Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences
short-listed for support by Germany’s Excellence Initiative

On 20 January 2006 the commission of the German Research Foundation and the German Science Council announced the results of the first step of the governmental “Excellence Initiative” (Exzellenzinitiative) for furthering elite universities and excellent science in Germany. Within the category “Graduate Schools” the proposal of the University of Bremen for a "Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences" (BIGSSS), in which IUB will participate, reached the second and crucial step in the decision procedure.

[ Jan 24, 2006]  The "Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences" is one of about 40 graduate school projects the commission selected for further consideration among the 135 submitted proposal drafts. Featuring the umbrella theme „The Future of Social and Political Integration” BIGSSS is designed to comprise in total six themes from the social and political sciences as well as from social and developmental psychology. A center for methods in the social sciences will round out the program. Under the lead of the University of Bremen, which will provide sociologist Karin Gottschall as dean to-be, IUB will be responsible for designing and organizing the research and teaching focuses "Attitude Formation, Value Orientations, and Cultural Change" and "Life Course Dynamics" as well as the method center. Klaus Boehnke, psychologist and methods expert is advised to be one of the vice deans.

„Our strong points are the internationality of our scientific profile and our student recruitment as well as the transdiciplinary concept encompassing the classical social and political sciences, various fields of psychology as well as law,“ says Klaus Boehnke, IUB coordinator of the proposal. After reviewing the complete proposals by mid-October about 20 of all proposed graduate school projects that have passed the first selection step will be elected for a five-year support starting in November 2006. If selected, BIGSSS can expect a yearly support of about 1 million euros. Other categories of the Excellence Initiative, which will provide in total 1.9 billion euros until 2011, are the so-called “excellence clusters” and big scope “future concepts” that support excellent university-based research. The initiative is designed to internationally accentuate the excellence of German research and to stimulate a quality-oriented competition among German universities.