Just one year ago, Fabio Pammolli became president of the private Jacobs University in Bremen. He is now an adviser to the right-wing Italian finance minister.
Under his leadership, Jacobs University Bremen got at least one new name: Fabio Pammolli Photo: University Builder
BREMEN cup | At first glance it seems like career advancement: a well-known economist who becomes an adviser to the Minister of Finance and Economy of the Italian Republic.
Fabio Pammolli, who turns 58 tomorrow, however, was appointed president of the private Jacobs University in Bremen only a year ago. Now it is called “Constructor University” and was founded more than 20 years ago as International University Bremen. Pammolli was considered the right-hand man and close confidant of the investor and IT entrepreneur Serg Bell, formerly Serguei Beloussov, who emigrated from Russia to Singapore and now owns the university with 1,800 students.
In the old homeland, Pammolli is today the “business advisor” of Giancarlo Giorgetti, considered quite moderate in his own party, the right-wing National League. But what does this mean in a far-right government? Giorgetti is a companion of Lega boss Matteo Salvini and was previously in the youth movement of the postfaschistischen „Social Movement“ active.
Pammolli, on the other hand, who since 2004 has been the founding rector of an economic hub in his native Lucca, has already carried out research activities at many first-rate universities – at Harvard and Paris, at the London School of Economics and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . In Bremen he took over a “financially unsustainable” university, as he said in an interview with the Courier Weser nicely paraphrased.
Is the rector running away from his job?
It remains to be seen if things will finally change with the new management thanks to the 50 million promised by Bell; even if the University of Builders attests that Pammolli has “successfully initiated a series of changes” – the most important of which: the new name. “When a new manager starts at a football club, he naturally brings with him a new vision of the game system‘ he said in the summer, and that he wanted to take his new, uh: club to the ‘European top’ within a few years. Is he fleeing this task now that he knows the private university better? The Constructor University is surprised by his resignation, but he prefers to praise his “bond” with Italy.
A new president, a new president for Bremen-Nord is not yet in sight, but the management of the university will first be expanded from three to six heads. Serg Bell’s recently married wife Oznur has already moved into this management floor: she immediately became Chief Operating Officer.
