In Hamburg’s university policy, a weak of the university reforms is reflected these days
Hamburg university policy is over-regionally in the headlines. At the moment, the focus of the criticism is on the outgoing university Prassidential Auweter-Kurtz. She had been a miscarriage. But by whom she was used at all? Through an external university council. And only this she was obliged. The college reforms have replaced the democratic choice of the Prasidium by the dictation of the external university council, which is not even busy by university. "Found" Auweter-Kurtz was finally from a headhunter. All these advances do not correspond to the requirements of academic life and are borrowed from the SOG. free economy.
That’s why nothing won with a new prasidentine. The effect achieved is only cosmetic nature, as if to replace a unpopular tyrant by a more sympathetic dictator: it may run a lot better (or not), but democracy was not introduced. And this would be the only reasonable solution. Because only the democratic steering of a university out of her interior can avoid the problems of which we witnessed in recent years.
The university reforms, which were also greatly designed in Hamburg after proposing the Bertelsmann Foundation and other influential advisors, do not meet the varied but concrete interests of research and teaching. They comply with the unilateral interests of industrial consultants. That these are considered by politics may be lacking in a black government. But that they were raised to the sole mabboat of the reforms, is devastating. How far the influence of the economy goes into higher education, see the dominance of managers sitting in the new university rates. It is a huge cuckoo egg, which today blocks the sciences.
Universities should be guided by strong hand – following the myth of the heroic economic rambos -, it sees the Hamburg University Act. But this laughing number is only the tip of the iceberg from technocratic foam, which glued the university for a few years: a gigantic apparatus of control and power ameng was admitted to the everyday work of the universities. He has the consequence that the audit is optimized, quite, as the university of actions that could be convinced to convince. Actions to which it is believed to be interested in short-term usability and brightening balance sheets – but these parameters agree with the tasks of a university as a public and cultural room overlong?
Hardly likely. But there are also speculation around: The current mismanagement is so serious that some argeways, the reforms served only to ruin the public universities final. Then, at least it lacks why private educational companies like Bertelsmann took so much impact on the conception: are the public facilities bad, creating an expanding market for private universities.
One may now be attached to such theory or not, it is clear that only those areas could benefit from the reforms, which have always been close to economic recovery: technological research and training-oriented study goals, as they were formerly operated by the colleges and technical universities. The division in technical colleges and universities was known not only a blessing, but the overfuilation of the university discourses on FH level is also no solution. Thus, the orientation is on the feasible in contrast to a science as an autonomous area, as he lively also in kind. 5 ABS. 3 of the Basic Law was determined. Teaching and research are written there, free. Of these, in today’s system, no longer can be the speech: the influence of the external managers and their prassides is definitely too rough.
In addition, reform legislation produces one-dimensional self-actor and conformists. Credit points and indicators, evaluations and rankings should be objective values over the "value" all existing elements deliver. But the magical numbers gained are theoretically more than fragwurround. In practice, the procedure commits the path of the slightest resistance and short-term calculus. Scientific disputes will be overformed with a mechanism that comes close to the control loop of the quota metering on television. The result is known manner: All transmitters send the same to the same program bursting. Variety and level do not play a role in this normal mechanism.
In Hamburg, there is a significant weakness of higher education reforms in these days: the deployment of the company structures. Each University Council, which ames the function of the Supervisory Board, blindly adapts the control parameters from economic practice with: "Visible" Success, glossy corporate identity, the magic of numbers. A prasidium equipped with comprehensive power is committed to these strange concerns and puts them inwards. What remains on the track are the concrete sciences with their legitimate self-interest.
What is destroyed in addition is the university as a place of social reflection and criticism, the free goods in this sense, namely autonomous in the sense of the Basic Law. Today’s reform college is a sensible, social tasks unbround university.