Adam Soboczynski: Down with Bologna! (Die Zeit, November 26)

[For all who look on with consternation at that vast process of macadamisation (astroturfing?) taking place within Australia's once-venerable universities, voilà a comment about the mother of all attempts to wind back universities' social and intellectual functions, taking place in Europe. Some of the most malign effects are being felt in the nation that, in a grand act of cultural high-mindedness some two centuries ago, gave birth to the modern university system. However the endeavour to contest bureaucratic efforts to consign higher education to the iron cage would appear to be Europe-wide. CS]

Is the noble student idler making a comeback? For years universities have been trying to make better, more efficient human beings out of German students. Their cumbersome degrees have been made tauter, their performance is now being controlled down to the finest details, their timetables are tightly packed. But recently the damned good-for-nothings have been blocking the lecture theatres and taking to the streets with all sorts of colourful demands: They don’t want to pay student fees. They say new courses are over-regulated and should be abolished. They say they can’t freely grow and thrive. In short: German students want the idle life again.

And they are completely justified. There’s an honourable tradition at German universities, mainly in the humanities, of studying a bit of this and that with no particular direction. Apart from anything else, it also goes back far too far to be eliminated within a few years. When the American writer Mark Twain visited Heidelberg in 1878 he was amazed how few regulations there were at German universities. Students, he noted, “are not admitted to university for a determinate period of time and so it’s probable that they’ll switch courses. They don’t need to sit exams to be admitted to university. . . They just pay an admission fee of five or ten dollars, receive a student card that gives them access to the university’s facilities and that’s all there is to it. They choose the subjects they want to study and enrol in the course, but they can also take a break from coming to lectures when they like.”

Ten years ago, these observations, made over 130 years ago, would still have characterised German students exactly. Fashionably put, the idle life was the student’s sole psychological indicator. And the idle life, if you look at it properly, by no means meant laziness (which there no doubt was as well), but a way of life that was bound to conjure up social envy: German students happily stopped coming to seminars given by uninspired professors. With a keenness that went beyond all reason, they devoted themselves to their own particular likings, expressed their preferences for the classes of charismatic lecturers (which in those days they could still for the most part freely choose), read Kafka stories with curious abandon and then two semesters later handed in a 60-page assignment that was not just accepted without complaint but also given top marks – something that today would already be impossible for logistical reasons.

If a few of the official tasks that the student idler had to complete were unpleasant, then they were the kind of business he sat through with mocking lack of interest – end-of-semester grades had no bearing on the grade he graduated with. He was hard-working in a way you can only actually call idling in the sense of actively idling around, being on the look-out. And now and again it was precisely those students who had favoured wild, undirected or unforced ways of thinking, disruptive individualism or originality, who went on to careers. Those who shunned precisely what today’s universities consider their holiest values: set courses with set contact hours and set fees, professionally relevant practice-exercises, standards of comparison and control, an administrative apparatus that runs rings round itself in its mad desire to evaluate and accredit; mechanical attempts to attract funds from third parties via time-consuming applications; inter-disciplinary go-getting which has a whiff of the collective farm about it and is the opposite of self-contained intellectualism and learned poise (these have no measurable market-value and so are scorned).

In other words, there was a degree of disorder, of stubborn self-assertion, of smoke-blown lack of bourgeois conformity within universities which couldn’t but incense the reformers who came to widespread prominence in the 90’s, the well-schooled financial advisers, who were concerned about German competitiveness. It was regularly commented that the reformers’ zeal had its origins in the very latest brand of free market radicalism. Indeed, no one actually even took the trouble to conceal it in the new bachelors and masters degrees: student performance is calculated according to “workload”, that is to say according to the amount of labour involved, students collect “credit points”, universities’ stated aims are defined using the plastic language of “mobility”, “flexibility”, “practical relevance” and “competition”.

Possibly such vocabulary is only meant to hide the fact that the top-down reform of the universities is clearly coming to have the characteristics of Leninist planned economy – competition is often in appearance only. It isn’t just the unproductive growth of surveillance mechanisms, nor the increased importance of commercial factors that speak in favour of this assessment, but the promotion of decidedly specific human character-traits within higher education: nowadays German professors are not meant to be intellectual individualists with erudition that radiates beyond the campus, men and women whose books not so long ago might well have reached a broader public. German professors who fit the new ideal are like apparatchiks; with their webs of contacts they are the major organisers of courses, graduate programmes and special fields of research; they dutifully publish all kinds of uninspired anthologies in order to document their workaday academic diligence. The students who correspond to the type are no longer the ones who are still engrossed in Nabokov’s novels in the middle of the night, but those who step into the lecture theatre freshly shaven at eight in the morning to make up their workload; they are no longer those who enjoy the privilege (if they’re engaged and talented) of being invited to an advanced seminar by a lecturer ahead of time, but rather those who, lemming-like, collect the little points that have been designated for their age-cohort.

Exact calculability, planning and increased output were always the beautiful dreams of the ideal socialist functionary, who branded the individualism of the West “decadent” and “elitist”. The same conceptual weapons are again being used today by the proponents of reform ¬– in a way that is completely forgetful of their history – for the purpose of denouncing the old overlordship of the professors. Their argument issues most of the time in the reproach that professors are lazy and uninterested in teaching – which is why the transition was made to wide-ranging control mechanisms (the latter incidentally had the advantage of quickly clearing out the lethargic and unfocussed old-timers among the students as well). Not long ago Gustav Seibt made the fitting comment in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the negative picture of human possibilities presupposed by the so-called Bologna Process, the idea of co-ordinated Europe-wide study divided into comparable modules, means that it has a surprising resemblance to Germany’s Hartz IV regulations [of unemployment benefits].

The stress is on compulsion rather than incentives. Just as Hartz IV has in its sights work-shy recipients and those who fudge their way through performance requirements, the heavily bureaucratised Bologna-style degrees are aimed at students presumably inclined to laziness. On top of that, it is no accident according to Seibt that the reform’s advocates “are to be found above all on the jobs pages of major newspapers.”

None of the malaises of the old-style university (the sometimes ugly paternalism, the male nepotism, the fragmented syllabus, the lack of orientation of the majority of students) comes close to the devastation wrought by the fatal hollowing out of the civic content of education going on at universities by means of the new courses. Humiliation is what awaits the more gifted students, who once felt bound by sheer love of knowledge and who, in their first semester, could already quietly take a seat in the back row of an advanced seminar – today the most they’re allowed are frustrated self-comparisons with the weakest students in their year. The formation of any sort of character that swims against the stream is being eliminated. What is promoted on a broad front is a “debasement of the spirit of creativity into the spirit of careerism”, as Walter Benjamin expressed it in his essay “The Life of Students”, which warned, quite in the spirit of Friedrich Schiller, against “education solidifying into a mere pile of acquired learning.”

It’s almost superfluous to mention that university restructuring on the model of the planned economy has failed even on the measure of the goals it has set itself. Choosing to change your place of study has become more difficult than ever, because courses often have such specialised profiles that they prove to be incompatible. Whether a stronger connection to the professional world has been created is seen as highly questionable. The student drop-out rate is spectacularly high.

The word from all sides now is of “technical glitches” that have to be smoothed out – there’s been a call for a reform of the reform. Understanding has been generously extended to demonstrators. Considered dialectically though, perhaps the opposite would be desirable: a far stronger attempt to constrict and stereotype German students. Their rage – the justified rage of a young generation that clearly recognises it is being robbed of its chances of development – might yet thereby let itself be raised to a politically effective level – finally, one would hope.

(Trans. C.S.)