WiHo editorial team: How would you describe the profile for your professorship, in terms of research?
Merkt: My professorship and my research work are closely tied to the BMBF's "Quality Pact for Teaching" funding line. That funding programme has financed a major development laboratory in the area of studies and teaching. In addition, it has given higher education institutions the opportunity to establish professorships of relevance to this field of experimentation. This has included professorships with research focuses in new research fields concentrating on higher education didactics, higher education research, quality management and specialised didactic issues related to higher education. Such professorships are oriented more closely to higher education institutions' developmental needs, within the meaning of such institutions' roles as socially relevant institutions, than to the research questions addressed by specific existing disciplines. One example of a relevant topic is that of higher education institutions' openness, i.e. the increasing diversity seen in groups of new students, along with the impacts of such diversity on the ways that institutions structure the introductory phases of studies. This perspective also manifested in discussion of research designs, research methods and research instruments that originate in a wide variety of different disciplines, i.e. that tend to be transdisciplinary. So far, this new developing field has undergone little systematisation. It is becoming clear, however, that higher education institutions have a need for this field, because they have begun removing term limits on professorships – and thus have been placing the professorships and their research fields on a permanent basis. Typically, the professorships involved assume functions related to the development of studies and teaching at their higher education institutions, functions that are defined in their job descriptions and advertised job profiles. As a result, such positions, in the very way they are conceived, combine research, intervention and organisational development.
My own professorship, in this field, is genuinely oriented to higher education didactics. This means that, in addition to covering questions regarding ways in which institutional frameworks can promote students' learning and education processes, my research focuses especially on the question of what this perspective implies for the theoretical underpinnings and empirical methods of higher education didactics as a newly emerging professional field.

WiHo editorial team: What is your central research project at the moment, and what social relevance does it have?
Merkt: The research that is central for me at the moment is work on how new students integrate culturally during their introductory phase of studies. I'm working from the assumption that successful cultural integration is a necessary part of any higher education studies that lead to an academic identity, an identity tied to a particular discipline, by the time students graduate. A student's introductory phase of studies is an especially sensitive transition phase, one in which the student's higher education institution seeks to integrate him or her within its cultural sphere. The difficulty of this task is compounded in that higher education institutions must accomplish it for widely diverse groups of students, with widely differing educational backgrounds, goals and resources. In addition, higher education institutions must constantly review their cultural spheres for suitability with regard to the educational goals they are promoting.

WiHo editorial team: How would you describe the profile for your professorship, in terms of teaching?
Merkt: About half of my teaching load consists of continuing education courses in higher education didactics, while the other half consists of basic courses for a master's degree programme in the social sciences. Since about half of the participants in my continuing education courses in higher education didactics are persons who have study and teaching responsibilities of their own, the curricular and methodological requirements pertaining to the courses are high. The topics covered in the courses are oriented to the organisational development of higher education institutions. They thus change in shorter cycles than do the topics covered in the basic courses.  The participants in the continuing education courses in higher education didactics need to learn about the latest scientific findings, in the various relevant topic areas, that are relevant for their own everyday work. The discussions in the workshops are usually highly sophisticated and often yield new, jointly produced ideas that can have impacts on organisational development. For this reason, the preparations for such workshops tend to be considerably more involved and time-consuming than the preparations for the basic courses. Furthermore, participants in the certification programme receive support with regard to their own personal and professional development. The techniques I use in providing such support include various formats drawn from higher education didactics, such as supervised teaching, guided work on teaching portfolios and guided individual research/development projects oriented to teaching.

WiHo editorial team: If you were offered the chance to work at any foreign university of your choice, which university would you choose? And why?
Merkt: I would love to spend a semester or a year at the University of Helsinki, in Finland, working at that institution's Centre for University Teaching and Learning, with Sari Lindblom-Ylänne. In my view, she has developed a convincing model for the task of cooperating closely, in research-based projects, with the teaching staff of all of a university's departments. I would like to learn about her model from an interior perspective, in order to understand exactly how it functions and whether it could be transferred in any way into German higher education didactics.

WiHo editorial team: Regarding the status quo of research on higher education and science in Germany: In what areas is such research especially strong? In what ways does it still need to improve?
Merkt: In this regard, I can only speak for research in Germany on higher education didactics (academic development), and not for research on higher education and science overall. Research on higher education didactics has undergone a veritable boom in the context of the extensive project funding provided in the areas of studies and teaching. This is seen, for example, in the annual conferences that are held on higher education didactics – such events can now have up to 700 participants. They cover key issues of higher education didactics and supporting research in that field. The "Position Paper 2020" of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Hochschuldidaktik (dghd; German society for higher education didactics) provides a current overview of this development. One especially interesting aspect is that the methods involved are not tied to specific disciplines. A transdisciplinarity, with impetus from an array of different research areas, has developed – and this is appropriate for the subject area involved. We still see a lack of systematising approaches, however, i.e. approaches involving methodological analysis of the different research methods involved, and development of epistemic foundations for higher education didactics. To date, legitimated institutional spaces for this are still lacking in higher education institutions and at an inter-institutional level.

WiHo editorial team: How do you think German research on higher education and science compares internationally? What can we learn from other countries, and from which countries can we learn?
Merkt: Here as well, I can only speak for research on higher education didactics / academic development, which includes a) staff development (i.e. continuing education) and b) educational development, or development of teaching and learning throughout all levels of studies and teaching. In the UK, and especially in the context of a support programme that ran from 1995 to 2005 and was similar to the Quality Pact for Teaching, there has been extensive generation of theoretical foundations, empirical foundations, and pedagogical research questions pertaining to higher education in general and to specialised subject areas. Interesting approaches are also seen in the Scandinavian countries and in the Netherlands. As to English-speaking countries, extensive empirical research has been carried out especially in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, although that work tends to lack the theoretical rigour seen in German research. The fact that contributions by German authors are seldom seen in the relevant international journals for research on academic development shows us, however, that Germany has been unable to contribute substantially to the international discussion to date.