Munich is about to become Germany's academic powerhouse after two universities of this city won the country's Excellence Initiative, writes Gretchen Vogel in her piece for Science online (13.10.2006). The results of the competition, designed to crown a sort of German Ivy League, brought good news to southern Germany. Two of the three big winners are in Munich: the Technical University Munich (TUM) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU). The third is the Technical University Karlsruhe, in southwest Germany.
The Excellence Initiative aims to promote some lighthouses in German science that might compete with universities like Oxford and Cambridge (that btw ranked first and second in a recent worldwide comparison). Three top universities get now some extra money to pursue some kind of scientific business plan for excellence and quality. Several other universities get money for smaller scientific programmes like graduate schools or so called excellence clusters.
The Excellence Initiative aims to promote some lighthouses in German science that might compete with universities like Oxford and Cambridge (that btw ranked first and second in a recent worldwide comparison). Three top universities get now some extra money to pursue some kind of scientific business plan for excellence and quality. Several other universities get money for smaller scientific programmes like graduate schools or so called excellence clusters.