ZEIT Germany: You had a great position in the American Ivy League. Why on earth did you come back to Germany?

A Columbia University captain‘s chair in Staudinger‘s TU Dresden office © Monika Keiler

Ursula Staudinger: It was not so much going away from something as going toward something. In my career, every position that I’ve taken has had a certain half-life for me. So when I was at Columbia University for seven and a half years, I felt that I had raised the bar for the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center from nonexistence to visibility and had established it at the university. When a headhunting firm contacted me about taking over as rector of TU Dresden, it also meant I would be closing a circle in my life, as I had my first professorship there twenty years ago. It got me excited. I took a closer look. And to be honest, I was extremely enthusiastic to see all that had changed since I had left the university back in 2003.

ZEIT Germany: What specifically excited you?

Staudinger: I was really amazed by the university’s development, for example that it had succeeded twice in the national excellence competition. That is a major achievement. I also became interested because it is one of the few technical universities offering a full range of disciplines beyond engineering and natural sciences. We have full-fledged programs in the humanities and social sciences here. As somebody with a background in the behavioral sciences, I felt I was in a unique position to bridge these two types of disciplines. So there was this special opportunity to take my institutional expertise and generalize it across all the fields of science and academic education at TU Dresden. In addition, my husband and I had been very clear from the beginning that we wanted to return to Germany at some point.

“I was always sure the country would reinvent itself after Trump’s presidency”

ZEIT Germany: When you left the US in 2020 Donald Trump was still up for reelection. Did the political atmosphere there also play a role in your decision?

Staudinger: Of course that was the backdrop at the moment when we left. Let’s just say it made it easier to decide. But I was always sure the country would reinvent itself after Trump’s presidency. I’m not saying that the goals have already been reached, but the process of redefining the US as a nation is underway, and it is a very creative nation. After the first year back in Germany, it is obvious that this country has a lot to offer. Once one has been away for a while, it clears the view for these advantages that long-term residents tend to forget.

ZEIT Germany: What were the most positive surprises?

Staudinger: I’m not sure I should say surprises, but I must say, compared to the US, the overall standard of living and level of infrastructure are significantly higher. That is probably in particular the case in the former East German states, because the infrastructure is more recent here; a lot was built up and renewed after German reunification.

ZEIT Germany: Can you be more specific?

Staudinger: Housing here is on average at a higher level of development than in the US. Maybe that’s particular to New York. The level of renovation there does not match any renovation that you would find here in Germany – even though many buildings here are hundreds of years old. Take the heating system of our building in New York, built in 1906. It still runs with steam heating, so you have no way to regulate the heat except for opening the window. That’s just a small example. Public transportation is another, bigger one. Dresden has a very modern tram system and a perfectly functioning bus system.

ZEIT Germany: What about the academic landscape? What does Germany offer in contrast to the US?

Staudinger: The two systems are hard to compare because they are built on such different assumptions. In the US, the basic assumption is that higher education is not a common good but rather a privately owned good. And this decision gets discussed and then renewed again and again. In Germany – and in continental Europe, for that matter – it’s the opposite. The basic consensus here is that higher education has to be a highly valued public good. And both of these approaches come at a price. For a long time, it’s been the case that, on average, university education in Germany is better than in the US. But at some of the top institutions, it is better in the US.

ZEIT Germany: That is why the German national and state governments have started to foster what’s known as excellence …

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Staudinger: The government started what first was called the Excellence Initiative and is now the so-called Excellence Strategy. Whatever the name, the plan has been to invest more money in the university system. When you look at the rankings of the top German universities, they have indeed improved as a consequence of this funding. Historically, by the way, the German research system had two streams. Public universities are governed by the individual German states, not the federal government. But Berlin had an interest in influencing research activities, too, so it invested immensely over the decades in the second stream: research institutions outside the universities like the Max Planck Society, the Helmholtz Association, the Leibniz Association, and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. As a result, large amounts of money pour into these research institutes but not into the public universities because the federal government has so far not been allowed to finance them beyond project funding.

ZEIT Germany: German academics tend to praise the Excellence Strategy, but it hasn’t received much recognition in the US. When you told people at Columbia you were leaving for Dresden, did they know about it?

Staudinger: No, they didn’t even know TU Dresden. They probably thought it was one of these provincial little college places. But they have developed a certain arrogance based on decades of academic supremacy, so that wasn’t a counter argument to me. Rather, it confirmed my decision to contribute so that the visibility of a top-rate university like TU Dresden will be higher in ten or twenty years.

ZEIT Germany: That’s a long time. Can Germany really create something like the Ivy League without mighty private endowments?

“We do realize that sustained high public investment for research pays off”

Staudinger: Indeed, Germany cannot just make up for the enormous endowments at the big Ivy League schools. That is what makes them resilient even in a huge crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic, even though they are residential universities. The German budget for "excellence," which is financed by federal and state government, looks like a drop in the bucket in contrast. And even within Europe, when you look at Switzerland and places like the ETH Zurich, you get a sense of what you need to invest in order to push an academic institution to the top. However, we do realize that sustained high public investment for research pays off. Visibility has increased. We have come into a position to recruit scientists for TU Dresden but also for Germany in general that would not have been possible ten years ago. Most of them are attracted by the "Excellence Clusters" because the researchers who collaborate to gain the funding for an excellence cluster are highly visible from the start. And the funding in turn enables them to make very competitive offers. They are equipped with very good resources, and they can focus on research.