Where do the rectors of German universities come from?

Where do the rectors of German universities come from? From Germany, largely, at least according to what I can make out. Of a total of 83 current rectors, 76 (85%) are German in origin. This is largely in proportion to the number of professors who are German, which according to this article is above 90%.

The idea to do this came from a Facebook post by Roberta D'Alessandro doing a similar thing for the Netherlands. This percentage is perhaps not hugely surprising in itself, but the overall low proportion of non-German professors did surprise me. I work in a department which currently has 11 professors, 5 of whom were not born in Germany.

Looking at the seven exceptions is interesting, too. Four of them are from Switzerland or Austria, where they would in all likelihood have spoken German from a very young age. The same may be true of Elizabeth Prommer, rector of the University of Rostock, who, although California-born, went to school in Bavaria. That leaves the president of the small private Constructor University in Bremen, Stanislav Protasov, who was born in Tashkent (then USSR), and the president of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Jan S. Hesthaven, who is Danish. Neither of these are hugely prototypical German universities, and in the former case it's been suggested that being mates with the man who owns the university may have played a significant role.

My feeling is that there's little antipathy to foreigners in the German academic system per se, but at the same time it's structurally quite difficult to penetrate due to its various idiosyncratic properties that the locals treat as self-evident natural truths about the universe. Actually running the show without German as one's native language would be a real challenge.

A quick note on methodology: I started with this list of universities, looked up who the rector or president is on Google, and tried to find their Wikipedia article. If this existed and stated where they were born or what their nationality was, I used that. Otherwise I tried to find another source, and this ultimately ended up being successful in all cases, so I didn't have to make inferences based on names. Unmarked entries in the list below are German.

Baden-Württemberg:

Kerstin Krieglstein

Frauke Melchior

Stephan Dabbert

(Danish) Jan S. Hesthaven

Thomas Fetzer

Peter Middendorf

Karla Pollmann

Michael Weber

Bayern:

Sabine Doering-Manteuffel

Kai Fischbach

Stefan Leible

Gabriele Gien

Joachim Hornegger

Thomas F. Hofmann

Bernd Huber

(Austrian) Eva-Maria Kern

Ulrich Bartosch

Udo Hebel

Paul Pauli

Berlin:

Günter M. Ziegler

Julia von Blumenthal

Geraldine Rauch

Brandenburg:

Gesine Grande

Eduard Mühle

Oliver Günther

Bremen:

Jutta Günther

(USSR) Stanislav Protasov

Hamburg:

Jörg Müller-Lietzkow

Andreas Timm-Giel

Hauke Heekeren

Klaus B. Beckmann

Hessen:

Tanja Brühl

Enrico Schleiff

Katharina Lorenz

Ute Clement

Thomas Nauss

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern:

Katharina Riedel

(American) Elizabeth Prommer

Niedersachsen:

Angela Ittel

Sylvia Schattauer

Metin Tolan

Volker Epping

(Swiss) Denise Hilfiker-Kleiner

Klaus Osterrieder

May-Britt Kallenrode

(German-Swiss) Sascha Spoun

Ralph Bruder

Susanne Menzel-Riedl

Verena Pietzner

Nordrhein-Westfalen:

Ulrich Rüdiger

Angelika Epple

Martin Paul

Michael Hoch

Manfred Bayer

Barbara Albert

Anja Steinbeck

Stefan Stürmer

Joybrato Mukherjee

Ansgar Thiel

Johannes Wessels

Birgitt Riegraf

Stefanie Reese

Martin Butzlaff

Birgitta Wolff

Rheinland-Pfalz:

Malte Drescher

Stefan Wehner

Georg Krausch

Holger Mühlenkamp

(Austrian) Eva Martha Eckkrammer

Saarland:

Ludger Santen

Sachsen:

Gerd Strohmeier

Ursula Staudinger

Klaus-Dieter Barbknecht

Eva Inés Obergfell

Sachsen-Anhalt:

Claudia Becker

Jens Strackeljan

Schleswig-Holstein:

Christiane Hipp

Insa Theesfeld

Enno Hartmann

Thüringen:

Walter Bauer-Wabnegg

Kai-Uwe Sattler

Andreas Marx

(Austrian) Peter Benz

Dominic Raab: "I deeply regret taking skooma"

Following yesterday’s explosive revelations, Conservative leadership hopeful Dominic Raab has expressed deep regret at his occasional skooma use earlier in life.

Raab, 45, admitted to taking the drug repeatedly when studying abroad at Winterhold College in the 90s. In his defence he claimed that his then-role as Dragonborn, destined to prevent the return of Alduin, was putting him under “immense pressure” leading him to make some “questionable decisions”, and that he had fallen into bad company.

“Some on the left will try to tell you that the skooma problem doesn't exist – that it's a fiction,” Raab added. “But I can assure you that the threat posed by skooma is very real.”

A former Brexit Secretary, Raab is known for his tough stance on Khajiit caravans and his unstinting support of leaving the EU, and has outlined plans for new trade deals with Elsweyr and Black Marsh in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

Remain tactical voting in NW: vote Green or Lib Dem

The tl;dr version of this post is:

• If you want to vote Lib Dem, do that.
• If you want to vote Green, do that.
• If you want to vote Change UK, don’t. Instead vote Green or (if you can’t stomach them) Lib Dem.
• If you are pro-Remain and want to vote Labour, consider voting Green or Lib Dem instead.
• If you are pro-Brexit, spoil your ballot. None of the parties can give you the hard Brexit you know we all need. F*ck the system!

(This post assumes that you’re a voter in the North West England electoral district for the European Parliament elections on 23rd May 2019, and that your priority is to send the strongest possible pro-Remain signal, understood as electing the most MEPs for unambiguously pro-Remain parties. If you don’t want this, then this post is not for you.)

Remain United is recommending that all Remainers in England vote Lib Dem. The idea behind this is that everyone should simply vote for the predicted largest pro-Remain party in each region. This, however, is a bad strategy because it doesn’t take into account the electoral system. In an ideal world where all Remainers voted tactically for the predicted largest pro-Remain party, it would work fine. But this won’t happen, and sub-optimal tactical voting could seriously screw things up. In districts with several seats, as Heinz Brandenburg explains:

If, for example, tactical voting pushes one pro-Remain party close to 15% but reduces the two others to 5 or 6%, the bigger party will not have enough to win multiple seats ... while the others could both fail to win a single seat. That could reduce the pro-Remain parties to a single seat where three could have been won.

Indeed, Remain United’s own projections show that if 50% of all Remain voters in the North West vote in the way they suggest (Lib Dem), the distribution of seats would not change: 4 for Labour, 2 for the Brexit Party, 1 each for the Tories and Lib Dems.

It’s worse than that, in fact. In what follows I use the ComRes/Electoral Calculus estimates (also used by Remain United):

• Conservatives: 12%
• Labour: 36%
• Liberal Democrats: 10%
• Change UK: 8%
• Green Party: 7%
• Brexit Party: 24%
• Other: 3%

I assume that this is a good model in what follows. Using the d’Hondt method, the seats would be assigned as follows:

• 1. Lab
• 2. Brex
• 3. Lab
• 4=? Lab/Brex/Con (it's not possible to be more precise)
• 7. Lib Dem
• 8. Lab

All else being equal, in order for the Lib Dems to get 2 seats rather than 1 by soaking up votes from Change UK and the Greens, they’d have to get 18-19% of the 25% Remain party voters, virtually doubling their vote share. Realistically that won’t happen; and it isn’t possible for them to get 3 seats that way. The most that shuffling the Remain votes around like this can achieve is to win 2 seats, the second of which would be at Labour’s expense.

There is another way, however. The question to ask is: Starting from the projections, what is the minimal change that would need to be made in order to get 2 pro-Remain seats? The obvious answer is that Change UK are sitting on 8%, just below the 9-10% threshold they’d need to nab a seat from Labour. If they could grab another 1-2% from the Greens’ share, they could get that seat.

As a tactical voting recommendation, that’s probably not going to fly, however. A recent YouGov poll suggested that, of the three pro-Remain parties, Green voters are by far the least likely to compromise by voting for one of the others (and congrats if you’re a principled Green voter and have read this far). Change UK voters, on the other hand, are much happier to vote tactically, at least insofar as tactical voting is comparable to an anti-Brexit electoral pact. And in this connection it’s worth mentioning that the Greens have an established supporter base in the North West, and came very close to getting a seat in 2014.

The estimate puts the Greens on 7%, so if they can get another 2-3% from Change UK voters - or from Labour Remainers, who ought also to be shiftable - they could get a seat. To me, that seems the most achievable goal of the three.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that all these scenarios involve the second Remain seat being pinched from Labour, not the Tories or the Brexit Party, who are the real hard Brexit flag-flyers. So at the end of the day it might not be worth it, depending on how you rank your personal principles. It’s also important that Lib Dems do get the seat they’re estimated to get, and that in itself is close. You wouldn’t have to massage the figures much for the Lib Dems to end up with no seats and the Brexit Party to pick up a third one (-2% Lib Dem, +2% Brexit Party would do it). So it’d be irresponsible to advise anyone who’s planning to vote Lib Dem to change their vote.

Why I'm voting Pirate in Manchester Central

I'll be voting for the Pirate Party in the upcoming general election. Here's why.

Lack of digital literacy among the major parties

It's time to end digital illiteracy. Internet policy is an area on which the major parties are both astonishingly ineffectual and terrifyingly illiberal. Amber Rudd has been much mocked for her reference to people who "understand the necessary hashtags". Less amusingly, but more importantly, Rudd has spoken of her desire to ban encryption, a move which is both anti-privacy and anti-business. End-to-end encryption is crucial for banking, for instance. You'd think there'd be outcry, or at least that Labour would use the issue to score some points. But that hasn't happened.

Online privacy and security is a matter of life and death, as the recent NHS attacks have shown. It's an open question whether the underfunding that allowed our NHS to get so royally screwed over was a result of miserliness, cynical targeted defunding, incompetence, or all three. In any case, it's clear that this isn't a purely abstract issue: increasingly, it's a matter of defence. This could well be the form that future warfare typically takes. Anyone who made as many gaffes when discussing Trident as Amber Rudd has made when discussing encryption and digital rights would be considered a danger to national security, and unfit to hold office. Meanwhile, the Labour manifesto only mentions "cyber warfare" in the vaguest of terms (p120), and elsewhere states that it will require tech companies to take measures against online abuse and inappropriate content for children (p96), without any indication of how this could be done while respecting basic civil liberties. (The corresponding section in the Conservative manifesto, p79, basically sings from the same hymnsheet, but is even more disturbingly authoritarian.) I'm sick and tired of the continual erosion of our civil liberties in the name of the fight against terrorism and paedophilia.

The Pirates understand the necessary hashtags. Just look at their manifesto.

Distrust for the Labour candidate

Lucy Powell is a Labour careerist, who has almost never defied the whip: only twice in 607 votes, of which the most recent rebellion was in order to support airstrikes in Syria. To me that indicates a lack of independent thinking and moral fibre. She was also part of the damaging attempted coup against Corbyn. I've written before about my reservations with regard to Corbyn, but he didn't deserve that - and, more importantly, neither did the country, given the move's deleterious effects for Labour credibility in the run-up to this election.

The first time I emailed her about an issue I considered important, I got no reply, but I was added to her mailing list.

"But we need to get the Tories out!"

I'm a leftie and a liberal, so I agree. If I were in a swing seat, I'd be voting for the party most likely to oust the Tories. But Manchester Central is an incredibly safe Labour seat, where Labour have never received less than 50% of the vote.

A futile gesture?

Perhaps. Certainly the chances of getting a Pirate elected are vanishingly low. But we shouldn't underestimate the effect on policy that an electoral threat can have, even without elected representatives. The prime example here is UKIP, who never once succeeded in getting an MP elected (if we discount temporary turncoat Douglas Carswell), but whose policies are nonetheless reflected to an alarming degree in the current Conservative manifesto. The Labour Party in the northwest has called out the Pirates by name before: then-MEP Arlene McCarthy was concerned about potentially losing votes over net neutrality.

One thing's for sure: this is not a protest vote. I'm voting for the party that I want to win. I would love it if a Pirate MP was elected in Manchester Central. The combination of liberal principles and evidence-based policymaking is a great one, and so I wish Neil Blackburn all the best for his campaign.

Full disclosure: the author is a former member of the Pirate Party UK National Executive, and is currently living and working as an immigrant in Germany.