German university life seen through American eyes, 1900-1901
irwincollier.com
irwincollier.com
"the matriculant is now a full-fledged student, free to come and go at will. Absolutely no restrictions are placed upon him, he may attend all lectures or no lectures. He wears no academic dress, he lives in no dormitory." -------- This was true mostly all the way up until the bachelor reforms in the 2000s. Nowadays, there are quite a lot of classes that you have to sit in (depends a lot on the university and courses)
" But every German class-hour has its “academisches viertel” or quarter-hour of grace." -------- We basically still "have" this in a way but it basically only means that many courses start at quarter past x (e.g. 8:15).
"Then the professor enters in haste. Before he has even reached his desk, he begins, “Meine Herren und Damen!” (the order is significant)" -------- Nowadays, it's the other way around ("Meine Damen und Herren").
"Occasionally scraping of feet, “Scharren,” a well-known signal, warns the lecturer that his words are not heard at the rear of the room, and he raises his voice, until the shuffling ceases." -------- This is not common anymore, as far as I know. A shame (well, we are allowed to raise our voices and tell the prof to talk louder, which works as well).
Higher education institutions are bound by the "freedom of study" ("Freiheit des Studiums") derived from the provisions on academic freedom in the German constitution (Art. 5 Grundgesetz) and explicitly formulated in the Framework Act for Higher Education (§ 4 Hochschulrahmengesetz). Also it is not directly mentioned, the legal interpretative tradition of these provisions tends to be that the freedom of study implies that compulsory attendance is only permissible if a certain study content cannot be acquired autonomously (e.g. for laboratory courses or seminar discussions). As this is not usually the case for simple lectures, compulsory attendance may not be required for them. I myself was involved in drafting study regulations in the late 2000s in which this had to be specifically taken into account. I am aware that not everywhere such attention is given to this and that there exist different opinions about the exact limits of the freedom of study. However, study regulations that include extensive attendance requirements run the risk of not standing up to legal scrutiny.
I matriculated in the UK in 2013 and that was exactly my experience. I agree with you it could be a current description, the American experience at least as portrayed in film etc. - even that they call it 'school' - seems much more juvenile, for want of a better word.
As I understood it, I paid for the exams, and the accreditation if I passed them. The lectures were presented at the university's and lecturer's will, and attended at mine. No 'meal card'; halls in first year, but that was pretty much just a rent paid as it would be privately thereafter, albeit subsidised; no 'counsellor'.
The decorated frat houses with passed-out guys on the lawn outside.
The enormous stadium in the centre.
Thousands of people (all students?) wearing team shirts.
Some sort of isolation, there were massive motorways around the university, barely any public transport and little space for walking, which may explain why I saw so few students in the nearby city centre.
A lot of American universities were built out in the countryside or in small towns rather than in major cities, following I guess the Oxbridge tradition rather than the continental. In many cases they dominate a town that grew up around them, which doesn't always have much of a city center to it. I'm curious to know which city center they weren't found in.
Universities in similarly-sized European cities have at least a metro station, if not two, and many more bus lines.
But almost every university I’ve been to is closed off from cars and walkable. Students walk on campus to get everywhere. Most students don’t own cars.
It varies a lot. In our university in the 2010s, nearly no computer science course had attendance requirements, but it was somewhat common in business administration (maybe one third of courses with mandatory attendance)
I don't think this is true for the vast majority of majors. Admittedly, in the natural sciences it tends to be more common to have weekly assignments but whether they are mandatory (or can be made so) or not depends on the university and has also been the subject of legal disputes. Mandatory attendance of tutorials, however? I've only ever heard that of medicine but those guys are crazy, anyway. (They basically saw your skull open and try to stuff as much in there in as little time as possible until you puke it out again during your exam. Not sure that's an effective method to learn…)
That's probably where Swedish universities got it from ("akademisk kvart").
At least back in the 90s, typical blocks for four 45+45 minute lectures a day were:
Before lunch:
08.15-09.00, 09.15-10.00
10.15-11.00, 11.15-12.00
After lunch:
13.15-14.00, 14.15-15.00
15.15-16.00, 16.15-17.00
There was a whole lot of shuffling around to get coffee/coke/pepsi and some sweets during those 15-minute breaks.
That's just normal university life, though.
> Though in loco parentis continues to apply to primary and secondary education in the U.S., application of the concept has largely disappeared in higher education. This was not always the case.
> Prior to the 1960s, undergraduates were subject to many restrictions on their private lives. Women were generally subject to curfews as early as 10 pm, and dormitories were sex-segregated. Some universities expelled students—especially female students—who were deemed "morally" undesirable. More importantly, universities saw fit to restrict freedom of speech, on campus, often forbidding organizations out of favor or with different views from speaking, organizing, demonstrating, or otherwise acting on campus. These restrictions were severely criticized by the student movements of the 1960s,[9] and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley formed partly on account of them, inspiring students elsewhere to step up their opposition.[10]
Off-topic, but I always find it funny to know that during his time as governor, "freedom-loving" Reagan had students shot for that particular crime.
It’s usually meine Damen und Herren, as it is in English (Ladies and Gentlemen).
In fact the only reference I can find to it being the other way round is in the first speech given by a woman in the German parliament in 1919.
I can say from my own experience at least at my university, that "Altherrenhumor" ("old gentleman humor") like this is still very common in German engineering lectures even today, or at least well into the 2010s.
I would even call such a re-ordering of the genders in the greeting very tame. If you are a woman, you better come to your lectures on time. If you enter the hall half a minute late, the entire hall would whistle at you and cat-call you. Sometimes with support of the lecturer, who would consider it appropriate hazing for "disturbing" the lecture by being late.
At least there started to be at least some sort of push-back by the administration during the years in which I studied, and the really bad stuff only seemed to happen in classes dominated by the mechanical engineers.
My biggest complaints about the US system: sports and other non-academic activities as well as administration consumes way too much money. On the other hand, German universities are still much more selective so class hierarchies are reflected in the trade-school/vocational school/university hierarchy. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different question.
That being said —- two further points:
The budgets of public universities sports teams are to a large extent driven by the people who pay for them, that is taxpayers. The people of Alabama, Texas, Ohio and Louisiana very much want competitive sports teams and are happy to pay.
The second is that a competitive sports programs can drive a university’s national profile. Two cases in point are the University of Connecticut whose academic profile, endowment and selectivity all improve dramatically as they became a basketball powerhouse, and Gonzaga University a small Jesuit school in Spokane had applications go up more than 300%, academic standards rise and their endowment more than double as they grew into a national basketball powerhouse.
These are still possibly negative sum academic acheivements though, some other universities necessarily dropped in the positional ranking and nearly all diverted more to sports.
Iirc, the Texas and Alabama sports programs are self-funding and (when I last looked at it) contributed some amount of excess revenue to the university.
Specially, the football and basketball programs are profitable at these schools, and these profits fund all of the other sports programs.
I haven’t read a good research study on how sports performance impacts applicants and donations (esp. from alumni). That said, I know that admissions profiles at Alabama have gotten stronger (better grades and test scores) since Saban (a winning football coach) has been there, ostensibly due to an increase in the number of strong applicants from out of state.
I was under the impression that in Germany vocational schools were in general high-quality and prepared you for decent jobs. Is this not the case?
Judging from the comment further down, I also assume that they are talking more about social class of students reflecting in the student bodies.
Which I can't confirm. I studied at a University that's by all measures one of the best in Germany and we had people from all social levels. Having no tuition at all, makes this easy. And from what I hear from Americans is very true for the US.
I agree with the clarification in the other comment, that we split/filter education significantly too early in young lifes. And while there are various way for "a second approach to education" there's way less help for older people than during youth/direct/first education paths.
The missing (or very low) tuition indeed makes it easy for those who qualify indeed.
However the distribution isn't even across different groups of society. A reason is that the school system segregates early. After 4th grade it is initially decided which students go to Hauptschule (general school, or nowadays often Gesamtschule) on track of a "lower" education to start some apprenticeship after 9th grade or for "higher" education with an "Abitur" Qualifying for university after 12 or 13 grades.
While there are ways to switch tracks or getting on the "zweiter Bildungsweg" the early separation correlates quite high with the parents ability to assist which depends on their social background (did the child learn proper German at home, can they afford an apartment bug enough for a quite place for doing homework, are the parents busy working or can help studying, can they afford a tutor, ...)
Many of those differences become smaller as the number of pupils who qualify for university rises, but in research the difference is visible (especially in "traditional" states like Bavaria, less in others)
And, being the teacher’s decision, it opens the door to all kind of nasty biases. Most gymnasium-going Germans were absolutely unaware of the undermining of the “social elevator” role of state schools.
More fun facts on German schools: psychical education classes are gender separated on the onset of puberty, and there are still state female-only secondary schools.
A cursory estimate of our very limited personal reality is hardly enough to draw any conclusions. Hard data shows that there is still a strong correlation between academic achievement and parental income, at all stages. https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/1/18/6335766
The best that can be said is that this correlation is weaker than in the US.
…than US schools? https://giphy.com/gifs/nWn6ko2ygIeEU
What are you basing this on?
The enormous inflation in degree requirements just makes things harder on everyone. Most jobs don't require college education in reality. And there's some benefit in specializing into more practical or more theoretical aspects during secondary ed.
Providing different usable levels and styles of education to everyone is better than trying to get everyone into one shoe. Especially if there's people on the top of that education system benefiting directly from the system because they run an investment fund with an attached education institution.
The only complications to open admission are for high demand courses that are very expensive to teach, mostly medicine. But if you got an Abitur and didn’t get good enough grades to get in your can just wait. I met someone who did a physiotherapy apprenticeship[1] in the three years of waiting.
[1] Yes, what in the rest of Europe is a Bachelor’s degree and in the US a “professional doctorate” is a three year apprenticeship in Germany.
A random aside… I enjoyed this description as a bit of a puzzle because it’s entirely based on fashion cues that happen to be obsolete. What kind of unnatural gloss? What does a celluloid shirt look like? Or a high hat brushed the wrong way?
When reading a story, my mind needs to create little actors to place in scenery. Building up these mental characters is easy and automatic with fiction’s usual introduction formula (which is also used by long form journalism in the New Yorker style where the editor makes sure that a person’s shirt color and posture is described to satisfy readers like myself).
But this German student broke my automatic actor-builder process and forced me to make conscious decisions about what his clothing looks like in my mind. Seems like this doesn’t happen very often, probably because usually there are enough cues to get a picture without fully processing everything.
As for the hat, remember that hats were made of felted beaver fur. To make a hat shiny, you'd brush it -- but if you brush it the wrong way, it'll look rough and weird.
The result makes reading this piece more laborious than necessary, but then the linked article does link at the end to the original: http://cdi.uvm.edu/book/uvmcdi-21528#page/29/mode/1up
But no, turns out, it's Berlin's Humboldt University.
Unfortunately, I can absolutely cannot find a picture of LMU's building taken from a similar angle, but while it turns out some details are very different, the resemblance in the layout and the overall style is striking.
Wonder whether that's on purpose. Munich University's main building is actually pretty young, having been erected in 1835, even though the university itself is over 500 years old.
The LMU on the other hand is way older, but the building is younger than the one of the HU Berlin: it was built in 1835.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptgeb%C3%A4ude_der_Ludwig-M...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_von_Preu%C3%9Fen_(172...
> The LMU on the other hand is way older, but the building is younger than the one of the HU Berlin: it was built in 1835.
That's what I said, yeah. So given that, I'm wondering whether LMU's building was purposefully built to look similar to Humboldt's?
Or maybe it's just coincidence, or was just common to shape buildings that way for a long time.
They share an outline common to many palaces from the 18th to the mid 19th century. See for example also the palace of Mannheim that (in part) houses the University of Mannheim and was built roughly at the same time as Prinz-Heinrich-Palais: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Mannheim#/media/Datei:...
When you look closer, you can observe that the individual architectonic elements are quite distinct: Frederician Rococo[1] in Berlin vs Rundbogenstil (round-arch style)[2] with a later (1900s) large extension in Neoclassical[3] style in Munich.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rococo#Frederician_Rococo
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundbogenstil
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassicism#Architecture_and...
There was what looked like a swimming pool in the basement that was in fact a sort of dug-out that made room for the swords in air (otherwise they would hit the ceiling), and the library was chock-full of material from the Third Reich - not that it was utilized, but it was part of the historical dressing.
[0]: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/69224/how-can-a-t...
This label could mean anything in a range all the way from "old boys club vibes" or "somewhat antifeminist" to "holds beliefs of objective racial superiority". It is a bit of a broad brush...
Heh, Austria is somewhat richer (due to having escaped Communism), but as far as corruption in politics goes, a Balkan country.
They were banned by Hitler as part of the general totalitarianism against non-Party organisations.