Competing in research and education? Intended and unintended effects for universities in multiple competition.

With regard to political dynamics underlying higher education it is obvious that competition is an important mode of higher education governance (de Boer et al. 2007; Paradeise et al. 2009; Musselin 2018; Naidoo 2018). The intensification of competition has been observed internationally with regard to different systems (Bleiklie et al. 2017; Brankovic et al. 2018; Jung et al. 2018) and also for the case of Germany (Lange/Schimank 2007; Hüther/Krücken 2018). Thereby, the competition between universities (and also other types of organizations) not only intensified, but the number of tendered competitions also increased majorly. While the role and consequences of single competitions have been analysed in different studies, there is only few research done on the interdependencies in multiple competition including intended but also unintended consequential effects. Examples for the growing number and the intensification in the German system are changes in the salary system of professors (that include performance based aspects), the excellence initiative (with regard to research), third party funding for research project, and the quality pact for teaching (with regard to education) but there are further more. In this research we focus on two competitions in two different areas: research and education. Research and education are (the) two classical missions of universities. While the excellence initiative induces competition with regard to research excellence, the quality pact for teaching induces competition between universities that try to achieve funding for excellent education. We analyse universities that receive funding in the excellence initiative but not in the quality pact for teaching (1), in the quality pact for teaching but not in the excellence initiative (2), in both programs (3) and cases in which universities decided to opt out from both competitions (4). Thereby we analyse the relations, dependencies and strategies that differ between the cases as well as the resulting effects on the organizations. This research project is part of a research group on ‘multiple competition in the field of higher education’ including 8 projects funded by the German research foundation which will start in April 2021.