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”.