Professorships can be regarded as archetypical elements of higher education institutions as well as small institutions, i.e. historically long-lived, unquestioned role and structure patterns. This small institution is integrated into the university organisation in the form of a position. In Germany, the professorship is the most important type of position in the system of higher education at all.
However, there are indications that this relatively homogeneous position has undergone processes of differentiation and has developed new structural features over a long period of time: There are differences in the level of W-salary between the German Länder and variations of working conditions between higher education institutions (e.g. task portfolio, financial provisions and infrastructure, professorships on probation or temporary professorships). Higher education laws include new terms and concepts such as research professorships, teaching professorships, junior professorships, and qualification professorships (the latter in Hesse) can be found in higher education laws. Young academic professorships have been established at universities of applied sciences (for example in North Rhine-Westphalia), senior professorships (for example in Bavaria, Hesse, and Lower Saxony) at different types of higher education institutions. A series of federal and state programs has supported the creation of new professorships and/or the appointment of professorships depending on certain characteristics, such as the Excellence Initiative, the Female Professors Program and the Program for the Promotion of Young Academics creating 1,000 ten-ure track professorships at state universities. In addition, there are endowed professorships of various external sources, joint appointments between universities and non-university research institutions, and shared professorships in cooperation between higher education institutions and companies (for example in Baden-Württemberg). Denominations of professorships point to an increasing relevance of interdisciplinarity, but Open Topic procedures without a fixed denomina-tion have been implemented as well (for example at TU Dresden).
To date, hardly any research has dealt with the questions which new types of professorships are actually emerging, and what are the reasons and consequences for this development. Hence, open research questions concern
- the structural dimension: What extent of differentiation of professorships can be observed at state universities and universities of applied sciences in Germany? What are particular (struc-tural) characteristics of the new types of professorships? How can the different types of pro-fessorships be systemized and categorized?
- the causal dimension: In what way – if so – have legal norms concerning professorships been changed? Which overall societal (e.g. gender mainstreaming, ubiquity of competition), sub-systemic (e.g. interdisciplinarity, excellence discourse), or university-specific (e.g. profile for-mation) factors are reflected in the differentiation of professorships? And how influential are dynamic developments in different scientific fields and interdisciplinary contexts? Or is the differentiation of professorships a predominantly discursive phenomenon?
- the dimension of effects: What are the effects of the (factual or discursive) differentiation of professorships on personnel resources, infrastructure and budgets provided to professors, on their activities in research, teaching, and third mission, on their concepts of professional performance, on their integration into the university organization, on their academic autonomy, on their opportunities for cooperation, and on the overall reputation of the professorship?
To answer these questions, a comparative analysis of structural features, causes and (cultural) effects of the differentiation of selected variants of professorships at state universities and uni-versities of applied sciences in Germany is intended.
In this context, central objectives of this project are the preparation and submission of an application for a multi-year project as well as the publication of a conceptual peer reviewed jour-nal article.
