The self-effacing leader: Looking back on Ralph Eichler

A great deal was written about the election of Ralph Eichler as president of ETH Zurich. He himself has said that he doubted until the very last moment that the ETH Board would recommend him. Then things happened very quickly, and the Federal Council selected him on 30 May 2007. However, he was by no means a reluctant president: “Once my mind is made up, it’s made up”, he says.

That’s what he’s like. He speaks concisely and gets right to the point without beating around the bush. Giving speeches and making public appearances are not really his thing. He likes to communicate sparingly, and as factually as possible. For example, when asked what he plans to do in January 2015 when he is no longer ETH president, he says simply: “My customers are getting younger. I’m going to be president of the Swiss Youth in Science (Schweizer Jugend forscht) foundation.”

ETH Zurich is different

In some ways, Eichler needed to adapt when he first took up his post: while he had gained some leadership experience as head of an international partnership to run the DESY accelerator centre in Hamburg, and as director of the Paul Scherrer Institute, “being in chargeof ETH Zurich is still something quite different”, he says. “There are 500 professors, every one of them employed to think and act independently – you can't just order them around, you have to give them their freedom.”

When Eichler first started, the president of the ETH Board Fritz Schiesser and his assistant, Annamarie Jezler, quietly pointed out that as ETH president, he wouldn't be able to present the same image as he had done as a physicist. “I took that as a compliment”, says Eichler, “I didn't want to lose the down-to-earth attitude of a physicist.” It is this attitude that underpins his leadership style: “You have to listen carefully, consider everyone’s opinions – and then make a decision, take responsibility for it and correct any mistakes that come to light.”

An egalitarian approach

When Eichler met members of ETH Zurich and other universities, his guiding principle was always to treat them as equals. Take, for example, Patrick Aebischer: he recognises how much the president of EPFL has achieved for his university and for Switzerland, “and if we have different opinions, we discuss them within the ETH Board, not in public. We have stuck to that rule since 2007.”

There have been some important milestones during Eichler’s period in office: ETH Zurich has grown rapidly and become even more international. It has set up two new departments (D-HEST, D-USYS), expanded the ETH site in Basel (D-BSSE), and established its first research centre abroad (the Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability SEC). It has repositioned the Swiss national supercomputing centre CSCS and opened the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Centre in Rüschlikon together with IBM. Support from the ETH Zurich Foundation has allowed the university to implement many strategic projects more quickly.

Behind all this lies a lot of hard work: “As ETH president, I had no free time. Instead, I had the privilege of having an extremely interesting job”, says Eichler, and it is typical of him that he highlights the achievements of the entire Executive Board: “We on the Executive Board have always presented ourselves as a team. That’s how we gained people’s confidence.” He pays tribute to the way Heidi Wunderli- Allenspach and Lino Guzzella worked for equality between education and research in strategy development; the way Peter Chen and Roland Siegwart introduced new platforms for collaborating with industry; the way Roman Boutellier drove forward the structural side of campus development – and he values the achievements of Robert Perich, the first non-professor on the Executive Board, who took the quality of financial planning at ETH Zurich to a new level.

The students also impressed him: “You can have a reasoned debate with them.” They certainly challenged him – be that on the question of tuition fees or on the development of the Energy Concept.

More ETH spirit

He welcomes their interest in doing more to strengthen the connection with graduates: “Conveying a sense of school spirit – a feeling that makes you proud to belong to ETH Zurich and to be among its alumni – we can improve on that.” Eichler remembers getting into hot water once when he questioned the value of the University Assembly, but now he says: “The University Assembly is important for ETH Zurich. It keeps the Executive Board on its toes so that we do our best.”

What conclusions would Eichler draw as he comes to the end of his period in office? “ETH Zurich is rock solid and really doing well. It enjoys a great deal of goodwill among the Swiss people.” He is worried, however, by both the Swiss policy on immigration and the country’s partial exclusion from European education and research programmes: “If our students and researchers are excluded from international competition, that will hit ETH Zurich hard.”

Finally, although Eichler rarely mentions his private life, he says: “I’m going to enjoy looking after my grandchildren.”