GERMANY, New education and research minister sworn in after Schavan resigns

Christian Democrat Johanna Wanka was sworn in as Germany’s new education and research minister on 14 February. Wanka succeeds Annette Schavan, who announced last weekend that she would resign, after being tripped up by a plagiarism affair.

Higher education in Germany has taken a bashing following a string of plagiarism scandals, culminating in the previous education minister being stripped of her doctoral title by the University of Düsseldorf earlier this month.

Schavan announced her resignation after a panel investigating her PhD thesis found she was guilty of “deliberate deception” in using text that was not properly attributed. She said she would take legal action against the university’s decision and that the allegations “have hurt me deeply”.



New minister Wanka (61) seeks to boost the reputation of higher education by granting institutions maximum autonomy and promoting their ability to control their own affairs.

Wanka can boast considerable experience in higher education politics, having served as minister of higher education and research under a Social Democrat-Christian Democrat coalition government in Brandenburg for nearly 10 years and having been appointed for the same office in Lower Saxony under a Christian Democrat-Free Democrat coalition in 2010.

With talks in progress on a new Social Democrat-Green Party coalition government in Lower Saxony following recent elections, Wanka will almost certainly lose her current post there anyway.

Wanka comes from Rosenfeld, Saxony, in East Germany. She studied mathematics and obtained her doctorate in 1980. She was a member of the civil rights movement in the then German Democratic Republic, and joined the Christian Democratic Union in 2001.

She has been a staunch supporter of tuition fees, although Lower Saxony is one of the few federal states that have retained fees so far.

State governments are calling for a €4 billion (US$5.3 billion) support package to compensate for a drastic surge in student numbers brought about by the end of conscription and double cohorts of school-leavers due to the introduction of shorter higher secondary education.

With Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble, a fellow Christian Democrat, pursuing a strict austerity policy in federal spending, and facing a Social Democrat-Green majority in state governments, Wanka could have little leeway for new measures.

And she may have little time as well, with federal elections set for September.

Schavan’s departure came as a setback for German Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of elections. She is the second member of Merkel’s cabinet to have resigned over plagiarism – former defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg left his post in 2011.