Sicherheit & Souveränität in Europa E-Book

Andreas Kellerhals

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Deutsch

Seitenzahl: 551

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Die vorliegende Publikation vereint eine Auswahl von Referaten, die im Jahr 2022 auf Einladung des Europa Instituts an der Universität Zürich in der Aula der Universität Zürich gehalten wurden. Die Beiträge spiegeln die Vielfalt der Themen und Perspektiven wider, die das Europa Institut im Rahmen seines akademischen und öffentlichen Dialogs zur Zukunft Europas in den Mittelpunkt stellt. Im Laufe des Jahres 2022 durfte das Europa Institut hochrangige Persönlichkeiten aus Politik, Wissenschaft, Diplomatie und Wirtschaft willkommen heissen. Die Referate greifen aktuelle Herausforderungen und Fragestellungen auf, die nicht nur Europa, sondern auch die internationale Staatengemeinschaft bewegen: von Fragen der internationalen Sicherheit und der europäischen Zusammenarbeit über Entwicklungen im Bildungswesen bis hin zu Aspekten der globalen Wirtschaft und der Menschenrechte. Die Vielfalt der Referate dokumentiert zugleich das breite thematische Spektrum und die internationale Vernetzung des Europa Instituts.

Leseprobe

Sicherheit & Souveränität in Europa Copyright © by Andreas Kellerhals is licensed under a Creative Commons Namensnennung-Nicht kommerziell-Keine Bearbeitung 4.0 International, except where otherwise noted.

© 2025 – CC BY-NC-ND (Book), CC-BY-SA (Text)

Herausgeber: Andreas Kellerhals – Europa Institut an der Universität ZürichVerlag: EIZ Publishing (eizpublishing.ch),Bellerivestrasse 49, CH-8008 Zürich,[email protected]:978-3-03994-003-5 (Print – Softcover)978-3-03994-004-2 (ePub)DOI: https://doi.org/10.36862/6MR3-CC1KVersion: 1.00-20250626

Dieses Werk ist gedrucktes Buch und als Open-Access-Publikation in verschiedenen digitalen Formaten verfügbar: https://eizpublishing.ch/publikationen/sicherheit-souveraenitaet-in-europa/.

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Vorwort

Die vorliegende Publikation vereint eine Auswahl von Referaten, die im Jahr 2022 auf Einladung des Europa Instituts an der Universität Zürich in der Aula der Universität Zürich gehalten wurden. Die Beiträge spiegeln die Vielfalt der Themen und Perspektiven wider, die das Europa Institut im Rahmen seines akademischen und öffentlichen Dialogs zur Zukunft Europas in den Mittelpunkt stellt.

Im Laufe des Jahres 2022 durfte das Europa Institut hochrangige Persönlichkeiten aus Politik, Wissenschaft, Diplomatie und Wirtschaft willkommen heissen. Die Referate greifen aktuelle Herausforderungen und Fragestellungen auf, die nicht nur Europa, sondern auch die internationale Staatengemeinschaft bewegen: von Fragen der internationalen Sicherheit und der europäischen Zusammenarbeit über Entwicklungen im Bildungswesen bis hin zu Aspekten der globalen Wirtschaft und der Menschenrechte. Die Vielfalt der Referate dokumentiert zugleich das breite thematische Spektrum und die internationale Vernetzung des Europa Instituts.

Ein besonderer Dank gilt allen Referentinnen und Referenten, die ihre Gedanken und Analysen im Rahmen der öffentlichen Vortragsreihe mit dem Zürcher Publikum und der internationalen Öffentlichkeit geteilt haben. Ebenso danke ich den zahlreichen Partnerinstitutionen und Unterstützern, die durch ihre Mitwirkung und Zusammenarbeit zur Realisierung dieser Veranstaltungen beigetragen haben.

Möge diese Sammlung interessierten Leserinnen und Lesern wertvolle Einsichten vermitteln und zur weiteren Auseinandersetzung mit den hier behandelten Themen anregen.

Zürich, im Jahr 2025

Prof. Dr. Andreas Kellerhals

Direktor des Europa Instituts an der Universität Zürich

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Inhaltübersicht

Prof. Dr. Gabriele SiegertDeputy President and Vice President Education and Student Affairs, University of ZurichProf. Randall BassVice President for Strategic Education, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

Challenges in Education in Switzerland & the USASpeech given on the occasion of the Public Live Streaming Swiss Day at the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich on 25 January 2022

Michael FlüggerBotschafter der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in der Schweiz und in Liechtenstein

Schweiz und Deutschland – Gemeinsam in der Mitte EuropasReferat anlässlich seines Besuches am Europa Institut an der Universität Zürich vom 1. März 2022

Botschafter Frédéric JournèsFranzösischer Botschafter in der Schweiz und in Liechtenstein

L’Union européenne en présidence française: construire l’avenir et empêcher la guerreReferat anlässlich seines Besuches am Europa Institut an der Universität Zürich vom 10 March 2022

The Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allenton CMGMember of the House of Lords, Former UK Cabinet Minister and Chief Brexit Negotiator

What is Seen and What is Not Seen: the UK, Europe, and beyondSpeech given on the occasion of the Churchill Lecture at the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich on 15 March 2022

Ambassador Chitra NarayananIndependent Strategic Advisor for Think Tanks and Corporates, former Ambassador of India to Switzerland, Liechtenstein and The Holy See, Turkey, Sweden and Latvia

The Crisis in the Functioning of DemocracySpeech given on the occasion of her visit at the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich on 23 March 2022

Manuel VallsSeit 2024 Staatsminister, Minister für Überseegebiete im Kabinett Bayrou ehemaliger französischer Premierminister 2014-2016 ehemaliger französischer Innenminister 2012-2014

La République franc¸aise face aux dangers de la contre-histoireReferat anlässlich seines Besuches am Europa Institut an der Universität Zürich vom 31. März 2022

Ambassador Kojiro ShiraishiAmbassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Japan to the Swiss Confederation, Embassy of Japan in Switzerland

Are Japanese newspapers dinosaurs on the path to extinction?Speech given on the occasion of the Japan Lecture Series at the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich on 1 April 2022

Denys ShmyhalPrime Minister of UkraineMaria MezentsevaMember of the Ukrainian Parliament (Servant of the People Party), President of the Parlamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE)Dr. Artem RybchenkoAmbassador of Ukraine to the Swiss Confederation

War in UkrainePublic Lecture and Live-Stream given at the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich on 4 April 2022

Egils LevitsPresident of the Republic of Latvia

The Price of FreedomSpeech given on the occasion of the Churchill Lecture at the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich on 11 April 2022

David MalpassPresident of the World Bank Group

Building peace, security, and prosperitySpeech given on the occasion of the Churchill Lecture at the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich on 16 Mai 2022

Dr. Andreas ZündSchweizer Richter am Europäischen Gerichtshof für Menschenrechte

Die Bedeutung der Menschenrechte im gegenwärtigen EuropaReferat anlässlich seines Besuches am Europa Institut an der Universität Zürich vom 19. Mai 2022

Livia LeuStaatssekretärin, Eidgenössisches Departement für auswärtige Angelegenheiten

Beziehungen Schweiz – EU: Perspektive der SchweizReferat anlässlich ihres Besuches am Europa Institut an der Universität Zürich vom 1. Juni 2022

Petros MavromichalisBotschafter der Europäischen Union für die Schweiz und das Fürstentum Liechtenstein

Beziehungen Schweiz – EU: Perspektive der EUReferat anlässlich seines Besuches am Europa Institut an der Universität Zürich vom 14. September 2022

Prof. Dr. Shinya YamanakaNobel Prize laureate Kyoto University, Founder & Director Emeritus of Center for iPS Cell Research and Application

Recent Progress in iPS Cell Research and ApplicationsSpeech given at the occasion of his visit at the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich on 16 September 2022

Volodymyr ZelenskyyPresident of Ukraine

War in Europe & Global Security ArchitectureSpeech given on the occasion of the Public Live Streaming at the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich on 29 September 2022

Prof. Dr. Gabriele Siegert

Gabriele Siegert und Randall Bass

Deputy President and Vice President Education and Student Affairs, University of Zurich

Prof. Randall Bass

Vice President for Strategic Education, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

Challenges in Education in Switzerland & the USA

Speech given on the occasion of the Public Live Streaming Swiss Day at the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich on 25 January 2022

Content

Introduction by Prof. Dr. Andreas Kellerhals and Ambassador Jacques PitteloudSpeech by Prof. Dr. Gabriele SiegertSpeech by Prof. Randall BassPanel discussion with Prof. Katrin Sieg and Anouk de Bast

Introduction by Prof. Dr. Andreas Kellerhals and Ambassador Jacques Pitteloud

Prof. Dr. Andreas Kellerhals (Director, Europa Institut at the University of Zurich): Ladies and gentlemen, dear viewers, on behalf of the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich, the Swiss Embassy in the United States and for the first time in cooperation with the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. I would like to welcome you to our 2021/22 Swiss Day. We have been doing this Swiss Day for about seven years now and the purpose of the event is to discuss topics of common interest for the United States and Switzerland. While in previous years the Swiss Day took place live in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington D.C., this is the second time that we are using the Internet instead. Besides some elements, of course, we are missing dearly, this format also has one big advantage: the viewers from all around the United States and Switzerland can comfortably participate from home or from the office. Therefore we are expecting a much bigger audience than before. This year’s topic is education and we want to talk about the different education systems in the US and in Switzerland. About advantages, disadvantages and current challenges. We are welcoming very attractive speakers tonight, but before I will hand over the microphone to them, I would like to give the floor to Mr. Jacques Pitteloud, Ambassador of Switzerland to the United States and co-sponsor of this event tonight. Please, Mr. Ambassador.

Ambassador Jacques Pitteloud (Ambassador of Switzerland to the USA): Thank you very much, Professor Kellerhals, for the introduction. I am delighted to be with you tonight from Washington D.C. Last November, we were fortunate enough to have the visit of the President of the Confederation, Mr. Guy Parmelin, and he was here to sign two memoranda of understanding (MoU). One expressed the will to continue and expand Swiss-American collaboration in the area of vocational education – apprenticeships – which is something where the US probably lags behind Switzerland. The other MoU was between the US and the Swiss national science foundations to create a basis for long-term cooperation and to pursue projects with partners in both countries. These are just the most recent examples in the long history of cooperation between Switzerland and the US in terms of education.

Though Switzerland’s educational system, characterized by a high degree of permeability, is quite different from our American counterpart, we also share a number of similarities. Both our countries are home to universities that top the global rankings and they are consistently ahead as worldwide leaders in innovation. We also share the values of academic freedom, openness and international mobility. Exchange and mobility between our countries is very strong. The US is the number one destination country for Swiss PhD students and all major Swiss universities have cooperation programs and exchange programs with American counterparts. I could give you dozens of examples of incredible cooperation between universities in Switzerland and the US, starting with the biggest particle accelerator – [the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab)] being built in Chicago with the help of the University of Bern. There are so many examples of fundamental science, and not just science, where the cooperation is excellent. Of course, if I would be remissed in my duties as an ambassador if I did not take this opportunity to highlight the importance, the breadth and the depth of the Swiss-US bilateral relation in general. We Swiss have more than just some political similarities and democratic values in common with our sister republic. We also share an innovative spirit which drives research and discovery. And I might add, maybe also a certain belief in the forces of the free market, which tends to be under attack right now. But this spirit is particularly visible in our respective educational institutions. So, the MoU signings were just the latest steps taken in pursuit of Swiss-US cooperation in education and research and they will most certainly not be the last.

An important topic and focus of today’s conversation is on Switzerland and the USA’s shared challenges in the field of education. Among them: How to prepare students for a rapidly changing world. Sustainability, innovation, equity, inclusion and so many others. Those working on the frontlines to prepare the next generations are doing truly important work and their devotion to the cause should give us all reason to be optimistic about the future. Our two countries are still ranking top and we should be proud about it. But at least from the Swiss perspective, the moment you are leading, that is the moment when you are starting to worry about tomorrow. That is the way these things are.

Today you will hear from experts in the field and we have an incredibly esteemed group with us today. They each contribute to this discussion from a different perspective and I look forward to hearing from all of them. Dr. Gabriele Siegert from the University of Zurich, alongside Dr. Randall Bass and Dr. Kathrin Sieg from Georgetown University here in Washington, D.C. I am also pleased that my colleague Anouk de Bast, head of the embassy’s Office of Science, Technology and Higher Education, will moderate the discussion.

One last note on Swiss-US collaboration. On behalf of myself and the embassy staff, I want to thank Professor Andreas Kellerhals and of course his fantastic colleagues at the Europa Institut for their partnership over the years. I would also like to thank the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University for its cooperation with us. This event serves as a launch and celebration of the new relationship with the BMW Center. This new relationship starts with the fact that the BMW Center will host two Swiss scholars in residence per year. We are very grateful for that. We look forward to years of fruitful cooperation to come and we are grateful to have kept the Swiss Day and our cooperation going in spite of Covid-19 and in spite of all these things being virtual. As you said, it guarantees a better audience. But on the other hand, we are missing, and I hope you are missing the reception at the Swiss residence. That said, thank you very much for co-organizing this.

The future in the 21st century will belong to those countries that will understand how important scientific cooperation is. And at a time when we witness, unfortunately, many countries shutting down the doors and trying to control all the data coming out – and trying to get as much in as possible by the way – we truly believe that Switzerland and the US have a role to play in creating the kind of scientific environment that will make it possible for us to tackle the challenges of the 21st century and there will be many. Thank you so much and have a great meeting.

A.K.: Thank you very much, Mr. Ambassador, for these introductory remarks. Of course, we are dearly missing the personal contacts, we had them in the past and we are very much looking forward to a reception at your embassy, hopefully in the fall of this year. Thank you so much. Now I would like to introduce our first speaker, Prof. Gabriele Siegert, Deputy President and Vice President Education and Student Affairs of the University of Zurich. Gabriele is going to speak about the challenges of the Swiss educational system today. Please, Gabriele.

Speech by Prof. Dr. Gabriele Siegert

Prof. Dr. Gabriele Siegert (Deputy President and Vice President Education and Student Affairs, University of Zurich): Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, I would like to thank you for inviting me to this event and I am looking forward to talking about the Swiss education system. My presentation is divided into two parts. First, I will talk about the Swiss education system in general and in the second part, I will talk about some challenges for higher education. Let us start with the Swiss education system. And let us start with money – more precisely – with education expenditure. According to the OECD, Switzerland’s total education expenditure corresponds to 4.6% of its GDP, just under the average of OECD countries. However, a different picture emerges if we relate national education expenditure to the total number of people undergoing education and training, then Switzerland has the second highest level of expenditure on education and training each year worldwide.

For those of you who are not very familiar with Switzerland, I would like to mention that Switzerland has a population of just under 9 million and is divided into 26 cantons. Why do I mention this? The Swiss education system is to a large extent a matter of the cantons. 26 cantons, that means it is rich in variety and it is a complex matter. However, it is characterized by a high degree of flexibility, for it is a very open system. After leaving the compulsory school, there are many ways to begin or to change to a different educational program, to enter or to transfer to a training program or school. Anyone who has necessary qualifications can generally attend the course of his or her choice. After the end of their compulsory education roughly two-thirds of young people in Switzerland switch to a form of education which combines classroom instruction at a vocational school with an apprenticeship in a training company. Those who gain baccalaureate can freely choose their study program at a university, but more of universities later. Altogether, more than 90% of young people complete upper secondary education. Switzerland has a strong and highly reputable vocational education. However, there are some restrictions due to ceilings on apprenticeship positions. On average 20 up to 25% of a cohort – and that depends on the canton – graduate with the baccalaureate and choose to study at a university.

Education is highly valued in Switzerland. The federal government and the cantons offer a comprehensive public education, which is completely or almost free for students. That means compulsory school is free, vocational training is free, general education is free. For example, at the University of Zurich, interested young people pay 100 CHF that equals 100 USD as an application fee and they pay a tuition fee of 720 CHF per semester. All in all, we have ten cantonal universities and two federal institutes of technology, we have eight public universities of applied sciences and arts and one private one and we have 16 universities of teacher education. There is a cluster of education institutions around the Zurich area.

When it comes to higher education, there are a few admission policy principles and they differ from other countries, therefore I would like to briefly mention them. Students admission demands a Swiss baccalaureate or an equivalent foreign certificate. Every student with a sufficient degree is entitled to be admitted to university. Universities are obliged to enroll all students qualified for and interested in bachelor studies. Currently, there is only one exception to this in the German speaking cantons: Everything that has to do with medicine is restricted. Before being allowed to study medicine, we have to pass an extra test. That includes human medicine, chiropractic, veterinary medicine and dentistry. Bachelor’s graduates from other Swiss universities must be admitted, regardless of the type and origin of their previous educational qualification. In addition, the master’s degree is still seen as a rule in university education. Holders of a bachelor’s degree have guaranteed access to master’s level education within their respective field of study in their type of university. That does not include specialized master programs.

In some disciplines, it is also possible to transfer to the Master’s level at another type of university. The teaching is based on a three cycles Bologna-model, which consists of a bachelor level after three years, a master’s level after four or five years and the possibility to get a doctor’s degree providing the master’s level has been successful. And as already mentioned, education is generally inexpensive for Swiss students, as the system relies almost entirely on public funds from the cantons and the federal government and on third-party funding.

So much for the Swiss education system in general. I would now like to move on to the second part of the challenges and I focus on higher education. I would like to speak about four challenges that will determine the core business of higher education in the future, not only in Switzerland. Challenges similar to those found in the papers of international higher education associations. The challenges are not entirely new. We know some of them, but in my opinion they will gain momentum. I call them: (1) transformative and engaged: shaping the future of society, (2) accessible and transparent: disclosing actions and results, (3) open-minded and transdisciplinary: eliminating boundaries and (4) connective and transnational: joining forces.

I will talk briefly about each of these challenges. First of all, transformative and engaged: shaping the future of society. In the future, universities have to continue to research socially relevant topics, contribute their expertise in tackling the growing global challenges, take these into account in their teaching, and seek, in a broad sense, dialogue and discourse with civil society. In other words, universities must see themselves even more than before, even more than now, as a transformative force that helps shape society. What does this mean for a university’s core business? Very briefly: stimulating discourse, actively accompanying change, enabling participation and involvement, and enabling lifelong learning. Examples for that would be additional programs for children (e.g. children’s university) or additional programs for seniors, continuing education programs for those in the workforce – the keyword would be reskilling and upskilling – or citizen science activities.

Accessible and transparent: disclosing actions and results. Universities must make their scientific achievements and results, as well as the corresponding research processes, the methods, the data, more transparent than before. The keyword is open science. Open science does not only mean open access to publications, but refers to a comprehensive and collaborative scientific practice, which also includes open research data and open educational resources. This requires support from the universities, such as repositories or other infrastructures. And yes, it also means a change in attitude. I am not naive. I am also aware that there is competition among researchers and that researchers need to be able to process and exploit their data before it can be made fully accessible. But nevertheless, we should make them accessible at a certain point in time. And because the integrity of research is becoming more important, reproducible science or the reproducibility of research results is also becoming more important.

The third one is open-minded and transdisciplinary: eliminating boundaries. Let me start with the following: disciplinary orientation is important. It is the scientific home of the researchers and lecturers and a successful academic career can often only succeed if the individuals deepen and specialize in their own discipline. But individual disciplines can solve the so called real-world problems and global challenges such as those manifested in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, less and less on their own. In most cases, they contribute a more or less large piece of the puzzle to the solution, but only a piece of the puzzle. To address these so called grand challenges on a larger scale, transdisciplinarity is needed. Transdisciplinarity understood as an approach that combines different perspectives and disciplines, links scientific knowledge and knowledge from society, and above all, deals with questions that arise from real life situations. Universities must therefore break away from disciplinary silos and move towards more towards more interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in research and in teaching.

Connective and Transnational: Joining forces. The different types of uni­ver­si­ties in Switzerland and abroad have a more or less clear and distinguishable mission. And of course, there is competition. We do not have to deny that. And, of course, competition is a good thing to a certain extent, because competition stimulates business and motivates to a certain extent. But the challenges are too great and the resource is too limited for the universities of the future to afford to act as lone wolves, neither in Switzerland nor in the international context. Rather, universities must join forces to jointly increase the impact of their activities. They must form strong alliances and collaboration. Digitalization helps to bring those international collaborations closer to the real-world working activities.

Ladies and gentlemen, many steps have been taken to address these chal­lenges, but there is still quite a way to go. University management must prepare for this and that requires good university leadership. But if I start talking about leadership, my colleague, Professor Randall Bass does not get a word in edgewise. Therefore, with an image of the University of Zurich and the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, I thank you for the attention and hand back the word to Prof. Dr. Andreas Kellerhals.

A.K.: Thank you very much, Gabriele, for this very comprehensive presentation on the Swiss educational system. Now we move on to our second speaker. This will be Professor Randall Bass, Vice President for Strategic Education of Georgetown University. His topic is: Equal opportunities in education. Access to education in the United States. Please, Randall. Go ahead.

Speech by Prof. Randall Bass

Prof. Randall Bass (Vice President for Strategic Education, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.): Thank you very much, Professor Kellerhals. And thank you, Professor Siegert, for a wonderful presentation. I think our pre­sen­ta­tions will complement each other in wonderful ways. And thank you to all of the organizers of the Swiss Day. I am very honored to be here. So, I will be giving the US perspective and I have structured my presentation similarly to Professor Siegert, although it will not be quite as well organized, but I think we are moving in the very same direction with lots of connections.

I wanted to begin by quoting a book that very recently came out that seemed very resonant with today’s event. It was written primarily by Ronald Daniels, who is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University in the United States, and it’s called What Universities Owe Democracy. In the book he talks about four key functions of American higher education, many of which, of course, overlap with the Swiss: social mobility, citizenship education, the stewardship of facts and truth, and the cultivation of pluralistic, diverse communities. It felt appropriate to begin with these four goals because I think that they are in many ways the ideals that are shared between the US and the Swiss. In the book, President Daniels talks about these goals, but the US higher education is not meeting the challenges in any one of those four areas and that is really what motivates him. He is particularly motivated, and the ambassador touched on this, by what he would call this moment: A perilous moment for democracy. He says: “In order to respond to that, universities cannot be complacent. They must look hard at who they admit, how they teach, how they explore and share knowledge, and how they connect their discoveries with the teeming, diverse world beyond their walls. In this light, the relevant question is not how do we shape society to nourish the university, but rather how does the university best foster democracy in our society?” That feels like the appropriate door into this brief presentation.

And now let me talk a little bit about the US context and the US system of higher education in parallel to Professor Siegert, keeping the context of how universities shape democracy in mind. First, to talk about the US higher education system, I will quote one of my favorite authors, who is a historian of education and who wrote a book a few years ago about the US higher education system which he called “a perfect mess”. He describes the US higher education system as a system without a plan, which strikes me as being quite the antithesis of the Swiss system. He also describes that there is a fundamental tension in the US system between social accessibility – the broad democratic reach – and social exclusivity which speaks to our liberalist tendencies toward individualism and mobility. And here, he says, what allows us to accommodate both our democratic and our liberal tendencies in higher education is stratification. We can make universities both accessible and elite by creating a pyramid of institutions in which access is inclusive at the bottom and exclusive at the top. Such a system simultaneously extends opportunity and protects privilege. This comes out looking, as he says, something like a pyramid. And here is a diagram of the US education system and as with the Swiss one, there are of course many ways and places to go after you leave secondary school including into vocational and technical education. Although, as the ambassador noted, it is not nearly as well developed as the apprenticeship systems in Switzerland. Then there are community colleges and a variety of undergraduate programs and then one could go on up into doctoral studies. Research intensive universities – as most places – along with small, private liberal arts colleges, sit at the top of this stratified system. They have most of the resources and they confer most of the social advantage. And yet, more than 50% of students in the country are in the vocational and community colleges or what we might call broad access institutions. They sit at the bottom of the pyramid both in terms of the numbers of resources and in terms of their social advantage.

Theoretically, our system has the same kind of permeability as the Swiss system. But structural inequalities in our society, the decline of state support – significant decline of public dollars to higher education – and the per­va­siveness over the last few decades of coming to see education as a private good and not a public good have all made the permeability and the mobility of the system very challenged. This is put quite sharply and bluntly by the well-known historian of higher education, Chad Wellmon, who wrote a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently called The Crushing Contradictions of the American University. He said: “American higher education has produced many goods, but it also launders privilege, luck of birth and circumstance and financial and social greed into socially acceptable status under the rubric of merit. And it now exacerbates persistent and worsening financial and social inequalities.”

That is a very blunt comment, but I thought it was worth sharing and it is also borne out by the data. This is a chart of attainment of higher education in the United States by quartiles of socioeconomic status. If you look in the 1960s, the lowest socioeconomic quartile had about 6% attainment and the highest had about 40%. 20 years later, the highest had grown to over 60% and the lowest socioeconomic quartile remained flatlined. This now is jumping ahead to the great global recession in which the highest took a little bit of a dip, but the lowest remains the same. And if you look at the current situation, it appears that the lowest quartile is taking a slight uptick and we will see if that continues. That might be the case because of enormous work that has gone on in the United States around what might be called student success. Not just access, but helping through the persistence to graduation. But it remains to be seen if that uptick will last. We know that it is being challenged by the pandemic since 2019, meaning the effect of the pandemic closures etc. Enrollment in US universities is down about 6%, which means that we have lost almost half a million students from the system and that the vast majority of that drop has been at the widest access institutions of the pyramid.

As this headline indicates: “The most vulnerable are the ones who have left the system by and large.” All of that speaks really to – as I turn to thinking about challenges – what many have called for a long time, the iron triangle. The idea of how do we achieve quality, access and affordability, meaning controlling costs both to the consumer and to the institution? What Steve Ehrmann in a recent book called “the three fold change”, being able to achieve all three of those at once is what is known as the iron triangle. And there may be nothing more important for higher education in the next couple of decades than to take on this iron triangle the way we would take on other major complex challenges and to consider it a wicked problem and not an easily fixable problem. As I talk a little bit more about challenges in the last part of my presentation, I want to put this in a broader perspective. A lot of my work is thinking about how this moment we are in, and in some ways the pandemic, really comes in the middle of at least a 50-year shift institution? What Steve – periodization is always tricky – but there are reasons to begin this shift around 1990 and to think forward a couple of decades.

I think this shift is characterized by at least two major revolutions. The digital revolution, which, of course, we do not need to spend time on, we are all familiar with it, but also the human revolution. What we have learned in the last 20 or 30 years about human capacity, human learning, and the nature of how humans develop, it seems to me is as important a revolution as the digital one. Both of these come together in what I think of as the new learning paradigm. And let me give you just four characteristics of the new learning paradigm. I think these will comport very well with Prof. Siegert’s very wonderful, comprehensive structure that you gave us.

First, we know – from a significant base of evidence – that active learning, inclusive and holistic teaching, significantly improves learning. That is, that the quality of teaching and learning design improves learning. That may seem obvious, but actually it is only in the last couple of decades that we actually have the evidentiary base that the nature of teaching and learning design actually improves student learning. This is part of the new paradigm. We know that cognitive and academic learning is not enough, that we have to educate the whole person. What we have learned about socioemotional learning, about resilience, about empathy, about creativity, about humility, not only are these qualities that are good for people to have, but that they are actually constitutive of intelligence and of knowledge and of success, and that these need to be very much designed into everything that we imagine what an education can be. We now know that the skills of the future cannot be formed in traditional classrooms alone, and they must be cultivated through ex­pe­ri­ence. Finally, we now know that the world’s most complex challenges will require interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thought, creativity, and action, just as Prof. Siegert was emphasizing. A question I like to ask often is: If we were designing higher education for this moment in history without any legacies, what would it look like? And when I ask this question every semester in a class that I teach called “The university as a design problem”. We tell the students that if you are designing for 20 years from now or more, you are no longer designing for content, you are designing for context.

So what will the conditions of knowledge, technology, learning and work be like in 20 years? And what kind of graduate would we want to produce? What do we know about the future? We know that it will be filled with a variety of existential threats that I think we can talk about in the final discussion. But obviously, these are all threats that we share, the US and Switzerland. We know that it will significantly reshape the future of human work. Levy and Murnane, who did some of their earliest work in the 2000s, say that in the future, the very near future, the human labor market will center on only three kinds of work: solving unstructured problems, working with new, complex information, and carrying out non-routine manual tasks. Every other kind of work will be done by robots or by low-level manual labor. These are the kinds of skills we need to educate students for. And this is the argument that Joseph E. Aoun makes in his book Robot Proof where he says that the only way to really robot-proof students for the future is to ground their education in experience, in unstructured problems and mentored learning through very volatile, uncertain circumstances.

He says: “No computer has yet displayed creativity, entrepreneurialism or cultural agility and although machines are continuously improving in their ability to map knowledge onto recognizable problems”, what he calls near transfer, “they cannot perform far transfer well, at least not in the infinite context of real life.” For me, this is the final challenge when we think about the challenges of education. It is not whether machines will get better at being human, but we know that machines are going to get better at being machines. And the question is, is higher education prepared to help humans get better at being human?

To close, these are my last four thoughts about how to respond to the challenges for higher education. One: take on this iron triangle of quality, access and affordability again, as if it were a grand challenge, as if it were cli­mate change, as if it were cancer.

Two: Expand evidence-based teaching and learning practices to align with the world’s needs. Our universities are at the moment not built-in optimal ways for the kind of education that the world is asking for.

Three: Push the frontiers of human intelligence, thinking not only about human capacity, but the relationship of human intelligence to machine learn­ing, but also to what we are learning about natural intelligence, mycelial networks and other aspects of nature we did not know 20 years ago.

And finally, liberate our conception of quality education from its historical exclusions rooted in racialized hierarchies, rooted in a cartesian split between head and heart, and the separation of humans from the environment. Michael Crow and his co-authors say in their recent book, The Fifth Wave of Higher Education: “America’s future depends on embracing the idea that excellence and access in higher education are not incompatible, but synergistic.” And that, to me, captures this paradigm shift and the challenge that is facing us in the decades ahead. Thank you.

A.K.: Thank you very much, Randy, for this excellent presentation and also for providing us with a wonderful list of books we urgently have to read. All those five or six books are extremely interesting, and we are going to buy them tomorrow. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the two speakers have set the scene for the following panel discussions, which will be hosted by Anouk de Bast. Anouk is the head of the science office at the Swiss Embassy in Washington, D.C. and I would like to thank you very much for taking on this task. The panel will be joined by Professor Katrin Sieg, director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. We are delighted to have her on that panel as the head of our new partner institution. Thank you very much, Katrin, for doing that. The panel discussion will last about 30 minutes. Please, Anouk, the floor is yours.

Panel discussion with Anouk de Bast and Prof. Katrin Sieg

Anouk de Bast (Head of Office of Science, Technology and Higher Education at Embassy of Switzerland in the USA): Thank you so much and good evening to Zurich. Good afternoon to the people listening to us from the US. My name is Anouk de Bast, I am the head of the science office here in Washington, D.C. and as was mentioned before, I will be moderating this discussion and also be your main time keeper and closing the discussion at the end. We have a lot of interesting food for thought that has been presented in the two first presentations and I also would like to encourage you to ask a question online if you have any questions for our two speakers today. We would very much welcome them. It is my pleasure to also welcome the new panelist here, Katrin Sieg, she is the director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. She is a theater scholar by training and an expert on German theater – I am very curious about that – and also an expert on contemporary European culture. So, Professor Sieg, I would like to start with you. Your center is bridging the German speaking and the American culture. Could you give us some general feedback and your impressions from these two first presentations?

Katrin Sieg (Director, BMW Center for German and European Studies): Yes. Thank you so much, Anouk and thank you to both panelists for really wonderful presentations that complimented each other really well. I could kind of give you some examples of how these very large philosophical questions play out on a smaller scale in my center. But I thought I would actually frame my contribution in terms of two questions that I would like to ask the two panelists. With regard to Prof. Siegert, I want to say that I really appreciated her emphasis on the permeability of the Swiss educational system which allows you to be both very innovative and to ensure broad access and social mobility at the same time. Now, I was actually born and raised in Germany, which has to some degree a similar educational system with vocational tracks and similar large public universities that are very accessible. But I think where the crux of the matter is how newcomers to Switzerland, that is migrants and refugees and their children, for instance are treated. How do they benefit from the innovation, the broad access and the social mobility that is promised to Swiss citizens and how are they empowered to benefit from these features of your system?

In Germany, I observed that very often migrants and their children are tracked into vocational training and away from university training and advanced degrees. I was wondering if that is to some degree also what is happening in Switzerland and if so, how does your system accommodate matters of equity? How can you democratize the educational system in that way? And then, also knowing a little bit more about the German secondary educational system, I observed that there has been quite a remarkable growth of private schools over the last 10 to 20 years that to some degree undermine the nice kind of democratic broad access promised by the public educational system. So that is my big question to Prof. Siegert.

And then to Professor Bass: I also want to express my appreciation for your wonderful presentation on what universities should give to democracies, what they owe democracies. That is both to ensure access and also excellence at the same time. In your presentation you come to the final assertion that they should. Now, as a director of a center, I am also directly affected by these matters. We have been in the fallout of the discussion of the killing of George Floyd two years ago. There has been a broad discussion of decolonizing the university and also democratizing it. But we are really hitting roadblocks in terms of overcoming the structural problem of stratification that you outlined so beautifully. We have made efforts to alter our pedagogies. We have made efforts to alter our curricula and decolonize our curricula. We can also alter whom we invite to get short term teaching contracts. Of course, it is very difficult to affect long term kind of durable changes to the demographics of the faculty body, but we can have an effect on who we invite to speak at public events. In all these cases diversity, equity and inclusion are very relevant to what we are doing and how we become conscious of our debt of democratization to society. But how do we alter the demographics of students? How do we alter the demographics of faculty since they are so intimately tied to structures of privilege and class inequality in the United States? We find ourselves really stumped by this problem. And of course, we are encouraged to do fundraising in order to raise money for student scholarships but education at Georgetown University and at many other elite universities is extremely expensive. And so to us it is a really huge challenge to overcome that. So those are my big questions or invitations to explore this further. Thank you.

A.d.B.: Prof. Siegert, ladies first, would you like to start?

G.S.: Of course. So, Katrin, thank you very much for the question. I would like to mention that I am a double citizen, I am German and Swiss, so I know the German system very well. In my opinion, the Swiss system is much more open, much more interlinked and vocational education is much more valued be it regarding to one’s position in society, be it with regard to one’s income. For example, I have many friends who are highly educated craftsmen. Swiss craftsmen who speak several languages, who have careers not only in Switzerland but also in the United States, for example. There are lots of possibilities to make a career and the Swiss system is really an open system. However, there is one big challenge, which is the transition into high school. You still have to pass a test before you get from elementary school to high school. And, of course, there are many wealthy parents who can afford to prepare their children with private lessons for this test or to send them if they would not pass the test to private schools. We need to think about access to high school, not so much about access to university. Because once you graduate from high school, you have free access to university. Access to high school depends on the canton. In Geneva, 35% of a cohort goes to high school, while in Zurich it’s only 20%. So the selection is much higher in Zurich.

You also asked about the refugees. As far as I know, every refugee in Switzerland has a kind of integration budget, and this budget can be spent on various kinds of education. The University of Geneva and the University of Zurich both have a refugee program. This is a program that trains language skills in German and prepares the refugees for university studies, or at least explains the system to them and gives them solid information so they can make a good choice for their future path. This is our contribution to make the situation a bit better for the refugees.

A.d.B.: Thank you very much, Prof. Siegert. If I can complement this, our former Swiss Secretary of Education always said that among his five kids only two went to university. These are sons and daughters of a Secretary of Education and the ones that earned the highest salary are the ones that did not go to university. This obviously has a huge impact on your perspective of having a very successful career in Switzerland. Your salary does not depend on whether you went to college. It also plays a role, obviously, when you look at the long term. Prof. Brass, the ball is in your hands now. You were asked a very difficult question. Good luck with that one.

R.B.: Thank you, Katrin, for the question. It is, of course, very challenging. I have several quick responses. The first is that I think if we are to take on the question of access and excellence, we need to take a deep breath and somehow stay both urgent about it and understand that it is a long game, that any quick fixes will probably only make the situation worse in some way. It is maintaining a sense of focus, but also understanding that it is a systems approach and a long game. But here are now two or three specific responses to the question.

First, as you were setting up the question, you kept saying, we are trying to decolonize the university, we are trying to change our pedagogy, etc. I would say the first piece is that we need to expand the we. I know that the we, as spoken by you and your colleagues, means we, but there are many parts of the university for whom it is not yet a project to decolonize or to open or to make more equitable or to think about antiracism in any way. Part of it is to really continue to push, to say that this is an institutional value and that has to come both from the bottom and the top of the institution.

Second, I think, is to adopt a stance that this is a systemic strategy. Institutions need to organize themselves to say, how are we recruiting new kinds of faculty? How are we recruiting new kinds of students? How are we diversifying the graduate programs, which is a very different pipeline problem than getting from secondary schools to high schools, which, of course, starts building the longer pipeline for diverse faculty. How are we creating a better climate so that students feel a sense of belonging when they are here and stay here? Those are the kinds of approaches where one just has to say that this has to be a comprehensive and systems level approach. Each of those will have its own trajectory. Some will move at faster paces. There is a professor here at Georgetown, Prof. Robert Bies in the business school, who always uses the phrase: “It’s about direction, not distance.” The key is just to keep moving in the right direction. And then finally, I would say universities need to find the courage – and here is where I am so glad that nobody else is listening, my boss or anything like that – to push themselves.

I think part of Chad Wellmon’s point is that we are not living up to our own values. We claim we are, we are to some extent, but we are really not pushing ourselves as much as we should. So pushing ourselves in terms of concept, pushing ourselves in terms of resources and pushing ourselves in terms of our willingness to expand business models to reach new populations and to feel comfortable that our brand will survive if we expand our business models in new ways. And I think it is going to take all of what I have mentioned in order to make progress toward this. As any wicked problem, there is no single solution.

A.d.B.: Thank you, Prof. Bass, you are talking about brands and added value. This is something that we also share in Switzerland, the reputation of the institution. Taking you up on the aspect of having the courage to push the university in the right direction. I would like to ask both of you the question that was slightly touched upon regarding the role of the university, of the higher education institution, in this continuously evolving time. If you look right now, the challenge of environmental issues, of climate, is a huge one. In your view, what is the role of higher education in addressing these specific challenges? Would it be on the education side and also on the research side? Maybe you can start first Prof. Siegert.

G.S.: Thank you very much for the question. To address these grand challenges, we need the best minds, we need critical thinkers and we need problem solvers. And this is the task of universities to prepare the students for that. Problem solving, as my colleague Randall said in his presentation, is a contextual concept. It is not just about gaining knowledge but also about practicing to work together in teams, taking into account real-world problems. Scientific disciplines are sometimes too narrow-minded, focusing on their own discipline, being in this path without seeing that for most problems you need to involve different disciplines. However, this is how universities are traditionally structured. The traditional structure of the university is pretty disciplinary. You study math, for example, and not many other things. And we need to offer students programs that are also more transdisciplinary, more practical, that deal with real-life problems and involve many disciplines. That is not an easy task. It is not an easy task because the colleagues usually think of their own discipline as the one and only – for good reasons – and do not think of the fact that there are several others that also contribute largely to the solution of a problem. We at the University of Zurich have established a very small school for transdisciplinary studies and we trying to offer programs or at least modules, that deal, for example, with sustainability in a multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary way. This is a very small, tiny school. Nevertheless, it is the first step and we trying to continuously improve that.

A.d.B.: Thank you, Prof. Siegert. Prof. Bass, any comments on this point?

R.B.: Yes. Certainly I entirely agree with Prof. Siegert’s point about trans­dis­ci­plinarity and interdisciplinarity, what the National Science Foundation would call a convergence approach to a very complex challenge, where you are bringing disciplines together in ways that are even inventing new ways to think about new ways to think about disciplines. That is essential. I completely agree. I would add just two things. One is that I think universities, which occupy space, often in very complex ecosystems, need to model sustainability practices, need to model those practices, both their students, the way they function as parts of the landscape and to extend that modeling of sus­tain­ability to their surrounding communities, whatever kind of community, an institution of higher education is. That is also a thing that I think that universities are uniquely capable of, to shape what happens as an organization and to connect to the communities around us. And then the last thing I will say that I think is also essential as a response is that it is all the disciplines that Prof. Siegert mentioned including – and I am sure she would include these absolutely – all those parts of education that teach one cultural humility. That teach one imagination. That give one empathy. That will position us to respond to the world’s most vulnerable people who will be differentially affected by climate change – or climate apartheid as people discuss – including the role for the arts in better understanding and communicating about climate. It is a truly transdisciplinary approach that really helps shape how it is that we respond to the world’s most vulnerable people. Because that has to be part of the environmental response.

A.d.B.: Thank you, Prof. Bass. I do see we have one question from the audience regarding mobility. The Ambassador mentioned how important this mobility of students and these people moving, doing part of their studies in Europe, in the US, is important also in terms of shaping the minds and tackling also these challenges in order to get a better cultural understanding. We do have a question saying that it is usually very hard, for example, for a person with a US high school diploma to get into a Swiss university without having to fulfil a lot of requirements. So maybe this question would be for you, Prof. Siegert. Has it changed? Is it still as difficult to get into a Swiss university with a US high school diploma? And how come this is the case?

G.S.: Yes, thank you for the question. Ideed, it is not easy to get access to the university because the entrance requirement is a Swiss High School degree or equivalent certificate. The Swiss certificate is very demanding. We have twelve subjects that you have to graduate in and there is indeed the problem that people from abroad sometimes do not fit into the system because they do not equal at least six subjects. We require at least six subjects – and mathematics is one of them, for example –to be on the certificate. The problem is that some degrees do not achieve that, and then we have a very strict rule that we do not give those applicants access to the university. This is a strict rule for the whole of Switzerland. It might be easier to study at a university in the United States and try to do an exchange to a Swiss university. I think that is the better and easier way to get access to the university.

A.d.B.: Thank you, Prof. Siegert, for also providing us with a concrete rec­om­men­dation on how to study in Switzerland. I see the time is flying by. I have a last question for you before we wrap this up. If you had a magical wand and you could change one thing in your respective education system – in the US or in Switzerland – what would it be? Just one wish for your respective education system. And maybe we can start with you, Prof. Siegert.

G.S.: Then I would like to see us really focus on the best minds and really make the selection based on performance and not on the parents’ budget.

A.d.B.: Thank you, Prof. Siegert. Prof. Bass?

R.B.: I think my wish would be that we could rapidly convert the majority of instruction, especially at the broader introductory end of the most difficult courses, to team instruction, or as Herbert Simon said, from a solo act to a team sport. I think if we for the most part stopped thinking of university teaching as something an individual does with one person and many students, and thought of it instead as a team, and I do not just mean two faculty, but a whole team of people delivering a very complex experience for a very complex world that would change everything.

A.d.B.: Katrin Sieg, what would you wish both for the US and for Switzerland?

K.S.: What I would love is to have all education be free in the United States.

A.d.B.: I believe we are wrapping up slowly but surely at the end of our panel. I remember that all of us should have the courage to change things. It is always difficult to move institutions, no matter what kind of institution it is. I take that as a take home message for myself too. That we should educate young people also in solving problems and not only to know things. I do believe this is important because there are many challenges to solve in this world and in the future, and also breaking the silos between the disciplines and trying to work together. This is definitely something that is very important, also at work, between friends, in building a democracy. I believe that these would be my three take home messages from this panel. I would like to give the floor back to Prof. Kellerhals. Thank you very much for letting me moderate this discussion with you and I will let you finalize.

A.K.: Thank you very much Anouk and thank you very much to the three panelists. This was a wonderful, great discussion. I would have loved to continue to listen to what you have to say and we realize that our time limits are much to short here, and I just had the idea that maybe we should repeat such a conference a bit later on, because there is much more stuff we can debate on education in these two countries. Thank you very much for your extremely valuable contribution.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this already brings us to the end of the Swiss Day, 2021/22. I hope you liked the edition and I would like to invite you back to this program when we do the next Swiss Day, which will probably be in fall 2022. At the end, I would like to thank the Ambassador of Switzerland, Jacques Pitteloud, the two speakers, Prof. Siegert and Prof. Bass, also, of course, Prof. Sieg for her excellent contributions during the panel discussion, Anouk de Bast for a skillful moderation and everybody else who was involved in making this event tonight possible. Ladies and gentlemen, please come back and all the very best. Stay healthy and goodbye.

Michael Flügger

Michael Flügger

Botschafter der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in der Schweiz und in Liechtenstein

Schweiz und Deutschland – Gemeinsam in der Mitte Europas

Referat anlässlich seines Besuches am Europa Institut an der Universität Zürich vom 1. März 2022

Es sind vielfältige Stimmen, die bei Ihnen zu diesem Thema zu Wort kommen. Ich freue mich, eine davon sein zu dürfen. Denn wenn wir Europa sagen, dann ist immer auch die Rede von der Vielfalt – Vielfalt an Kulturen, Sprachen und Staaten, welche unser Kontinent auf engstem Raum versammelt.

Deutschland und die Schweiz tragen ganz sicher zu dieser Vielfalt bei. Zwei föderale Staaten, die sich innerhalb ihrer Grenzen jeweils auf regionale und kulturelle Vielfalt gründen – und zugleich zwei sehr unterschiedliche, von ihrer Geschichte geprägte Verfassungen und Formen ihrer europäischen Teilhabe entwickelt haben.