mando a voi, visto che ho avuto un po di scambi con voi, la lettera di Martin Groetschel segretario dell IMU e ben noto matematico, che spiega il sistema tedesco, ovvero di una nazione che ha una storia accademica simile alla nostra e un sistema pubblico.
Devo dire che provo solo rabbia quando sento dire che noi non siamo ancora pronti per un sistema sensato, e` veramente sconfortante vivere nella universita` italiana, per fortuna sto per andare in pensione claudio procesi
Dear Claudio,
Thanks for your efforts to support the upcoming EC meeting in Rome using financial sources that you will try to find in your "academic neighborhood". Concerning your request for scientific advice on a complicated issue, I can respond as follows.
Germany does not have the Italian "concorsi" which, as I understand them, are centralized professorship application and distribution systems. As far as I recall former reports of my Italian friends, the government announces that there will be a certain number of professorships, in algebra say, available all over Italy, then people apply for all these professorships, and a central committee decides who is going to get these positions, and then some negotiations start who is getting which algebra position at which place.
In Germany the hiring is very local. Each individual faculty (for instance of mathematics) decides about the hiring. In general, this works as follows. A faculty (or department) has a certain number of professorships. If a person leaves or retires the faculty has to re-apply within the university for the reassignment of this professorship to the faculty. A part of the reapplication is to precise the description of the area the professorship should cover. The faculty may decide to open it for the same subject the predecessor had, but may also provide arguments for a change of subject. At TU Berlin, my university, we completely eliminated "function theory" in the recent years (there were 4 professors who retired within 10 years) and reassigned these professorships to mathematical disciplines closer to engineering (such as Numerics of Partial Differential Equations, Optimization, ..).
Once the Academic Senate of the university has decided to reallocate the professorship (with a precise definition of the topic of the chair) then the faculty determines a search committee which publishes announcements for an open position, screens the applicants, invites some of them for lectures, and finally prepares a ranked list of three persons. This list goes to the department and the faculty for approval and finally to the Academic Senate. Once the list is approved by all these institutions, an offer (in Germany called "Ruf"("Call")) is made to the person placed first on the list. If this person rejects the offer, second is called, etc.
This shows, that we have a completely decentralized hiring system. This has the advantage that decisions are made on the local level where the needs are known better, and the personalities of persons to be hired need to be known. Sometimes you are happy with an autistic researcher, and sometimes you need an organizer or a good teacher, subject to good academic qualifications, and therefore, I think that the local decision process is important. Of course, since usually the new colleagues are not hired by specialists (the new professor should cover an area not covered by anybody else) mistakes are happening. For that reason, for such hiring processes the Academic Senate requires quite a number of evaluation letters from well-known persons from outside the university, and some of these letters have to compare the qualifications (with respect to research, teaching, etc.) of the persons that make it to the final round (of typically 6 persons), so that the university is (somewhat) sure not to make a mistake.
In centralized hiring systems, there is more topical expertise around, but I am not a friend of these systems since these tend to favour "schools" and do not give good chances to "outsiders".
In former times mathematics was also subdivided in some way. There was, however, no consistent subdivision of mathematics. Many faculties simply had Pure Mathematics and Applied Mathematics groups, but in most cases this subdivision has been given up and people are happy to run everything just under "Mathematics".
This is also reflected by recent decision of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) which is the main funding agency for research. Until a few years ago, there was the subdivision of mathematics into Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Statistics. Now everything is under one roof, and only "mathematics" is supported. Mathematicians have to take care among themselves how the financial support is distributed within the mathematics community.
I personally find this development very positive. The creation of walls between the subjects typically creates conflicts and competition. It is more important to support cooperation. As you know, I have chaired the DFG Research Center Matheon for six years, and we have made good experience to also integrate several pure mathematicians. A key problem is, that people talk to each other, and I have noticed in the recent years that there are more number theorists, say, who are interested in really applied topics then persons in probability theory. Traditionally number theory was consider pure, while probability was an applied subject, but all this very much depends on the interests and personal drives of the individuals working in the subject.
Is this of any help for you? Do you have further questions?
Best regards
Martin