this is a little uncanny in that it reads a lot like it could be today as well (saying this as a German who studied in Germany in the 2000s/2010s).
"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).
> Nowadays, there are quite a lot of classes that you have to sit in (depends a lot on the university and courses)
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.
> 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
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'.
Having walked (as a tourist without a car) through an American university campus on the day of a baseball match, some parts of the movies are accurate.
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.
I passed frat houses most days during four years of college, and do not remember ever seeing anyone passed out on the lawn outside. I don't doubt that many of them drank too much, but they must have been able to make it in the door while still semi-vertical.
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.
I have 2 daughters at a public US university.
There is tons of pedestrian traffic, and plenty of busses. Some students have cars, but parking is very limited. My daughters walk everywhere, or get a bus. Some kids use bikes or scooters.
No doubt especially that part varies, but I checked Google Maps for the university I walked through. There's a half-hourly bus on one side of the campus, and a bus every 45 minutes on the other side. There are several enormous parking garages.
Universities in similarly-sized European cities have at least a metro station, if not two, and many more bus lines.
Are you talking about public transit connections to the university? That’s a valid, but general complaint about American mass transit and car culture.
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.
Same here for me, graduated in 1977, Exeter Uni. Physics Department. But it varied from department to department, lectures were compulsory in Law for instance.
> 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)
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)
In one of my CS/math courses, the professor told us that he never went to class when he was an undergrad, so he didn't expect us to, but it would probably be a worthwhile trek from your bedroom.
With the reforms since then, I think the general modus operandi now is that lectures do not require attendance, however almost every course has tutorials with attendance and weekly assignments. If or how this is enforced is completely up to the professor though, and some do not care.
> however almost every course has tutorials with attendance and weekly assignments
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…)
>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.
It wasn’t in the US when this was written and for half a century after.
> 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]
> 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.
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.
Although some of those restrictions were still there at a lot of universities in the US as late as the 1980s when I was an undergraduate. There were still dorms that were all male and all female and rules that you had to stay in one at least for your first year of university.
For me this sounds just like the lecturer inserted some casual sexism.
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.
As someone who went to University in Germany but left for the US right after I found this very interesting. My daughters are going to (state) universities in the US and there are profound differences between the systems, some of them appear to have a very long history, judging by this account.
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.
With respect to the sports, the association of sports with universities is a historical quirk of the United States and partially an extension of what we inherited from the British system.
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.
> 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.
> The people of Alabama, Texas, Ohio and Louisiana very much want competitive sports teams and are happy to pay.
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.
This feels charmingly naive. The SEC is getting $300 million per year from TV rights to football games. Surely the marginal amount donated by athletes versus non-athletes is not the reason we've ended up with the college sports industrial complex.
All the traits that make someone better at sports make them better at earning money too. Extroversion, communication skills, competitiveness and physical energy almost certainly aren’t worth a much as intelligence but when would they hurt?
>On the other hand, German universities are still much more selective so class hierarchies are reflected in the trade-school/vocational school/university hierarchy.
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?
They are.
But outside some specific ones, a (good) univeristy education is still better.
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.
> we had people from all social levels. Having no tuition at all, makes this easy
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)
When at University in Germany, I was shocked by the lack of social mobility caused by the “decision” as early as age 10 / 4th grade to put students in different types of schools.
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.
> I studied at a University that's by all measures one of the best in Germany and we had people from all social levels.
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.
Sorry, poor wording. What I should have said is that the overall educational system ends up letting a smaller percentage of the population into universities, partially because sorting happens as early as age 10.
I'd say that's a feature, and sadly declining. Though I do agree that the early split is questionable at best.
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.
Public universities in Germany will take anyone who they believe could pass the course if they worked hard enough. For practical purposes this means you got the school leaving certificate, the Abitur. If you went to a less academic school (Realschule) rather than a Gymnasium, a grammar school you need to take an extra year but you can still go to a university of applied sciences which offer Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees as well.
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.
> “His clothes were shabby, his coat ill-fitting and with an unnatural gloss, his linen or celluloid— I am not sure that his collars and cuffs were of linen— seldom above reproach, and his high hat was always brushed the wrong way.”
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.
His shirt wasn't made of celluloid, just his collars and cuffs. At one time, it was common for shirt collars and cuffs to be purchased separately and attached to your (collar-less, cuff-less) shirts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detachable_collar
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.
I enjoyed reading this as someone that years ago had the experience of being a student in Germany from another Western country. One technical problem is that whatever web CMS was used for this page has trouble with anything non-ASCII and simply omits it, which affects not just the expected umlauts but also quotes and M-dashes and quotes.
As an American student who was at a German uni in 1998, there was still a lot of this that felt very familiar. At minimum, it fell in line with everything I'd ever heard about traditional / historic life at German universities. It made me a bit sad, as I had a professor I was close to who passed away a few years ago and he would have found this article charming.
Huh. At a first glance at the photo on top of the article, I thought: Is this Munich's University with a different yard layout and statues? (Would not be surprising with WW2 in between, you can still see some of the shrapnel damage on one of the walls.)
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 Humboldt University's palace was originally not meant as a university building but instead was built in 1748-1753 for one of Friedrich II's brothers prince Heinrich, who was as his brother, gay. In fact the building was designed to have separate rooms, entrances and staircases for Heinrich and his wife, so that they wouldn't have to see each other. The university moved into that building in 1809 upon its founding by the new king Friedrich Wilhelm III. This was 7 years after Heinrich's death.
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.
Ah, thanks for the context to the Humboldt University. That makes it even more curious for me why the LMU building looks so similar, at least from the exterior.
> 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.
> 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.
Yeah both are U-shaped, at least from one side. I'm not sure why this commonality is the case, but it's not unseen to have U-shaped buildings. Even the Kanzleramt is U-shaped, the Russian embassy in Berlin, or the BND headquarters.
I spent a year in the company of a dueling Verein in Munich a few decades ago and was startled to be at parties where every fourth male had a a scar.
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.
Beyond the links everyone else posted, I happen to have run across this[0] post on Travel.SE today and found it quite entertaining to read about how people from (some) fraternities / corps are still dueling each other on a regular basis to this day.
Isn't any organization that has been around for a long time and hasn't sufficiently updated its moral positions considered to be such?
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...
Generally true if he had said just “right” or “conservative.” But doesn’t far-right specifically mean fascist? (Like how far left is code for communist.)
I have a few friends who were in a corps and as far as i can tell the general political standing wouldn't be that much out of place in the Kaiserzeit. Definitive not fascist, but very much "classist" and racist in a way that want to believe that non-white people are not LESS capable, but that they (the white guys in the corps) are just MORE capable. I think the word "aristocratic" would describe their mindset best.
I am fairly rightist myself and the few Burschenschaften I got acquainted with feel right-wing to me. The last one I visited (which was in Vienna some 15 years) ago, I was told by multiple members during the drinking part of the evening that it is just a matter of time before the Austro-Hungarian empire gets reconstituted, because Slavs failed at ruling themselves.
Heh, Austria is somewhat richer (due to having escaped Communism), but as far as corruption in politics goes, a Balkan country.
The corps are/were old-right, i.e. linked to or emulating the feudal aristocracy. They are necessarily anti-feminist as they're male-only; there is no direct female equivalent that I'm aware of. In particular, I do not believe it would be permitted for a woman to recieve a duelling scar, or for any man to participate in such a duel. I think you would be very hard pressed to find one on the face of someone not ethnically German, either.
They were banned by Hitler as part of the general totalitarianism against non-Party organisations.
This is reminding me that I wanted to watch The Student Princehttps://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047537/ (1954 film based on 1901 novel, set in a before-then-but-unspecified historical period)
"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).