Bettina Stark-Watzinger appears tense as she appears before the Bundestag Committee for Education and Research on Wednesday. It is not a routine meeting to which the committee has invited the liberal Federal Minister of Education. Rather, numerous committee members are demanding “factual clarification” in the so-called funding affair: about the circumstances of the dismissal of Stark-Watzinger’s State Secretary Sabine Döring and about the “current allegations against the Federal Minister for Education and Research,” as the invitation stated.
There is a serious suspicion against the FDP politician. “Did the minister lie to the public?” asked the “Spiegel” magazine at the beginning of the week. Internal records from the ministry raise questions about the veracity of the previous statements on the subsidy scandal, the magazine reported.
The accusation: Contrary to her own assurances, Stark-Watzinger may have known that her ministry was investigating whether funding could be cut for university professors who had expressed criticism in an open letter about the police clearing of a pro-Palestinian protest camp at the Free University of Berlin.
The reason for this was an internal email exchange that was made public via the “Ask the State” platform, which revealed that the ministry had already requested a list on May 10 “of the signatories we directly or indirectly support” – three days before the May 13 request for an audit commissioned by the now-ousted State Secretary Döring. However, the sender’s name was blacked out. A second email stated that it was “about reactive language” for the government press conference.
Was this all the independent action of the ministry, as Stark-Watzinger claims? “I did not give the order to have the legal consequences of funding examined, nor did I want to,” the minister always asserted. She herself claims to have only learned about the events on June 11th from a report in the ARD magazine “Panorama”.
The Education and Research Committee of the Bundestag wants to know exactly what happened on Wednesday. One of the main questions is the question from CDU education expert Thomas Jarzombek about who commissioned the list of university lecturers funded by the ministry. A question that Stark-Watzinger only partially answers.
The overview was created “at a technical level” “in order to be prepared for questions from the press”. Neither she nor the head of her management team had given the order, nor had the list been presented to her – she did not want to say anything more, “also to protect my employees, who are now under fire”.
However, it is also clear that at least at times the impression had been created at the ministry’s technical level that, in addition to a legal classification of the open letter, an examination of possible consequences under funding law had also been commissioned, said Stark-Watzinger. In the course of the investigation, she therefore came to the conclusion that “the basis of trust for further cooperation with Professor Döring no longer exists,” said the minister. Döring corrected this immediately after she gave the order over the phone, but the impression had still been created.
This is also confirmed by the email exchange that has now been published, in which ministry officials expressed their “irritation” about the request for an audit. Such an audit would also contradict the principles of academic freedom, emphasises Stark-Watzinger. “Our funding is awarded based on scientific excellence, not on political ideology.”
Stark-Watzinger leaves no doubt, however, that she continues to view the contents of the open letter extremely critically. “We see that some Jewish students are already on their second semester off because they are afraid to go to university. We see Jewish lecturers who are being treated with hostility. That is why it is at least worthy of criticism that the open letter calls for a blanket rejection of police operations or for crimes not to be prosecuted, while at the same time we are observing anti-Semitic incidents and violent attacks against Jewish fellow citizens,” said the minister.
Therefore, “to my knowledge,” a legal classification of the contents of the open letter was requested on May 17 – a request for review that was then incorporated into the template for the review order issued by Döring on May 13, which was already being prepared. In its final report on May 24, the ministry then stated that the open letter from the university professors was “within the scope of constitutionally protected freedom of opinion” and “had no criminal law-related content.” “There is therefore no reason to draw conclusions regarding funding law, which were not requested by the management either,” it continues.
Nevertheless, the whole process has led to a serious loss of trust within the scientific community, said Green Party MP Anja Reinalter in the committee meeting. “The mere fact that the question was even raised caused a great deal of irritation.” The scientific community was “very agitated, upset and unsettled.” Confidence-building measures and “absolute transparency and clarity” are urgently needed now.
For CDU politician Jarzombek, this transparency was certainly lacking. “We have not received an answer to the key question of who commissioned the list of names on May 10 and who gave the instructions for it,” Jarzombek told WELT. “The question is why the minister does not simply say who it was.”
For Ali Al-Dailami from the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), the affair follows a classic pattern: “First there is the scandal, then people play dead, then a pawn is sacrificed, and in the end the minister has to go.” What else has to happen before she resigns, asks Al-Dailami, referring to the calls for her resignation made by more than 3,000 university professors from all over Germany.
Stark-Watzinger only provides an answer at the very end of the committee meeting: “I see no reason to do so.” Things don’t get any more unpleasant for her during the government questioning. There are no new answers in the Bundestag that afternoon. No new questions either. Just one, perhaps: If there are such far-reaching events in her house that Stark-Watzinger is not aware of, says CSU MP Katrin Staffler, then the question arises “whether you believe you still have your house under control.”
