Peter-André Alt’s book “Excellent !? On the situation of the German university ”- Culture

Education, if it is to be useful, is a matter of organization. The committee for questions of university reform, which met in the summer of 1952 at the suggestion of the American cultural officer JJ Oppenheimer in the small Black Forest community of Hinterzarten, was also convinced of this. The host was Georg Picht, head of the Birklehof educational home located there and the son of a well-networked head of department for adult education in the Prussian Ministry of Culture. It was agreed to ask the universities about their most pressing problems. A good year later, the German University Association announced the results of this survey to the West German Rectors’ Conference. The lack of professional prospects for “non-ordained” people, scientists with no prospect of a professorship but whose work in teaching and research was indispensable, was named as a central problem. How should one deal with this “academic reserve army” that one needed, but from which one also recruited one’s own successor through “selection of the best”?

The problem that was presented to the West German Rectors’ Conference in November 1953 has persisted to this day. Under the hashtag #IchbinHanna, thousands of scientists gathered in the summer of 2021 to complain about excessive fixed-term contracts, a lack of future prospects and structural exploitation. In a system characterized by key figures, third-party funding and excessive evaluation, their situation has worsened massively: They are supposed to secure teaching and research, acquire third-party funding, take on administrative tasks and voluntarily provide additional services to signal that their work is important to them – all of this in one place Job that is limited to an average of three years and the continuation of which is questionable every time.

Readers have seldom been given such a detailed insight into the real process of the university system

The university today is very different from that of the 1950s. There are not only almost 70 years between Hinterzarten and the present, but also a number of university reforms in which the full-time university should be modernized. This permanent reform of the German university is also used by Peter-André Alt, the current President of the University Rectors’ Conference, to present this situation from his point of view in his book “Excellent !? On the situation of the German university”. The book has three parts. In the first, historical part, Alt recapitulates the reform of the German university since the mid-sixties. The second part is devoted to a detailed analysis of the university system, for which Alt then presents his own suggestions for a further development of this system in the third part. The second part of the book in particular benefits from the sometimes intimate insights that Alt “acquired in a quarter of a century of responsible involvement in shaping the university system and its facilities”.

Georg Picht, the host of the Hinterzarten conferences, also plays an important role in Alt’s book. Because from January 1964 Picht published a series of articles entitled “The German Educational Catastrophe”, with fiery pleadings for an educational reform in which schools and universities are presented as important factors for the economic development of Germany. “An educational emergency means an economic emergency,” is how Picht sums it up right from the start. Alt places this diagnosis from 1964 – and important accompanying contributions by Schelsky in 1963 and Dahrendorf in 1965 – at the beginning of the reform movement, which recognized that “Germany’s future would be at stake without an immediate educational offensive”. But that’s not entirely true.

Picht’s influential text is rather part of a much broader journalistic campaign that has intensified since the end of the 1950s and also included ardent lobbying with the Erhard government. Picht’s economically oriented argument, in which schools and universities appear primarily as a means of production for future skilled workers who are supposed to strengthen Germany in international comparison, is supplemented by a social-liberal twist that Ralf Dahrendorf and Hildegard Hamm-Brücher bring into play: Dahrendorf pleads for equal rights , for “education as a civil right”, while Hamm-Brücher in the Time a series of articles with the meaningful title “At the expense of our children?” released. It is the highly effective beginning of an ideological constellation that later generations will ascribe to the left sixty-eighties: the economization of public institutions in favor of equality and the overcoming of class differences, a little later: privatization and self-determination or personal responsibility.

Alt adopts these two liberal spins for his argumentation and supplements them with two more: an organizational sociological view of the university and the reference to his own experience as a university official, which is reflected in his pragmatic suggestions for improving the university – to adopt the word used by Alt – “Systems” knock down. This is where the real strength of the author, who has been tempered in many committee debates and presidium meetings and who headed the Free University of Berlin as President from 2010 to 2018, lies. His insights into the university system are not free from prejudices and perspective classifications, but rarely have the readers been given such a detailed insight into the real process of the university system.

Alt likes to hand out especially against the left-wing university that is driven by grassroots ideals

The attention to detail in Alt’s depiction is only surpassed by his delight in dialectical contrasts. The book is pervaded by a scheme in which Alt always takes the same three steps: He juxtaposes two extremes and tries to mediate through a third position. His historical account of the reform history of the German higher education institution seems rather unhistorical for him, but gains in conciseness when Alt contrasts the conservative full-time university with its elitist and personal clusters with the following left-liberal coded committee university in order to dissolve it into the neoliberal one To write the University of the 90s as a history of progress. Especially against the left-wing university, which is driven by democratic ideals, Alt hands out time and again, against lazy and stupid students, incompetent professors and unrealistic expectations of an entire generation that has prevented presidential decisions through endless debates in committees.

However, these polemical failures cannot hide the fact that Alt’s analysis of the neoliberal university appears in crisis mode. This crisis manifests itself in a series of hard breaks, between advertising blocks for the blessings of the neoliberal system and furious attacks on this very system and its risks and dangers, which primarily affect the academic autonomy and the peculiarities of the university system.

The rhetorical aim of this hard dialectic is of course to convey it through his own deliberations at the end of the book – but this is exactly what Alt does not succeed in doing. His suggestion to mediate the extreme contradiction between the neoliberal operating system and university hardware is to approximate both using functional terms and otherwise to refer to the ideas of Dahrendorf and – previously scolded for his dream dances – Habermas. Once again, economization should be justified by “diversity” and “equality”.

Peter-André Alt: Excellent !? On the location of the German university, CH Beck, Munich 2021. 297 pages, 26 euros.

But that doesn’t detract from the great virtue of the book, on the contrary. Alt’s polemical attacks against students, democratic institutions and fellow players in the university system cannot distract from the fact that the President of the University Rectors’ Conference is accomplishing something extraordinary: He informs his readers about the internal mechanics of the university system, and shows them, ideally, which ones Way, the current operating system of “New Public Management” is defended, and it provides you with clues as to where the blatant contradictions between formal organization and scientific claim can no longer be bridged. What is a paradox to Alt may not be a paradox to those who criticize the scientific system.

From this perspective, his book is an excellent, well-written and extensive compendium that provides detailed information on the weak points and functioning of the higher education system, represents the ideal-typical neoliberal argumentation and itself gathers important and established objections to them. The opponents of the neoliberal university agenda should therefore study it carefully – and avoid the polemics so that they do not overlook the most important content of the book: a defense of the status quo that is no longer sure of itself.

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