Germany, currently the world’s third largest producer of scientific research, is credited with the origins of two major organizational forms responsible for generating scientific discovery worldwide: the research university and the independent, extra-university research institute (hereafter, institute).Footnote 1 As is well known, over the late 18th and early 19th century, universities in German-speaking Europe innovatively integrated a set of principles around higher education and scientific research, most importantly the nexus of research and teaching, as the fundamental principle of the modern research university. Eventually, the new research-oriented university took shape and by the mid-19th century was internationally celebrated and emulated, though somewhat misinterpreted, including in nascent American universities (e.g. Geiger 2004 [1993]; Lenhardt 2005; Ash 2006). While innovations continue elsewhere, the core principles behind this original model of the research university are now evident in universities throughout the world, and by the end of the period examined here there were 142 research-active universities in Germany. After developing the research university, Germany also pioneered the independent, government-funded, and highly prestigious research institute, a salient model frequently employed throughout the country, financed to varying degrees by various levels of government. Fully autonomous from universities and private interests and with academic freedom from the state in scientific pursuits, by 2010 there were 427 institutes undertaking basic scientific research and publishing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, plus medicine and health journal articles (hereafter, STEM+ papers), primarily coordinated within four umbrella organizations (Fraunhofer, Helmholtz, Leibniz, and Max Planck). With some modification, the form of the research institute has also been replicated outside Germany, such as the internal research laboratories within the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the researchers and laboratories of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and the national Academies of Science in the former USSR and China (Kreckel 2008; Robin and Schubert 2013; Oleksiyenko 2014). Here, we primarily investigate these “dual pillars” of German science production (see also Powell and Dusdal 2017a).
Consequently, and even in the face of severe national, regional, and global crises, the country’s science production has been significant over the 20th century—dominating early, fading during the middle, and rebounding in later decades. To put Germany’s contribution in perspective, shown in Fig. 1 are estimated annual journal publications in STEM+ from the European region and the percentage of these from Germany (data source described below). This region has been a major producer across a “century of science” of unparalleled discovery, from approximately the late 19th century until the present (Powell et al. 2017a, b). Termed the “small science” phase of the 20th century, notable for its novel increase in scientific disciplines, topics, and discoveries, it was launched by European scientists who were then authoring about two-thirds of the world’s scientific journal publications, many of whom worked within research universities inspired by the German model (de Solla Price 1963). And a large share of this production was from Germany itself. For example, of the estimated 6,300 STEM+ papers from European countries published in 1900, 70 percent were authored by at least one Germany-based scientist. Not surprisingly given the critical junctures due to an illiberal fascist regime, defeat in WWII, plus its post-WWII political division, Germany’s proportion began a steep decline from about 1940, dropping to below 10 percent of Europe’s papers by 1970. This coincided with what has been referred to as the “big science” phaseFootnote 2 with its unprecedented growth in papers from scientists researching in a growing number of nations, most notably in the U.S. Even with a scientifically weakened Germany, Europe during this period continued to contribute just under 40 percent of global journal articles in STEM+. The worldwide culmination of the trends already occurring in the emerging research universities in Germany by 1900 may be termed “mega-science,” which by the 1980s marked the intensification of scientific capacity-building and publication in Europe—and globally (Baker and Powell forthcoming). The publication rate, reflecting unexpected “pure exponential growth,” rose to over one million annual papers by 2010, authored by scientists working in dozens more countries, resulting in large part from global higher education expansion (Powell et al. 2017a, b). In the midst of this global sea-change, by the 1980s German science had rebounded and consistently contributed just under 20 percent of a constantly expanding volume of papers from Europe. By 2010, the country’s re-built and growing science capacity produced over an estimated 74,000 new STEM+ papers, third globally after the U.S. and China.
Germany’s current science production is clearly impressive. Yet unlike other leading productive countries, it relies on a higher education and research policy that increasingly diverges from the rising centrality of the research university in the majority of nations’ science production. Supported by deeply held political and cultural assumptions, since 1950, the guiding principle behind the German Federal Republic’s and then a reunified Germany’s research policy is the image of universities and institutes each representing a supporting but differentiated “pillar” of science production. By the 20th century, Germany’s states (Bundesländer) chartered, funded, and managed universities that had the specific function of university education, including preparation of the country’s future scientists. Universities, relying on competitive R&D revenue, were undertaking research as part of their mission, but this role was assumed to be steadily and properly eclipsed by the institutes, the home of world-leading specialists in selected scientific fields. Extra-university research institutes were considered organizations of the “best and brightest” researchers guided by prestigious senior scientists in the systematic pursuit of the most cutting-edge science possible. Their overall conditions for research are characterized by well-resourced dedicated streams of federal and Bundesländer funding, albeit recently with some competitive revenue streams added in and becoming increasingly important. While the early charter of some institutes involved partnerships with industry (a form of doing research also pioneered in Germany, but not examined here), they were never limited to research primarily for economic, military, or state purposes, and have evolved into centers of fundamental scientific inquiry to be shared openly with the world’s scientific community in the standard fashion of journal articles, conferences, and so forth.
As the term “dual pillars” implies, while functionally different to a degree, the two main organizational forms of science are widely assumed essentially equal in their importance. Intentionally and unintentionally, this assumption has, however, neither led to equality in resource allocation nor in legitimation. Instead, the dual-pillar model has yielded uneven levels of public research funding, access to scientific talent, and cultural prestige within German science. Especially over recent decades, the institutes have received proportionally more while the universities have received proportionally less from expanding national R&D investments (Hinze 2016; Hohn 2016). For example, by 2017, even though among European nations Germany spent the most on R&D (3 percent) relative to its very high GDP, its universities received only 17 percent of these funds, while a significantly larger share went to support research in the well-resourced institutes (OECD.stat 2019). As a result, the institutes’ role in scientific discovery enjoys a kind of “favored sponsorship” by the state in terms of resources, and within the general society is reflected in enormous prestige. In contrast, a long simmering “crisis of legitimation” of universities and their role in science has meant that they must do more with less, given the steadily rising student numbers, heavy teaching loads, and increasing competition for research grants (Schimank 1995; Enders et al. 2002; Mohrman et al. 2008; Timmermann 2010; Henke and Pasternack 2017). Accentuating the sense of a crisis is that few of the country’s universities achieve top positions in widely publicized international rankings, despite multiple cycles of an “Excellence Initiative” policy designed to select and valorize some leading universities thought then able to compete globally at the highest level.
At the same time, an essential factor in the trajectory of global science has been the rise in the centrality of the research university; in 1900 only a third of the world’s scientific papers were authored by university-based scientists, yet over the next 110 years that proportion grew to fully 80 percent of new publications annually (Zhang et al. 2015). Also, recent cross-national investigations find that the research university, particularly so with global mega-science, is robustly productive, even in environments with less than optimal resources (Powell et al. 2017b; Dusdal 2018; Owen-Smith 2018). It is with some irony, then, that the central innovation behind the organizational form of the research university—integrating preparation of future scientists with scientific research—has, at least at the policy level in its country of origin, been differentiated and downgraded to a degree, and that worldwide intensification of this earlier model has not been optimized in Germany’s research universities.
The implication of the dual-pillar model is that the institutes lead the way and they form the foundation of the country’s science production, while over time universities should have receded in this respect as they focus on teaching and training future scientists. Scientists in universities are, of course, expected to undertake research, but under the dual-pillar policy, disproportionate resources, intellectual prestige, and greatest legitimation for scientific discovery flow towards the institutes. Although this remains a widely held assumption among higher education and research policy makers, it begs the question of what the dual-pillar research policy has meant for science production during the reestablishment of German’s scientific prominence. Even though the country played a central role in the origins of both forms of doing advanced research, there has never been a systematic, long-historical assessment of their relative impact on Germany’s prodigious scientific output (but see Heinze and Kuhlmann 2008 for a two-year assessment). This is now possible to undertake with a unique dataset.
A summary of the historical development of these organizational forms that led to the dual-pillar policy with their now globally atypical differentiated positions sets the context. Then, with national data on STEM+ publications from 1950 to 2010, collected during the international, multidisciplinary project “Science Productivity, Higher Education, Research & Development, and the Knowledge Society (hereafter SPHERE),” (see Powell et al. 2017a), we address three empirical questions on foundation, mega-science, and efficiency. Firstly, foundationally, to what extent was the primary objective of the dual-pillar research policy achieved: namely, did institutes surpass universities in producing most of the nation’s volume of science as university research conditions eroded? Secondly, as also implied by this policy, did institutes adopt regular use of key characteristics of global mega-science production before universities and eclipse them in these practices? Thirdly, is there evidence that institutes are more efficient in science production than universities? Lastly, in light of the results, we consider the logic and future sustainability of the dual-pillar policy and its ensuing sponsorship of institutes as well as university crisis.