Under the regalia, smell of past millennia
(even in America?)
Revolutions in Germany tend to only go halfway. The king gets a gentle slap on the wrist, but his head is usually safe and doesn’t end up on a pike. So, when I became a university student at Düsseldorf University in 1977, it should not have come as a surprise to me that professors were still the unchallenged rulers in the mysterious land called Academia. The reforms following the student revolution in the 1960s had tiptoed around their privileges and powerful positions. For many years, German universities continued to be run by an old boys’ network with departmental fiefdoms, in which, as an underling, you had to prove your worth through obedience rather than excellence or independent thinking.
This sounds really awful, doesn’t it? Yes, it does, and it was part of why I came to America. To the land where professors picked up their office phones themselves and didn’t have secretaries to shoo unwelcome petitioners back across the moat before pulling up the drawbridge.
But to say that American universities are free of feudalistic traditions would be grossly wrong. Just listen to this, taken from Yale’s 2020 manual for presidential inaugurations:
“At 2 pm, the inauguration ceremony begins. During the ceremony, colleagues from other universities will bring greetings. Symbols of authority will be presented to the new President, and he will be formally installed into office. The President will offer his inaugural address. Other elements of the ceremony will include: a poem written for the occasion; an anthem with a text chosen by the new President and set to music.”
Symbols of authority? A poem? How about knight games on the campus quad or, if you prefer ancient over medieval, gladiator fights in the football stadium?
The pomp seems disturbingly dated, but it still has a lot of fans. Not among faculty, however, since their standing in the royal academic household has been steadily reduced over the years and today amounts to little more than jester of the court. In most cases American university presidents are selected by a group of proud non-academics who often call themselves regents, which fittingly translates from Latin as “kingmaker”. Faculty have been sidelined in the process and presidential search committees—as recently reported from the University of Wisconsin—often no longer include faculty or academic staff. If they are lucky there will be “listening sessions” in which their voice may be heard but hardly taken seriously.
With all the criticism that can be rightfully lobbed at the German system, it would be unthinkable that an external committee installs a retired general or “entrepreneur” as university president or, for that matter, lets him pick a poem for the inauguration ceremony. Presidents, rectors, and other senior administrators can’t be forced upon the academic community. The “symbols of authority” will only be presented to them after they survive a confirmation vote, usually in the university senate. Even if to this date some members of the faculty are enjoying their status as “Herr Professor Dr. habil.” a bit too much, strong faculty governance has had its merits in preventing the corporatization of higher education in Germany.
“Under the regalia, smell of past millennia” (Unter den Talaren, Muff von tausend Jahren) was the slogan that kicked off the West German student revolt in 1967. In the end, the system wasn’t toppled, and professors remained powerful, yet in a more participatory, democratic environment. The revolution’s most visible effect was the complete disappearance of caps and gowns from German university campuses. Just airing them out apparently didn’t get rid of the reactionary odor—not surprising since the “millennial smell” was a reference to the Third Reich in which most professors had willingly served and which according to Nazi propaganda was supposed to last one thousand years.
Having moved from Germany years ago, I am still amazed at the true bottom-up character of American democracy each time I go to the small precinct caucus in my neighborhood where candidates running for office face the first of many election hurdles. Funny that America has been a republic for more than 200 years and its universities are still run like the Holy Roman Empire.
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://academeblog.org.
