Year in review 2021
2022-01-11
Dear University Members
Dear colleagues, dear students,
Once again, we look back on an eventful year that has demanded a great deal of us, but in which many positive things have also developed. I would like to take the upcoming Christmas holidays and the turn of the year as an opportunity to thank you individually and personally, but also collectively, from the bottom of my heart for your dedication, your solidarity and your commitment to our university under often again very difficult conditions.
CORONA PANDEMIC AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
The past year has once again cost us all a great deal of effort to keep the university running as well as possible under the conditions of the Corona pandemic - the instructors in their courses, the students in their studies, the researchers in their projects, the administrators in the organization of the university under constantly changing pandemic conditions. All of them often had high and highest burdens in common. Together with all the members of the Presidential Board, I am immensely grateful to all of you that we have managed this year so well together - and that we have not allowed ourselves to be discouraged by the difficult conditions; that we have looked after each other as best we could; that we have been there for each other when it was necessary; that we have been able to continue to guarantee teaching and research almost without restrictions and that we have thus been able to make a very important contribution to all university members as well as to society as a whole in difficult times.
The pandemic will continue to occupy us for quite some time. I hope and wish that we can continue to live, strengthen and develop this culture of trust and close cooperation, and that this culture can strengthen us all to deal with the pandemic and its consequences in the best possible way in the future.
RESEARCH: INCREASING PROFILE AS LOWER SAXONY´S SOCIAL SCIENCE AND HUMANITIES UNIVERSITY
It was not only the pandemic that had a major impact on Leuphana last year; our university also once again recorded a very dynamic development in research. It is becoming increasingly clear that Leuphana can develop not only - as in the past - as an innovation university with a special interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary profile, but also increasingly in a classic subject logic. Increasingly, we are succeeding in establishing Leuphana as Lower Saxony's outstanding university for the humanities and social sciences, especially characterized by specific links to the natural sciences and engineering. We continued to make great strides along this development path in 2021.
Last year, Leuphana succeeded for the first time in being included in the Shanghai ranking of the 1,000 best universities worldwide. Leuphana is again represented in this year's global ranking of academic subjects and achieves good to very good rankings in almost all subjects in which we are represented, particularly in a comparison of Lower Saxony and Germany. In its most recent funding atlas for the humanities and social sciences, the German Research Association (DFG) ranks Leuphana 15th out of 85 public universities in Germany in terms of performance per researcher. Individual scientists at Leuphana 2021 were ranked at the top of other rankings on several occasions, including this year's economist rankings by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). There, Prof. Dr. Claudia Kemfert, who has held the professorship for "Energy Economics and Energy Policy" at Leuphana 2021 since the winter semester 2020/21, is ranked 7th as the first woman in the overall ranking. She is followed by transformation researcher and Leuphana Honorary Professor Dr. Maja Göpel in 17th place and as the second most influential female economist. In the science category, Prof. Dr. Michael Frese from the Institute for Corporate Development was able to maintain his TOP ranking with 5th place. And Prof. Dr. Berta Martin-Lopez is among the most frequently cited researchers worldwide in her field of research, according to the current "Highly Cited Researchers" report by Clarivate Analytics.
In 2021, third-party funding for research projects continued to increase. And in 2021, researchers also obtained projects with outstandingly large funding amounts as well as in highly competitive contexts, mentioned here on behalf of all other researchers: Prof. Dr. Beate Söntgen is represented with a sub-project at the just newly established DFG Collaborative Research Center "Intervening Arts". Prof. Dr. Vicky Temperton, as project leader, is investigating concepts for the restoration of species-rich grassland in Germany in a three-year BMBF project with a funding volume of 1.3 million euros. And the International Sustainable Chemistry Collaborative Center in Bonn, in which Prof. Dr. Klaus Kümmerer plays a leading role, will receive funding of 1.7 million euros from the German Society for International Cooperation over the next four years.
Institutionally, things are also developing: Leuphana is currently being asked for the first time, alongside the universities of Göttingen, Hanover, Braunschweig, Oldenburg and Osnabrück, to prepare an application for a possible Cluster of Excellence on the topic of "Disruption and Transformation as an Epochal Signature of the 21st Century" and thus one of only three social science and humanities applications in Lower Saxony - a new and very big step for our university. In addition, starting in 2022, Leuphana will be one of only a very few universities in Germany and only two places in Lower Saxony with an Institute of Advanced Studies, with a new "Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and Society" funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The planned institute is intended to strengthen Leuphana's focus on the humanities and social sciences and will bring international scholars to Lüneburg through fellowships. This is also a big step and a special expression of the trust of the state of Lower Saxony and the Volkswagen Foundation in our university. Detailed information on both the Cluster of Excellence application and the new Institute for Advanced Studies will follow next year.
Last but not least, we can look forward to the establishment of our new Leuphana School of Public Affairs. After extensive consultations in all committees, the new school will combine the subjects of political science, law and economics and will start in the summer semester of 2022 with 12 professorships currently advertised and to be filled. Its basic question, how state, economy and civil society have to work together in the future, has become particularly topical due to the Corona pandemic – so the new school comes at exactly the right time. Further information on the new School of Public Affairs and also on the new law program at the Graduate School, for which the school is responsible and which will for the first time in Germany offer both a master's degree and access to the state law examination, can already be found on our website.
TEACHING: RETURN TO PRESENCE AND CONTINUED FLEXIBLE TEACHING
Probably for almost all of you, despite all the challenges, it was also a great joy that we were able to return to face-to-face teaching for the winter semester, at least for a while. For a long time, many of you sorely missed the personal encounters on campus, the opportunity for direct exchange, and the conversations that resulted from chance encounters. We will see how the coming months unfold and continue to work closely with the state government and the other universities to find our way through the pandemic - always with the goal of organizing as much face-to-face teaching as possible, but always with the goal of protecting health and ensuring responsible university operations.
In response to the Corona pandemic, there has been an enormous digitization push in teaching. It is already foreseeable that we will not simply return to the previous normality. Studies in post-pandemic times will undoubtedly again be very much characterized by presence, but will increasingly be supplemented by new digital formats. We are currently working on which positive experiences from the online semesters we can use to enrich the new normal. The success in the federal competition of the Innovation in Higher Education Foundation (Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre) provides a good basis for this: With the project "Leuphana: Digital Transformation Lab for Teaching and Learning" (DigiTaL) and the participation in the joint project "Souver@nes Digitales Lehren und Lernen in Niedersachsen" (SOUVER@N), Leuphana has succeeded in acquiring funding of more than 4.6 million euros.
ORGANIZATION: DYNAMIC DEVELOPMENT AND DIGITIZATION
We are experiencing a digitalization push at Leuphana not only in teaching, but also in the development of our organization and the digitalization of our processes. We are currently working not only on the introduction of a new campus management system ("Campus Online"), but also on the digitization of administrative processes (including digital recording of working hours, vacation and sick leave notifications, digital invoice processing, digital travel expense accounting, digital document and form management). Digitization is also currently a particular focus in research, including library media procurement, research data management, the research information system and the publication strategy (open access). It is also particularly noteworthy that a comprehensive digitization strategy for all universities in Lower Saxony is currently being developed for the first time in cooperation between all Lower Saxony universities and the state government under the working title "Hochschule.digital Niedersachsen". A new dynamic has emerged here - not least as a result of the pandemic - which we want to use for our university. In this context, I would like to extend my special thanks to all administrative employees, who have rendered outstanding services to our university not only in day-to-day operations, but also in these strategic development and digitization processes.
Dealing with the pandemic will continue to present our society with major challenges in the coming year. Dealing with it, solving the problems and also recognizing opportunities in the crisis is in line with our values: breaking new ground, questioning certainties, finding innovative solutions and gaining new insights. I will be pleased if we manage together to move our university forward in this spirit in the new year as well.
On behalf of the entire Presidential Board and also personally, I wish you all the best for the new year – and in the coming days enjoyable and relaxing Christmas holidays with your family and loved ones. Together with you, I hope that in the new year we will again have more opportunities for personal encounters - and thus opportunities for direct exchange, which is so important not only for the development of our university, but also in human terms and for personal togetherness. Let us remain confident.
With best regards
Yours
Sascha Spoun
President