Most CNRS labs are attached to university departments and their researchers teach in standard university courses.
It would be more useful to consider them as parts of the host department.
He’s not talking about institutions though. He’s talking about universities.
It’s not like it’s any great mystery why German and French universities don’t rank highly either. For France it’s because all universities bar the grandes écoles have always been of more or less similar selectivity, and given that all professors are civil servants on the same pay scale there’s no way to change that either. You might accidentally get a great department but you’re not going to get a great university that way.
Germany had great universities, universities with world spanning reputations, like Göttingen and Heidelberg. Then after 1968 there was a deliberate policy of leveling, so that every university is more or less of similar quality. It worked. All US Supreme Court justices went to Harvard or Yale. So little prestige attaches to which university you attended in Germany that for several of their Supreme Court justices the specific university they attended isn’t even mentioned on the Supreme Court website.
Contrast this with a system where you aren't tied to your department and can go to classes wherever. In practice there are ways around that in Europe, but it's either niche "elite" programs or pushing "special cases" through university bureaucracy. Also, the whole spirit of the system probably increases mental siloization of the departments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_Society
The research absolutely impacts teaching to a great extent. We are only humans after all, and I don't have a separate brain for teaching and for research. If you separate your best researchers in research institutes, you're going to seriously limit the flow of knowledge to your bachelor and master students. And those students are your future researchers.
Well, Aschenbrenner did go to Columbia for college, so he put his money where his mouth is. Presumably Helmut Kohl's sons—who went to Harvard and MIT for college, and not FU-Berlin or Heidelberg or TU-Munich or ETH Zurich or Oxbridge—agree.
Aschenbrenner seems to suffer a little from not feeling accepted in his home country. His argument seems to be mostly that his "elite" intelligence was not properly recognized, so he feels that places who celebrate that/him are better than those who don't.
In general, contemporary German culture does not like taking risks or people who stand out. You can see that in casual conversations with people, in the way their bureaucracy works, in the kinds of things that they promote or not. Outside of Berlin, that it, which as a city itself is a stand-out, where people come from their small village because they felt they don't fit in.
“… Germany feels poorer than the US.”
Rural Franconia feels richer than East Texas outside the Houston metro area.
Mr. Aschenbrenner's education is incomplete until he works for a year outside of NY/Boston/Bay Area, supporting himself only on that income.