Neurosensorics" and "Safety-Critical Systems" have each submitted an application for a cluster of excellence in the Excellence Initiative. If these concepts are recognised by the jury under the leadership of the DFG and the German Council of Science and Humanities in the forthcoming major competition between all German universities, another major building block for the profile of the University of Oldenburg will be created - one more reason to be optimistic about the future.

Gerhard Harms