The Executive Board reports 2019 / 3

At the request of the Research Commission, the Executive Board has given the green light for awarding the first ETH+ Grant. As part of the first round for this new in-house research funding instrument, a group of eleven researchers working with Earth Sciences Professor Domenico Giardini will receive 1.8 million Swiss francs for its interdisciplinary Planet MARS project. This grant ensures that all the data emerging from ETH’s participation in the InSight Mars mission can be evaluated over the coming years. The project takes an interdisciplinary approach to analysing the data generated by NASA’s InSight mission to Mars in order to investigate the red planet’s internal structure and dynamics. In this round of ETH+ Grants, the internal Research Commission considered a total of six proposals.

Top marks for leadership and administration at ETH

ETH has solid, efficient and appropriate structures and processes that enable it from an organisational perspective to achieve the strategic goals it has set itself. This is the conclusion reached in the Transition Review of ETH Zurich, conducted by external auditors between October 2018 and February 2019 at the request of the ETH Board. Whenever there is a change at the helm of ETH, EPFL or the federal research institutes, the ETH Board arranges for external auditors to produce a comprehensive Transition Review.

The audit covered the areas of governance, finance and controlling, legal and compliance, and real estate. None of these areas warranted a level 1 or 2 recommendation on the five-point scale, which would have signalled an urgent need to act. The report concludes that in future, two areas will require careful monitoring (level 3 recommendations): in legal and compliance, the reputational risk resulting from ongoing legal disputes; and in real estate, the long duration of construction projects, which run from the proof of need to the construction of new buildings. The external auditors also recognised the challenges presented by steadily increasing transparency requirements and the question of securing financing and autonomy for ETH Zurich, as well as the issue of securing the university’s current excellent position in teaching and research.

The risk situation for ETH

The Executive Board has discussed and approved the Risk Management Commission (RMK) report. From a financial standpoint, the risk situation has not changed, but as regards our reputation, risk has increased. The catalogue of current major core risks has been expanded to include “managerial and employee misconduct”; this is ETH’s reaction to the potential negative effects on public opinion of cases of misconduct by ETH senior staff. A wide-ranging set of measures is being drawn up as part of the “Leadership” project. Improvements emerging from this project are regularly being introduced. Last year’s new ETH+ initiative was integrated into several risks. Following the successful conclusion of the first ETH+ cycle, this risk has been downgraded and in some cases removed from the appraisals of individual risks.

Making better use of the lecture halls

Student numbers at ETH are constantly growing, but the classrooms cannot keep up. Even though Scherrer Lecture Hall – ETH Zurich’s biggest lecture hall and a designated historical monument – will be available once more from Spring Semester 2020 following renovation work, the relief it brings will be only temporary. This is why, starting in Autumn Semester 2020, the Executive Board has decided to do away with the lunch break from 12 noon to 1 p.m. and expand core teaching hours to cover the period from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. for both the Zentrum and the Hönggerberg campuses. This adds two hours of teaching time, bringing the total to ten hours per teaching day.

Classes on the Zentrum campus will start as usual at a quarter past the hour, in coordination with the starting times at the University of Zurich (8.00 a.m.) and the Kantonsschule (7.45 a.m.). Classes on the Hönggerberg campus will still start at the full hour or a quarter to the hour in order to accommodate travel time between the two campuses. Various bodies were involved or informed. The Study Conference, the Lecturers’ Conference (KdL), as well as those responsible within the academic departments for drawing up study plans and various administrative bodies have agreed to the new structure. However, the VSETH is sceptical as to whether the costs of the reform outweigh the benefits. A preliminary external study had determined that ETH Zurich has the shortest core teaching times of 34 universities in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. None of the other universities included in the study has a lunch break.

Expansion of Psychological Counselling Service

The external page Psychological Counselling Service for ETH and the University of Zurich is to be expanded. In order to guarantee quick, low-threshold access to counselling for students and doctoral students and bring down the currently (too) long waiting times of over four weeks, the Executive Board has approved an additional 1.4 full-time equivalent posts. This means the service will have a total of 6 full-time equivalent posts in future. Costs are to be borne equally by ETH and the University of Zurich.

Parking: Fees rising to meet market prices

The new parking regulation for parking at ETH Zurich has been in force since 1 January 2017. Now the Executive Board has decided to increase parking fees incrementally until they reach market levels. At the same time, Hönggerberg fees (currently 60 Swiss francs per month) will be brought in line with those on the Zentrum (120 Swiss francs). Students receive a 33 percent discount. By way of comparison, the University of Zurich charges 100 Swiss francs per month to park in shared spaces, and a space in a local private garage costs 240–280 Swiss francs per month. From 1 January 2020, parking fees on the Hönggerberg will rise from 60 to 90 Swiss francs; on 1 January 2022 they will increase to 120 Swiss francs. In a third step, on 1 January 2024 fees on both campuses will go up by half again to 180 Swiss francs per month, approaching market prices..

ETH in Dübendorf

The Swiss federal government is taking on Hangars 2 and 3 on the site of the former military airport at Dübendorf and is allocating them to ETH Zurich. This is where the Innovation Park Zurich (IPZ) will soon be set up with a focus on mobility, robotics and aviation. A number of ETH professors in the fields of autonomous driving and robotics are already conducting research in a part of Hangar 3. The site of the IPZ is the property of the Swiss confederation; armasuisse is expected to continue using Hangar 2 until 2020, which is when ETH will be able to move in. The plot on which Hangars 2 and 3 stand is to be carved out from the rest of the IPZ site, the building rights to which the federal government will hand to the canton of Zurich.

More space for the CSCS in Lugano

The external page Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS, which has been based in the new LCA Building in Lugano-Cornaredo since 2012, is expected to grow from roughly 110 employees today to some 180 people over the next few years. An increase in third-party project funding and an expanding remit (international presence) are driving this growth. To meet CSCS’s growing need for space, two floors will be added to the LCA Building. To this end, ETH Zurich has submitted a proof of need to the ETH Board for a construction project worth between 9 and 12 million Swiss francs.