A Million-Dollar Fairy Tale from a Faraway Land Called Academia
Once upon a time in a faraway land called academia, all professors were equal and got the same salary. Their university president came from within their midst and had to be chosen by a faculty vote. Nobody really wanted that job because it came with an augmentation of pay so ridiculously low that most professors thought it was a waste of valuable research time. Only those who were willing to sacrifice time and noble-minded enough to work for the common good of the university threw their hat in the ring. And no, this wasn’t the Soviet Union or some other communist dystopia. It was the original concept of research universities, designed as classless academic republics where new knowledge was considered priceless — no matter what field or discipline — and the department of philosophy was valued just as much as the department of economics. Funny that this egalitarian model of higher education, more or less persisting in Europe to this day, was invented in Berlin, the capital of the Prussian kingdom, which is more remembered for its merciless military discipline than anti-authoritarian impulses. Academic freedom was also invented there. It meant that although the king was the namesake of the new Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, His Majesty wasn’t allowed to mess with its faculty or students and had to stay out of the academic republic’s business.
The University of Minnesota is not a classless republic. It is actually run by the king (or queen ) who doesn’t answer to His/Her subjects — let alone gets elected by those lowly folks — but only to the campus nobility aptly named regents. “Regent” can be best translated from Latin as “kingmaker” or “elector” since their main task is to select the president and spare the University community the trouble of a democratic vote. This and the royal remuneration of one million dollars, which recently was set by the campus nobility and sounds like a number from a medieval fairy tale, has a truly feudal ring and reminds me more of the Holy Roman Empire than a modern research university.
Here is another difference. The Prussian research university didn’t rely on tuition, nor does its modern European offspring. The king donated the buildings and financed faculty salaries and laboratories. When the monarchy was gone and the rest of the country became a republic, the taxpayer became the main sponsor of universities. This is why to someone from continental Europe, fees and tuition at the University of Minnesota sound just as obscenely high as the president’s compensation. But I guess the money for the royal household must come from somewhere. And when I think about it, if the University went fully feudal with its financing model, it might actually be to the advantage of today’s students. After all, royal subjects had to relinquish only one-tenth of their personal income to the Crown.
Henning Schroeder is a professor at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.
An earlier version of this article was published at https://www.startribune.com.
