Introduction

Future policy can be informed by understanding barriers to the implementation of new models in the organization of the university.¹ Described here is a national case in which there are profound institutional barriers to the employment of the emerging global model (hereafter EGM) of the new research university as a way to shed light on the broader implications of this model in the transformation of higher education (see Mohrman et al., this issue). Hence, the idea of an 'institutional crisis'. A sociological analysis, as applied here, assumes a different meaning of 'institution' from its more conventional use in the literature on higher education as a particular university. Sociologically, 'institution' represents the pervasive and guiding ideologies, norms, and operational models that shape behavior, both individual and collective, throughout an entire sector of society. Higher education as a whole is a social institution, and an institutional crisis implies a fundamental conflict between an institution and its larger social context. The current relationship between the ideology, norms, and operation of German universities and the German society within the overall context of a world that is increasingly interested in the EGM of the new research university generates a profound sense of crisis of legitimacy throughout this nation's entire higher education sector. This case illustrates the power of this new EGM to define an intensified relationship between the university and the knowledge society (Frank and Meyer, 2006; Meyer et al., 2007).

The German University in Crisis

The ongoing crisis of the German university illustrates the potential difficulties with implementing the EGM of the new research university in a nation where there is a long tradition of higher education, and where the university and the nation-state have developed together through a historical symbiotic relationship (Lenhardt, 2002). Once an exalted institutional model for higher education development in Western societies, the German university of today struggles to adapt to new challenges facing higher education for the new century, and appears at times entrapped within the myth of its former self (e.g. Ben-David, 1991). Rooted in the traditions of the medieval university, then in the weak absolutist state of the 18th century, and expanded with the promise of 19th century academic science, the German university with its ties to the state was the exemplar for the first wave of growth towards the modern university (Lenhardt, 2005). For example, established in 1734, the University of Göttingen became the worldwide leading university of its time.

The German model, or at least parts of it, was transplanted into the growing American higher education array of institutions. Turn-of-the-20th century founders of American universities, such as The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago, copied directly its form, institutional values, especially the unity of teaching, learning and research. And the 19th century spirit of the German university still pervades some elite American institutions today.

But the ideas of the 18th and 19th centuries on how universities should be governed and financed to accomplish their mission have been replaced with a new set of ideas with which many universities are intensifying research, teaching, and societal roles to levels unprecedented in the near two millennia history of the Western university. Reacting to the EGM, the German university and society are currently undergoing a crisis of identity and finance. Ironically many of the original copiers of the 19th century German university are now the institutions that are emulated in the 21st century as the new research universities (Baker, 2007). A further irony is that when institutions hold on too long to the old German model it can cause problems in the new academic environment, as, for example, is the case with the University of Chicago, which kept faithfully to the old model and found itself in its own mini-version of the German crisis (Kirp, 2004).

Sensing a slide into an anachronism, German faculty, administrators, and students regularly express discontent with the universities in the nation, while politicians wring their hands over solutions. A plethora of stories in the German media routinely point out a failing institution. A season barely goes by without some public call for the creation of a German 'Harvard or Stanford' for the rigors of the knowledge society and to keep pace with the production of research and technology transfer in other wealthy nations' higher education. Yet, few in the system truly understand what a revolutionary change that would mean for German higher education. The student-centered, highly privatized, research-optimized, elite American university of the early 21st provokes critical discussion in many quarters of German higher education and in society at large (Geiger, 2004; Lenhardt, 2005). But nevertheless the EGM is dominating the dialogue of the crisis among German educators, scientists, and the public.

Caught between pincer forces of pressure towards greater access and concern about internationally competitive research, the system struggles to adapt. At the same time, the ongoing Bologna process within the European Union confronts German higher education with a model of tertiary education that run counter to its national traditions (Lenhardt, 2002). While these are familiar challenges to the future of higher education worldwide, clashing as they do with the unique German combination of political control by state (i.e. Länder) authorities and a strong tradition of oligarchic academic self-regulation makes for particularly interesting institutional problems to study (Clark, 1983; Altbach and McGill-Peterson, 1999).

The crisis and calls for change run through nearly every aspect of the German university (Enders et al., 2002). The cost of reunification of East and West Germanys produced an acute shortage of funds even as enrollment increases. National enrollments have more than doubled, although enrollment rates remain relatively low in comparison to other Western nations, and demand rises for greater higher education services (Baker et al., 2007). Stagnation of public funds is particularly damaging to efforts towards fostering internationally competitive basic research in the universities as they receive only about one-sixth of the entire national research budget (Bundesbericht Forschung, 1996), and must contend with a healthy, budget-capturing sector of extra-university research organizations, such as the Max Planck Institutes. For example, Germany spends just 1% of its gross domestic product on all private and public expenditures for higher education compared to 2.7% of the gross domestic product spent on higher education in the US (NCES, 2005, 3). Further, the state is not very responsive to growing demand for higher education as the number of university students nearly doubled from 1980 to 2001 while higher education budgets only increased by 56% (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2001).

Problems with inflexible teaching loads have raised concerns about the quality of instruction, inadequate time for research, and a growing student discontent with the institution (e.g. Enders and Teichler, 1995). Similarly, problems of ineffective mentoring, inordinately long periods of dependency of junior faculty upon full professors, and adherence to the feudal Habilitation (i.e. second theses) system of access to professorships hamper the development of junior faculty and young university scientists needed to sustain the university's research tradition (e.g. Holtkamp, 1996). What was once an innovative and internationally competitive set of universities in the 19th century is now described as 'institutionally immobile', exhibiting many of the opposite tendencies from those that once made it a world model (Ben-David and Zloczower, 1991).

There are three areas of acute crisis within the German higher education system, each of which is a function of a clash between the older 19th century model of the university and its resistance to the EGM of the new research university: (1) crisis over the expansion of enrollments; (2) crisis over the expansion of academic freedom; and (3) crisis over the expansion of the scope of teaching and research within the university. Although each of these address a core aspect at the foundation of the Western university in general, and thus have already been part of the German university in its various reincarnations, the unique intensification of each of these in the EGM presents ideological and organizational challenges to the future of the German university in the 21st century.

Further, it should be noted that from its earliest beginning in feudal Western Europe until now the model that universities aspire too, and often successfully reach, are universalistic and supranational in nature. While throughout the historical development of the university there has always been (and continues to be) some struggle between the particularism of political authorities (e.g. economic concerns, technical requirements of statecraft, social cohesion objectives of a particular state) and the universalistic tendencies of the university (from curriculum to organizational form), but by in large the latter has won out (Lenhardt, 2002). This is as true for the German university as it is for universities throughout the world.

The focus here then on Germany and the EGM of the research university is not intended to mean that German higher education has not in the recent past made strides towards the intensification of the universalism represented by the EGM, it clearly has and these reforms are pointed out at the end of each of the three parts of the crisis (Kehm and Lanzendorf, 2006). Rather, the German case is particularly enlightening as it demonstrates the counter forces in society that resist the EGM, as well as other scenarios as to how the relationship between society and the university could have developed. It also should be noted that many of the factors influencing German higher education are part of the wider European situation in the debate and actions towards the future of higher education in the whole region.

It is also important to note in this regard that the so-called 'Bologna process', now a decade and a half old, has seen greater involvement of the European Union in higher education development. This is clearly an off-setting force to particularistic trends in any member nation, and in many ways could have the largest impact on transforming the model of education that Germany has tended to have from the earliest decades of the 19th century until even now. Therefore, in addition to mentioning attempts at reform of the German university across the three parts of its crisis, various examples of the universalizing impact of the Bologna process on other European nations that also influence educational decisions in German higher education are described.

The German University as a Laggard in the Global March Towards Universal Higher Education

Sociological research on social status attainment, social mobility, and the credentialing of the labor market, plus a host of social problems, all identify educational attainment of people as a key factor in understanding social institutions and processes. Therefore, significant changes in modern education systems have direct repercussions for the organization of modern society. Through widespread and unprecedented expansion of enrollments in higher education, the world is currently experiencing the third phase of the educational revolution that has transformed so much of modern society over the past 150 years. Most nations in the world, even among some of the least developed, are significantly increasing the proportion of youth enrolled in various forms of higher education (Schofer and Meyer, 2006).

For example, only about 500,000 students were enrolled in higher education institutions worldwide at the beginning of the 20th century, representing a tiny fraction of 1% of college-aged people, but by 2000, the number of tertiary students had grown to approximately one hundred million people, a number that represents about 20% of the relevant age cohort worldwide, and most of this growth occurred after 1960 (UNESCO, 2004). In higher-income nations, it is now common for more than half of all youth to receive some post-secondary schooling, with numbers surpassing 80% in a few countries (UNESCO, 2004). But, the expansion is not limited to the wealthy, industrialized societies; countries such as Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar each now possess about as many post-secondary students as could be found in the entire world at the start of the century (UNESCO, 2004; Schofer and Meyer, 2006).

This expansion has been supported by a set of interlocking ideas about human development, education as a civic right, and human capital development through direct state actions. By contrast to the near unanimous belief in educational expansion prevailing among so many nations, strong historical trends in German culture have resisted what many nations worldwide now define as the virtues of educational expansion of mass comprehensive schooling. For example, even though Germany was industrially advanced by the middle of the 19th century, schooling and higher education began to increase only after 1865, about half a century later than the predominantly agrarian US.

Similarly in the 20th century, equal educational opportunity became an issue in Germany much later than in the US and these differences persist until today. For example, following civil protests by parents and students, it was not until the 1970s when the German Supreme Court ruled that government-run 'manpower planning' was unconstitutional, that freedom of education choice was effectively opened up to those wishing to attend the highest level of secondary school that led to the university (Lenhardt, 2002). Unlike what is now happening in many other nations, higher education in Germany is not institutionalized within a comprehensive education system based on the universalistic concepts of mass education at all levels; instead, it is characterized by exclusivist institutional distinctions, which date back to an image of the social structure of the 19th century (Lenhardt, 2005). And this is evident in the fact that educational opportunity in Germany is more dependent on a student's family background than in any other developed Western nation (OECD, 2004).

Whereas Americans have tended to welcome the expansion of higher education, Germans tend to oppose it, and a number of restrictive enrollment policies were tried. While for the most part these have failed, the fact that they were attempted at all indicates a certain degree of cultural resistance to the expansion of higher education in Germany that even pervaded the policies of retraction of higher education enrollment in the 1970s and 1980s of the former socialist East German regime (German Democratic Republic, see Baker et al., 2007) This lack of support for expansion gives rise to the first part of the higher education crisis in Germany: the enrollment rate among youth is relatively small. For the most part, German higher education has lagged behind the world trend of expansion of university enrollment since the middle of the 20th century. For example, German enrollment quotas are among the smallest of all OECD countries (i.e. wealthy nations in Europe, North America, and Asia); even after accounting for structural differences, the German rate of new university entrants is 29%, in contrast to the OECD average of 32%. Moreover, this more limited enrollment enters universities that are vastly under-funded by the standards implied in the EGM. Per pupil funding in American higher education is almost double the amount in the German system. Thus, the student–teacher ratio and other core elements of German higher learning are much less favorable than in American and other OECD countries' universities.

At the core of the resistance to the expansion of higher education is the extreme selectivity of German secondary education. It is based on a 'conservative' image of the relationship between education and society; with 'conservative' meaning an ideology based on feudal ideas of society made up of a 'natural hierarchy' of status (conservative in continental usage, not neo-conservative as in the American sense, the latter of which would be 'neo-liberal' in Europe). This idea has been at the core of the German policy to limit access to higher education that had been in place in Imperial Germany since the 19th century. While many other nations had a similar arrangement over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, this idea has rapidly been replaced by the value of education as an individual right and path to human development for technical and civic reasons (Meyer et al., 2007). The endurance of this ideology in current day Germany is without parallel among other OECD educational systems, and as an institutional value it is rapidly becoming an anachronism in a world full of comprehensive secondary education and expanding higher education.

The structure of German secondary education and its articulation with higher education is the organizational equivalent of the deeper conservative ideology of education's function in society. Unlike in most nations, German secondary schooling is not undertaken in a comprehensive high school; instead it is made up of three distinct forms of schools that correspond to the status order of the society dating back to the 19th century and earlier. At the end of the 4–6th grade, depending on the Lander, students are distributed among the Hauptschule, the Realschule, and the Gymnasium. A few limited exceptions aside, the graduates of the Hauptschule and Realschule are denied access to higher education. Admitted are only the holders of the Abitur, the graduates of the Gymnasium. And although the proportion of children admitted to the Gymnasium has increased over the second half of the 20th century, it has not expanded enough to increase higher education to normal international levels among other wealthy nations (von Below, 2006). These streams not only represent future stratified occupational opportunities of graduates, but more importantly, they represent an assumption of a production of a culture made up of elites, technicians, and workers.

Illustrative of this are the many recent national and international calls for reform and even abolishment of the Hauptschule after the international achievement study PISA findings in 2006 showed that the low status Hauptschule was failing to educate the significant numbers of children of Turkish immigrants who schooled there. Yet the flipside of the system, the Gymnasium, as the exclusive link to higher education, escapes such examination and continues to be celebrated in German society.

Along with the values that underpin the current secondary and university system in Germany, the state has always been organized around the ideas of 'manpower planning', where the labor market is conceived as a fixed set of places into which the education system allocates people with appropriate skills and attitudes (Lenhardt, 1984). Instead of the more liberal notion of educational and labor market laissez-faire that underpins the notion behind the personal development of individuals in the US and many other nations, public discussion of education in Germany often returns to images of manpower needs, for example, conflict with parents of the rising middle class with widespread aspirations for university for their children to the degree resulted in the Supreme Court becoming involved to assure educational freedom of choice. "East Germany" over its short history, the German Democratic Republic fully embraced a policy of manpower planning and undertook an unprecedented retraction of enrollment rates in the university (Baker et al., 2007).

As a consequence of this underlying ideology, the German higher education establishment officially maintains that the university now enrolls too large a proportion of all students. Along with manpower planning they argue that many students lack the aptitude necessary for an academic education, and by and large they assume that this intellectual weakness is more or less a function of inborn talent, or rather the lack of it. Hence individual limits, which nature seems to impose on the individual learning potential, cannot be transcended by education. The poorly talented students are believed to be a burden on the educational progress of their better-gifted classmates and hence of the development of the elite, whom society needs for guidance and progress.

This German anthropological pessimism differs vastly from the American belief in education, and it is widespread among university faculty. For example, in a survey by the Carnegie Foundation among university professors in 13 countries, the German professors turned out to be among those holding the abilities of their students in lowest esteem (Boyer et al., 1994). A similar pessimistic attitude prevails among the teachers of the Gymnasium. For example, the professional association of the Gymnasium teachers, the Deutsche Philologenverband, has opposed all expansion of higher education since the end of World War II, when barely more than 5% of the younger generation enrolled in higher education.

This ideology claims a scientific underpinning, yet the science is often a thin veneer over a more exclusionary policy. Widespread public statements on the part of educational and scientific experts frequently oppose any expansion of university enrollments. For example, in 1997 the former President of the prestigious and leading research organization, the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, Hubert Markl, himself a behavioral biologist, publicly argued that (Markl, 1997, authors' translation): The entire educational system seems ever more geared to support even the last foot-sore [i.e. least talented individual] to take the hurdles of final examinations [to enter university], which have been deliberately lowered, rather than to help the development of the best talents. This practice wastes the most precious gift of nature — to be more precise — of human genes — to the society, which is most dependent on the most talented. Parents stricken by a frantic pursuit of happiness are unable to assess the modest talents of their children realistically. Under pressure from parents, teachers and politicians educational standards have been lowered in favor of the least talented and laziest, thereby ruining the education of the talented children. The ability of the society to master its future is at risk. One should not misconstrue this educational ideology as some residue of 20th century German racism or fascism; instead, it stems from lingering old traditional ideas of education embedded within the West from the middle ages onwards, and indeed was an underlying idea of the 19th century German university that so much of the developed world aspired to at that time. Consequently, one can easily find this kind of conservative imagery among various educators and politicians in many other nations including the US. But the German case is particularly interesting because of the widespread acceptance of these elitist ideas, as well as how these ideas retard the factors leading to the expansion of university enrollments evident in so many other nations (Schofer and Meyer, 2006).

Furthermore, the German conservative view of education also contradicts the modern norm of equality of individuals in a social order as it holds on to the feudal belief in high and low birth. The older version saw birth as determining membership in the order of estates according to God's will; today birth seems to determine social status according to the natural gene pool of an individual. This belief in inborn talents, which resists educational expansion to higher education, explains the globally unparalleled selectivity of the German educational system.

Not only does this ideology make German higher education an international laggard in terms of expansion, but also since the EMG of the new research university is funded by robust support for higher education, it retards this nation's attempts to capture the advantages of first-rate research universities.

As in the US, many in the German system fail to appreciate that expanding access and internationally competitive research universities are symbiotic because they represent two parts of the underlying model of the university taken to unprecedented intensification in our post-modern world. Hence the German system struggles to adapt. At the same time, the ongoing Bologna process within the European Union confronts German higher education with models of tertiary education that run counter to its national traditions, and are more like the wider access found in the US. The unique German combination of political control by state (i.e. Länder) authorities and a strong tradition of oligarchic academic self-regulation of universities right now limit the ability of the higher education system to generate the levels of societal support that will lift institutions into the super research university game.

The very ideas behind the American comprehensive secondary system and its relatively open higher education system that have shaped wide society support have not transpired in Germany (Baker, 2007). Along with several other Western European nations, Germany holds on dearly to the older idea of 'manpower planning' supported by a highly stratified secondary system crowned by the Gymnasium and the university as the source of the society's elite. It is no wonder that the German higher education system finds it difficult to capture the funding (public or private) to compete globally in terms of research universities. Why would those denied access to the Gymnasium and university (at the early stages of education — 4th–6th grades) support it individually or collectively?

In keeping with its strong-state model in higher education, in recent years Germany has attempted to create universities of research excellence through mostly a top-down bureaucratic process. Begun in 2005, the Excellence Initiative is a strategy whereby several of pre-existing universities are selected to receive additional investment of resources in the hope of jumping several places into the top tier of research universities worldwide Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft (DFG). The goal is to spend almost two billion euros from 2006 to 2011 to enhance graduate training, form clusters of excellence, and develop new organizational strategies to promote research. While it is too early to determine if this kind of an internal state process can remake a university, critics of the plan point out that without competition among institutions and departments these kinds of top-down plans tend to fail (Geiger, 2004); also there has been widespread dissatisfaction with the level of funding that the state provides for selected institutions (Lenhardt, 2005). For example, while the program is a notable manifest state attempt to address the crisis of the research university and the funds are significant, in total for all selected institutions they equal what it costs to operate one large American research university for 2 years with just average research output (Baker, 2007).

In contrast, there are some notable reforms aimed at make funding of research more competitive among faculty at all universities. Similarly, the German state, through its chief scientific agency, DFG, is attempting to reform the funding of scientific research into a more competitive and university-based system modeled after American National Science Foundation procedures. There have also been attempts to use more research performance-based funding (Zielvereinbarungen) and the Large Research Centers initiative increased funding, but only to a limited extent (2% increase of the total DFG budget) (Kehm and Lanzendorf, 2006). There are also signs that some of the older norms behind the professoriate are changing, as in the decline in the use of the Habilitation and the introduction of junior faculty with research autonomy common in the US.

The point is that the EGM of the research university means unprecedented levels of societal resources flowing to these institutions, both from private and public sources (e.g. Geiger, 2004). One interesting hypothesis is that the EGM originated in so many American institutions because the wider societal inclusion in higher education makes for a more optimistic attitude towards university and what they might do for the common good. This expectation tends to help the levels of resources flow into these institutions that in turn enable them to become what as been termed 'super research universities' (Baker, 2007). This is not to say that the attraction of the EGM of the research university is limited to national cultures that are less optimistic about higher education; it is spreading globally and will continue to. But understanding its origins and counter forces to it illustrate in greater detail it nature and its ultimate impact on universities.

Academic Freedom and the Autonomy of the University: The Historical Paradox of the German University

As a precursor to the modern university, the feudal German university was based uniquely on the academic freedom of the professoriate (Lenhardt, 2005). As has been well documented in various histories of the Western university, the institution was in a sense a separate estate with rights and power if its own. This structure and how it has evolved into the modern era is one cause of the inability of the modern German higher education system to completely develop the research university along the dimensions of the EGM.

Higher education management in Germany is divided among three groups: the state, the professoriate, through the holding of chairs, and university presidents. Within this triad of control, the state and the professoriate each hold more power than the presidents. For example, in contrast to their American counterparts, the position of the German university president is extremely weak, lacking even control over a complete bureaucratic administration.

This governance structure reaches back to the late middle ages, surviving until the present day because faculty chairs and their considerable management functions are the basis of academic freedom. Academic freedom was a feudal privilege and provided the university and its faculty with some independence from the absolutist state apparatus. Academic freedom in this case was not construed to mean just the freedom of individual inquiry, as in the current research university, although it included this as well. Rather, 'freedom' meant the relative political autonomy of the university from interference from above (the state) and from below (social demands of the society at large). The absolutist state, was interested in the bureaucratic rationalization of all national economic and cultural resources, including universities, as a means to wage international state competition.

The university chair-holders (i.e. senior faculty of the university), who supported this conservative social order, and the authoritarian state, with its interest in rationalized planning of society, were allied in their opposition to the emerging Western democratic society in other parts of Europe and North America. After the political and humanitarian disasters of the German state in the first half of the 20th century (in part supported by a wide majority of the professoriate at each juncture), the eventual democratization of the former Federal Republic of Germany ('West Germany') undermined the basis of this old coalition of the absolutist state and a feudal conservative professoriate. Yet the old ideology of the chair holders and the state as to the university and academic freedom lingered on, and even today interacts with the counter ideas of university governance in the EGM of the research university.

One of the main aspects of the EGM is the trend towards more neo-liberal management principles. The New Public Management — or NPM (the organizational manifestation of the neo-liberal philosophy) — abandons old bureaucratic forms of management by implementing contractual relations between the universities and the state based on an incentive system that mimic market principles. Some universities around the world have implemented management strategies aimed at improving university research based on the ideas behind NPM of public services — flatter management structures, market-like mechanisms, decentralization, customer orientation, and rational improvement of services (e.g. Sahlin-Andersson, 2002; Barzelay, 2001).

In the course of attempts towards more neo-liberal governance in German universities, the state has tended to withdraw from higher education management, yet the professoriate has tried to preserve its traditional influence and considers NPM as suspect. For example, the Association of University Professors openly fears that the new management is just a new form to keep higher education under state control, to make this control more efficient, and to use it to reduce public funds for higher education, which are already extremely limited by international standards today. These fears seem to be confirmed by an aggressively proclaimed neo-liberal educational policy on the part of federal and Lander politicians. But despite tendencies at the policy-level to embrace NPM ideas, there are currently no real impacts, although there could be gradual change in this direction in the future (Kehm and Lanzendorf, 2006).

Thus, the crisis of higher education in Germany is foremost organized around conflicting political goals over academic freedom of universities to govern themselves. This conflict, mixing the old power of the professoriate and new models of the relationship between the state and the university, has hindered the full embrace of the EGM of the new research university in the home of the original Western research university.

Resistance towards Expanded Teaching and Research within the University

Part of the German model that was innovative in the 19th century was the establishment of centers of research excellence outside the confines of the university. The goal was to intensify research activity by amassing the best and brightest of scientists in stand-alone research institutes. Exemplified by the Max Planck Institutes, this system produced impressive science for many years. Yet, in many ways it too has become anachronistic in light of the intensification of research and teaching within the EGM of the new research university. These research institutes are cut-off to a degree from the research and teaching environment of the university, and the latter certainly suffer a certain amount of 'brain-drain' and secondary status as a research organization. Furthermore, the state ties up its research funding in these institutes in a rather uncompetitive fashion that limits the opportunities of university-based researchers to excel.

The German resistance to expanded research and teaching in the academic setting of the university is a tale similar to the crises with enrollment expansion and academic freedom — an older conservative model holds sway. In this case the issue is whether or not the German university will merge intensified academic research and teaching in a comprehensive fashion as is now much the case in the American land-grant research university. In other words, will a newly integrated research component enter into the university merged with the original teaching mission all within an academic environment? Major educational and scientific organizations openly resist this idea and instead again propose a more manpower-oriented solution. For example, the high level Wissenschaftsrat (German Scientific Council) argues that German higher education might function in the future with the 'intention to train a decisively bigger percentage of the students in shorter [higher education] programs, which are linked to specific occupations' (Wissenschaftsrat, 2000, 12). These would be programs in non-university institutions of higher education without any research function and with only applied programs of study.

Similarly, the Standing Conference of the Ministries of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Federal States (Kultusministerkonferenz, KMK) agrees with the division of research first in extra-university research institutes and then in the university, but never within non-university institutions of instruction. The elevation of the university as a small and exclusive institution is further evidenced by the KMK's recent decision that the upper ranks of the public service would be reserved exclusively for university graduates, while the middle ranks would be for graduates of the non-university institutions. This exclusionary image was supported by the academy as well as the association of university presidents agreed with the KMK's decision (Lenhardt, 2005).

Without reinvigoration of research and teaching within the university, it is doubtful that a research university along the lines of the EGM will develop in Germany anytime in the near future.

Towards Reform

While the German system of higher education seems currently ill-suited to implement the EGM of the new research university, there are winds of change that suggest some progress may soon unfold. The homogenizing force of membership in the EU certainly is one major force behind some proposals for change. This has shaped a discussion and implementation of some reforms for a more open and research competitive higher education system in German. Also there are a number of experiments with private governance and funding of universities, but it is too early to tell if the society in general will support these. But the old and, for its time, successful model is difficult to change, particularly when so much of the German public seems to support the lingering imagery of the 19th century university and its secondary school system.

Notes

¹ This case study is the result of interviews with German educators and scholars of the university, archival research, and media analysis. This study is part of an ongoing collaborative research project among the authors and Manfred Stock at the Institute for Higher Education Research, Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Baker participated in this study as a Fulbright New Century Scholar in 2005–2006.

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