Education Quote by Richard Ernst

Ernst is making a quiet but pointed claim: a university is not just a place where knowledge is produced, it is a place whose power structures must be shaped by the people who actually do the producing. Coming from a working scientist, the line reads like a corrective to a familiar academic drift, where management becomes its own career track and “strategy” starts to outrank experiments, seminars, and the messy reality of discovery.

The operative word is “vitally.” He is not arguing for token faculty representation on committees; he’s describing an institutional life-support system. When active scientists step away from governance, the vacuum gets filled by administrators optimized for metrics, risk management, fundraising, and optics. Those priorities aren’t inherently sinister, but they tend to flatten the long time horizons and high tolerance for failure that real research demands. Scientists in management functions act as translators and, just as often, as brakes: they can explain why a lab can’t be run like a quarterly report and why teaching quality can’t be audited into existence.

There’s also an ethical subtext. “Involvement” signals responsibility, not entitlement. Ernst implies that autonomy in academia comes with civic duty inside the institution: if scientists want resources, freedom, and credibility, they have to take turns doing the unglamorous work of steering the ship. It’s a technocrat’s plea for democratic adulthood, aimed at colleagues tempted to treat administration as contamination rather than stewardship.