Development since 2005: ETH today
When things become more flexible, security has to be provided in other ways. ETH has gained this security by establishing more global networks, by upgrading its information technology and by gradually turning itself into a university specialising in science and technology.
Ever since the 1970s, the process of appointing professors has become far more international. All the evaluations and rankings that began sprouting up everywhere in the late 1980s meant that ETH's performance could be compared internationally, and from the late 1990s a great deal of hard work was done on the "Europeanisation" of higher education with the Bologna Reform. Globalisation has also meant that ETH has to compete internationally for outstanding doctoral students. Finally, we cannot underestimate the linguistic, media-related and polemical pressure for greater standardisation that scientific publishing has experienced in recent decades.
New coping strategies in day-to-day university operations
In any case, the increasing flexibility of its structures – supported by the use of information technology – plus the changed world in which ETH was operating led to new coping strategies in day-to-day university life. In recent years, ETH has turned itself into a university for science and technology whose members are well aware of the laws of supply and demand, who know which sales and consumer markets are most open to their information and how they can present themselves as experts in self-management or change management.
Members of ETH will play an even more radical role in shaping the future than the founders of the early Polytechnikum could ever have dreamt. The decisions that the university's leadership has to make are increasingly far-reaching and forward-looking – from the structure of degree programmes to the appointment of professors. Connected with this is the fact that the university's research must remain clearly distinguishable from the more application-oriented focus of the universities of applied sciences. This is why it focuses on subjects for which any industrial application lies in the increasingly distant future.
At the same time – and this is a new phenomenon – planning and reporting in today’s change management are more and more often tightly controlled, so that the future is more closely interwoven with the present. It is not without good reason that ETH today welcomes its visitors into the "World of Tomorrow". The sensors of the university's reporting system can already detect in the present the smallest sign of future changes.
Even the mechanics of the institution itself have been made so flexible that they are sensitive to the slightest signal from the databases and to the effects of the media today. Nevertheless, such "fine tuning" in real time (i.e. the IT-assisted, coordinated act of "listening" to what is on the ground at the university) is now held in a delicate balance with that entirely different management principle that we call "leadership", and which once again is authorised to issue directives.