The Technical University of Nuremberg (TUN) is getting a new president. On Tuesday, the acting founding president, Hans Jürgen Prömel, 70, informed the workforce about this. Meanwhile, Science Minister Markus Blume (CSU) informed the Council of Ministers and immediately presented his successor. The mathematician Prömel will resign from his position at the end of March after three years as TUN President. The former head of the TU Darmstadt was appointed for five years. The new president Michael Huth takes over at the beginning of October. He was born in Aschaffenburg. Until then, TUN founding vice president Alexander Martin will manage the business in Nuremberg.
Officially, the Ministry of Science cites the new orientation as a university for artificial intelligence as the reason for the “change of staff”. Huth is considered an expert in AI and currently teaches as Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Department of Computing at the Empirical College in London. It was only in December that Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) announced in his government statement that TUN in his hometown should now be a university for AI. The original concept and philosophy was different until then. Söder did not say what should distinguish TUN from other universities with a focus on AI.
The TU Nuremberg is the first new university to be founded in Germany in a quarter of a century. The state government wanted to see TUN in the same league as the most important US universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 1.2 billion euros are to be invested in TUN; studies there should be more digital and international. There should be a better supervision ratio for students and flatter structures. Humanities should be integrated with natural sciences. This was the original concept that the Science Council approved. But critics said even back then that other universities also did all of these things.
Science Minister Markus Blume (CSU) thanked Prömel in a statement for his development work, saying he had “set standards”. But there had been rumblings behind the scenes for a long time. Apparently there were different views on the structure of the university. The state government wanted more dynamism and there is also unrest in the Nuremberg university community. The state government was able to pacify the initial irritations of the existing universities about this new lighthouse university next door with many millions of euros; for a long time, brave, positive cooperation was considered the official attitude towards the new university. But at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen (FAU), for example, people were not happy that Prömel poached two of the seven new professors from the neighborhood.