The conference was conceived out of a sense of urgency about numerous issues confronting the higher education system in both countries. The focus was on research universities in Germany and the United States and the problems they face in preserving both research quality and integrity in the face of decreasing government funding, as well as its “pure” character in the face of growing involvement of business in research support and its accompanying pressure for research of a more applied character.

Although the systems of the two countries are very different, issues of access, affordability, and the quality of the teaching program are critical right now as each country’s system attempts to deal with growing numbers of qualified students, the real costs of their education, and the conflict arising from the idealized partnering of research and teaching.

These issues and many others are closely connected to the relative degree of power for institutions to govern themselves and allocate their own budgets. This is a particularly burning issue in Germany where real control lies with state govenments and ministries, rather than within the governing structure of each university.

In the United States, governance issues are thought to be equally critical, but from the perspective of maintianing the autonomy of public institutions free from political interference and a functional consensus among faculty and admininstrators to preserve the mission of their universities.

Further complicating an already highly complex series of concerns, are the trends in disciplinary change expressed in part in a move toward increasing “interdisciplinarity.” Here, too, there are close parallels between the two countries.