The academic ethos

Abstract

University teachers hold an intermediary position between those who are self-employed and those who are employed. Like doctors or lawyers they can determine their own working hours. Nobody cares whether they work six or 60 hours. But unlike doctors or lawyers they do not earn their income proportionately to the time they devote to their work. They are employed by the university or the state, but enjoy the freedom of a leisured class. Because of this intermediate position, they have always been watched by the layman with a strange mixture of respect, envy and mistrust. Even today the opinion is widespread that a professor has to teach only six classes a week, can take a three-month holiday in summer, may hold and is paid for his position until he is 70 years of age, andas not only children put it does not work but just sits at his desk. Should the professor finally be taken in hand like other employeeshave shorter holidays and account for his activities hour by hour and day by day? University teachers are practically unique in the amount of time at their disposal, free from specific prescriptions as to how they should use it. What arrangements or conditions could ensure that this leisure is not misused, but is used for study and research which contributes effectively to the education and training of students and to the advancement of knowledge? In 1965, in my inaugural address as the newly appointed rector of the University of Frankfurt, I apostrophised the social role of a university teacher as that of a permanently appointed man of leisure.1 Aristotle attributed the highest value to leisure; it was leisure which made possible the bios theoretikos } Probably as a consequence of his study of Aristotle, Karl Marx in Deutsche Ideologie 3 took up this concept of leisure in his famous vision of the future which pictured man as relieved from alienated work. In the current discussions about reduced working hours, an increased amount of leisure, and the simultaneous assurance of the individual's future by the social-welfare state, visions of the future develop in which not only the university teacher is a permanently appointed idler.4 Leisure, as a necessary rest on the march to certain goals, contributes to the overcoming of