CELEBRATING ITS 150TH ANNIVERSARY, the Technical University of Munich has received a spectacular birthday gift — a new campus. Funded by a donation from the German supermarket tycoon Dieter Schwarz thought to be worth more than €100 million (Rs.800 crore), TUM’s new campus marks several firsts in German higher education, and illustrates how the university hopes to be an expansive, competitive force in a system traditionally marked by equality and cooperation.

The new, business-focused campus will be based in Heilbronn, a picturesque city three hours drive north-west of Munich in the neighbouring state of Baden-Wurttemberg. The new campus is the first established by a German university outside its own federal state, explained Wolfgang Herrmann, TUMs president, to Times Higher Education in Munich. The development is “totally new in the German university landscape”, he says.

What attracted the donation was TUM’s record of merging business and technical education, he explains — business students at the new campus will have to take engineering, informatics or chemistry courses alongside their other studies. This model has been rolled out at TUMs existing School of Management, where the technical part is for many students the “toughest part of the entire study course”, says Herrmann, whose own daughter had to retake her informatics exams twice.

The campus, which includes 20 endowed professorships, is believed to be the result of the largest philanthropic donation to a German university, a significant move in a country with little tradition of alumni donations or big gifts from the super-rich.

“TUM has been attempting to create a philanthropic culture since 1998, and has so far raised about €300 million (Rs.2,400 crore) for specific projects”, says Herrmann, who has overseen the entire process. He was appointed president in 1995, making him the longest-serving university head in Germany.

Since 2010, TUM has also tried to raise money to create a US-style endowment, although with €40 million so far, its nowhere near the Ivy League yet. “That’s the biggest one (endowment) in a German university — you can tell how difficult it is. Germany has a different tradition”, he says. A glance at TUM’s most recent accounts shows it still receives only a tiny fraction of its income from private businesses or donors — it is still overwhelmingly dependent on state funding and other public bodies such as the European Union. Nevertheless, TUM’s “entrepreneurial” impulses are part of a broader shift in German universities to become more competitive and differentiated, something spurred by the Berlin government with its Excellence Initiative, which encourages rival bids for pots of research money and special status.