Heinze, Marie-Christie

To use national stereotypes, it would be a typically German way of doing things to create another office in the university and ministry of education to promote private funding of universities. This approach would also bring with it the question of which of Germany’s hundreds of universities would benefit from it. At any rate, the government is not likely to create such a programme so perhaps it is better to limit partnerships to the university and the business in question.

Following on from Ms Ziemba, we have observed that of late, universities have to go to other sources for financing. We believe that education is a public benefit and should therefore be state-financed. Research should not be profit-oriented and be bound by market conditions. In the future, the funding of universities will be much more diverse than it is now. We will have funding coming from the state mainly, but there will also be the private sector and foundations. We have to be realistic as the educational market expands: if universities don’t sell what they can sell, somebody else will.

What goods can universities sell? There are three main points:

• University status – what we have is the image of independence and the image of reliability and academia.

We would like to summarise what was discussed yesterday morning in the Students' Session. Our discussion was much less philosophical or ideological than the discussions we have heard in the last one-and-a-half days. We were much more pragmatic about things and questions were not about the need for ICT usage or is the utility of networks, but what we can expect from these facilities. How can we make use of them? What can be done to improve these opportunities? We ended up with three main issues that concerned us most, and these were ICT usage, networks, and funding. We will quickly give an overview of these issues, and then make some concrete suggestions to teachers and the Europaeum especially, and also propose some things that students can do in order to improve these issues.