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Faculty forces president to quit Swiss role

Leading European university in turmoil.

One of Europe's star universities nose-dived into crisis last week when its faculty members forced the president to resign.

Molecular biologist Ernst Hafen, who took over the reins at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich last December, submitted his resignation letter on 1 November, a day before a planned faculty vote of confidence he was certain to lose. "It has become clear over the past few days that I don't have the necessary support to continue," Hafen said in a statement. Hafen had been mandated to reform the ETH by its supervisory council. But his style and his plans both angered and failed to convince senior professors, who banded together to demand that he go. Hafen is not the first ETH president to have been forced out ? there was a quiet resignation in the late 1980s. But the university, which trumpeted its 150th anniversary last year, has never experienced such hostile internal turmoil. The ETH came out as the top-performing university in mainland Europe and 27th in the world in the University of Shanghai's 2006 world ranking of universities. It claims 21 Nobel prizewinners, starting with the first laureate, Wilhelm Röntgen, in 1901. Alexander Zehnder, president of the ETH Council, had even greater ambitions: he wanted to raise the university into the top ten worldwide, and asked Hafen to make organizational changes to that end. Hafen, a highly regarded researcher with a strong publication record, had been considered by the ETH Council ? a body nominated for five-year periods by the Swiss federal government ? as an ideal candidate to do this. At 50, he was still young. He had experience in setting up a biotech company, The Genetics Company, and he worked in a research area ? systems biology ? that is a Swiss priority. Hafen is one of the co-developers of Systems X, the prestigious Swiss national systems-biology network. Former scientific colleagues refer to Hafen as warm and collegial. But ETH faculty members were clearly not seduced, claiming that his challenges to all aspects of their work encroached on their traditional autonomy. They said that his plans for a rapid reform of the university, a programme known internally as ETH 2020, were ill conceived ? and that Hafen often failed to explain which problems they were designed to solve, and how they would solve them. Worse still, critics say, Hafen set up a consultation procedure but then ignored their own carefully formulated input. Attacks on Hafen by some faculty members reportedly became personal. Key reforms included abolishing the position of rector, who is elected by the faculty to take charge of university teaching, which under the new plan would be run by the president's office, and changing the ETH's 15 departments into a smaller number of schools to be run by professional deans. D. BOSCHUNG/ETH ZURICH Ernst Hafen failed to gain backing for his reforms. This structure was introduced into Switzerland's other federal university, EPF Lausanne, five years ago and met "a lot of resistance from the faculty initially", says Patrick Aebischer, the university's president. Aebischer's reforms, which included the addition of a new life-sciences department, are now widely regarded internally and externally as a success. But at the ETH, Hafen was unable to overcome faculty resistance. As tempers peaked at the end of October, the ETH board, composed of the rector, the president and two vice-presidents, put the ETH 2020 programme on hold ? against Hafen's wishes. The heads of all departments except biology, where Hafen remains a faculty member, supported a letter on 24 October demanding his resignation. After attempts at reconciliation and public statements admitting his mistakes, Hafen finally conceded defeat. The rector, Konrad Osterwalder, will act as president until a new one is appointed, a process that may take at least a year.