:: TransatlanTicker ::

Despite their sometimes serious reservations regarding current US foreign or environmental policies, German politicians and higher education professionals of all stripes have for years been enviously looking at the accomplishments of American higher education. US colleges and universities continue to attract the world’s best scholars and researchers to their campuses, including more than 6,000 from Germany. Weary from decades of brain drain, policymakers have recently implemented a number of major higher education reforms to increase the country’s international competitiveness when it comes to producing and keeping potential Nobel Prize winners. Most of these reforms such as the introduction of a two-tiered system of undergraduate and graduate education or the creation of junior professorships are inspired by the Anglo-American model, which is widely hailed as the pathway to success.

For a long time, the objects of envy and desire in most policy papers and editorials were prestigious US private institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or the MIT. It is only recently that commentators and employers have abandoned their dream of a German Harvard in favor of the University of California system as a far more feasible model for higher education reform in Germany. This shift in the discussion no doubt marks a move into the right direction. Unlike the private Ivy League schools with their multi-million dollar endowments, public institutions in California are faced with challenges closely resembling those of their German counterparts: e.g. constitutional requirements to accept every in-state high school graduate, major cutbacks in public funding, or similar size with a number of huge campuses serving more than 30,000 students.

In spite of these challenges, however, California has managed to establish and maintain a public university system that is both socially inclusive and academically outstanding, with UCLA, UC Irvine, and above all UC Berkeley ranking among the top schools in the US and worldwide. The key to success is the spirit of individual freedom and competition that characterizes the entire system. For example, students constantly evaluate their professors who can not afford to let the quality of their teaching suffer from too much research. Neither do they receive a life-long guaranteed salary or other standard privileges their German colleagues routinely enjoy. Both students and professors do benefit, however, from more institutional autonomy, long-term career perspectives, flat hierarchies, and less inflexible and distracting bureaucracy.

So what’s the lesson? Traditional German higher education, to be sure, is not nearly as inefficient as some people say it is. After all, US institutions gladly accept German graduates into their doctoral programs because they are often extraordinarily well-qualified. Hence there is no need to reproduce every aspect of the California model, not least because it relies heavily on the willingness of the private sector to contribute large amounts of money to keep up the high standards at Berkeley and elsewhere. German corporations and foundations, on the contrary, are still comparatively reluctant to provide funds for research and scholarships, which will be badly needed as soon as more and more German universities begin to charge tuition.

But a healthy dose of that Californian spirit of flexibility and personal freedom may help to unleash the enormous potential that is too often stifled under the present rigid arrangements. Whether the upcoming government-sponsored competition for millions of euros worth of extra funding in an effort to create a small number of outstanding elite institutions and “clusters of excellence” to match up with the likes of Harvard and Yale will work toward that goal remains doubtful at best. As German Japanologist Klaus Antoni has noted, the initiative is rather another manifestation of the bizarre belief that path breaking science and research may be planned and programmed from top down.

Read more about this weblog or about me.