The Scientific Parliamentary Service of the House of Representatives has now again certified the initiators of an amendment to the Berlin Higher Education Act that the project is unconstitutional. It already seemed superfluous anyway. The position of mid-level faculty at the universities is precarious.
Responsible for this are long-forgotten politicians who, for ideological reasons, eliminated a functioning system for promoting young talent and replaced it with one that had not been thought through to the end.
You can see the shambles: too few permanent jobs for the next generation. However, if you convert the temporary positions into permanent positions, future generations will no longer have any chances at all. The work of ideologues, boastfully described as strengthening Berlin as a science location, is classified by experts as unconstitutional. That doesn’t seem to bother the proponents of this “reform”. They insisted on the adoption that took place on Thursday.
Berlin has always managed to damage its universities. This began in the late 1960s with exaggerated participation rights for all groups and unrestrained expansion of the rights of staff representatives. There were corrections in the 80s, which were then cashed in again.
The development of a science location not only includes declaring universities to be excellent universities, but also creating framework conditions such as those of top institutions abroad that people strive to emulate. Legislative projects that constrict science in this way are unknown there.
Now a group of parliamentarians have pushed through a law that is unlikely to stand.
What is the point of having a parliamentary service that examines projects for their constitutionality if the initiators do not comply? The majority of Parliament has fallen into an open trap. The spokesmen would have considered it if they could be held personally responsible for the resulting damage. So the public treasury, which is often maltreated in Berlin, carries it.
