Appointment procedures for professorships are an important research topic because they can be seen as performance evaluation procedures with long-term structural effects on research and teaching agendas in higher education. Therefore the "LiBerTas" research project (the name is the acronym for the German title "Performance Evaluation in Appointment Procedures - the changing tradition of hiring professors in academia") focuses on different aspects of the recruitment of professors. The project is funded for three years (11/2013-10/2016) by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and conducted at the DZHW in Hanover.
The first part of the project examines the legal framework, different schemes and current changes in appointment procedures for professorships. Besides an international literature review, expert interviews will be conducted to explore the research field. Additionally, a quantitative content analysis of job advertisements for professorships in a German newspaper (Die Zeit) covering three deliberately chosen periods (1995, 2003, 2012) will be carried out in order to trace changes in requirements for academic appointments.
The second part of the project deals with the performance assessment and personal eligibility of candidates for professorships. In this field of inquiry, an online survey will be deployed to disclose the criteria applied and their measurement. Different types of actors playing important roles in the appointment process (e.g. members of appointment committees, deans, or equal opportunity officers) will be polled about selection criteria and formal as well as informal operational practices.
The project aims to reveal in how far changes in appointment procedures affect the relationship between university organisation, academic personnel and scientific community. To examine these effects, case studies at eight universities and four universities of applied sciences, focusing on four subjects (physics, mechanical engineering, social sciences, and medical sciences), will be carried out.
Grant Recipient:
Deutsches Zentrum für Hochschul- und Wissenschaftsforschung
Head of project: Dr. Bernd Kleimann
FKZ: 01PY13008
Duration of the project: 01.11.13-30.10.16
