The legislator and the German university

Abstract

All the European countries which have changed their laws governing higher education within the last 10 years, including West Germany, did so as a result of the student uprisings in the late 1960s. Yet, the students' contribution to the content of this legislation was minor : it confined itself to the demand for a " democratisation " of the university, in the sense of equal representation of the constituent groups on all university bodies. That this formula for democratising the internal structure of the university met so little resistance is not because of a particularly persuasive case put forth by students. The grounds for the ease of the victory lay in the old Ordinarienuniversitat , a university governed by full professors. It was the basic fiction of a "corporate" German university, as a "community of teachers and students", which was merely carried forward into the " democratised " Gruppenuniversitat a university governed by representatives of the various constituent groups. Without so much as changing a sentence in a law or university charter the concept of the legal status of the German university shifted fundamentally in the period 1945-67. The new laws were based on a model, which in the years before 1967 was enthusiastically labelled by professorial opinion as the only one capturing the "essence" of the German university. Mistaken concepts were followed by mistaken actions. Professor Helmut Schelsky gave his book, Abschied von der Hochschulpolitik , the sub-title, ". . . or the University as the Target of Failure."1 As those who failed the university he lists the following : first, the professors; second, the students and junior academic staff; third, the various governmental departments; and finally, the politicians and the public. A discussion of higher educational legislation must necessarily be focused on the role of the legislators. However, their accomplishments, whether successful or not, are only understandable when placed in the context of the efforts of the other parties: the professors and the governmental departments.