It could have been inspirational. Imagine a university established to educate some of the best students from Europe and beyond, and to provide a home for the world’s most creative researchers in the natural sciences and engineering. It will be an institution with an outstanding new campus, benefiting from annual revenues of at least €500 million (US$700 million) – a peak scholarly aspirations and entrepreneurs will be close to.
That could be the European Institute of Technology (EIT). This was rooted in the idea that the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, put forward under that name in 2005.
The proposal, now known as the EIT, is a small thing by comparison – a small, central, administrative executive that forms ‘knowledge and innovation communities’ (KICs) to fund research in promising-sounding areas. will choose. KIC will be distributed a network of ‘partnership’ between organizations in the education, research and business sectors, and award postgraduate degrees. The Commission will contribute €2.4 billion between 2008 and 2013.
An expert group appointed by the European Parliament to analyze the proposal last month recommended a different approach. In this vision, there is also no central EIT – but KICs become de facto brick-and-mortar institutions, with 20 or so of them, each with 300-odd scientists, located in areas with already established research power. Is.
However, Parliament is not taking the advice of its experts. Both it and the European Council – the EU’s two decision-making bodies – are likely to approve the Commission’s notion of a lack of virtual networks. And both are undermining the element of education, toying with the idea that the EIT and its constituents can offer some sort of water-logged postgraduate diploma without the influence of a PhD.
Europe will therefore get another virtual industry-academic network to sit alongside the Framework Program’s Network of Excellence, Eureka Clusters and other variations on the theme. This shop-worn notion of EIT has no support among researchers. The industry is also not interested in this.
This apparent compromise marks a worrying loss of nerve. Europe has a demonstrated ability to deliver permanent world-class research institutions: the particle-physics laboratory CERN and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory stand as evidence.
It has shown a willingness to invest in research excellence for its own sake, independent of political agenda – witness the fledgling European Research Council, which is flooded with applications in its first round of awards. If he chose, why shouldn’t the world’s largest economy establish a unitary engineering powerhouse to rival the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with all the benefits that such scale and ambition provide?
This pathetic situation exposes much of what is wrong with pan-European politics. A fundamental problem is that of ‘subsidiaries’, a principle underlying the EU’s Fundamental Treaty of Rome, which requires the Commission to articulate actions that individual countries already consider to be good enough. including award of academic merit. Another is a chronic reluctance to research bricks and mortar.
The German Presidency is keen to launch a ‘Test KIC’ next year with expertise in energy efficiency or climate change. It will be a long way from a world-leading educational institution that will have inspired Europe’s youth and propelled its economies. The financial and constitutional challenges involved would be undeniably great. But the results could have been fully worthy of the academic legacy that Europe has, and may have taken it to new heights. Is that vision dormant now? Or is it dead?