Envoys

Mayor Henning Scherf of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen sent Rice a formal invitation and regretted that a previously planned trip to India would prevent him from participating. When the Rice delegation arrived on November 17, they found that Alexander Zeiger-Jöns of Senator Kahrs’s office had immediately recognized the prestige of the delegation and had helped arrange a whirlwind VIP tour of all the academic and cultural assets of Bremen. The tour culminated in a trip to the proposed campus that, to the American visitors, looked like a small liberal arts college.

The IUB Campus Center

But the Rice delegation had already realized that Rice was in no position to establish a branch campus, no matter how attractive a setting Bremen offered. Sadly, there seemed to be no way Rice could be integrally involved. The night before the last full day, though, Auston had a breakthrough idea: Why not propose that the leaders in Bremen create an entirely new and autonomous institution—an American-style private, residential university. Rice could help them do that.
The idea, introduced after breakfast to the Bremen officials, took them by storm. There had been much previous discussion about the failures and limitations of the existing German university system, including a much-noted article in Die Ziet by Reimar Lüst, perhaps the nation’s leading scientific administrator, and more recently, a prominent speech by German president Roman Herzog, both of which had called for following the example of American universities. During their flight back to the United States, Auston and the delegation capitalized on the enthusiasm Auston’s bare-bones proposal elicited by drafting a “white paper” outlining such a private university in slightly more detail. This text was e-mailed to Germany and, after minor tinkering and energetic lobbying of the Bremen Senate by Kahrs, Timm, Köttgen, and Zeigler-Jöns, was formally accepted on December 17, 1997.

Rice President Malcolm Gillis meets with officials from IUB, the University of Bremen, and Bremen in the Town Hall, February 11, 1999.

Plans instantly got under way to send a Bremen delegation to Rice to see what an exemplary American private university looked like, and this trip, on February 6–11, 1998, was a resounding success. An influential senator from the other major political party, Josef Hattig, came, and he instantly developed a bond with President Gillis and other Rice officials and was tremendously impressed by what he saw. The entire delegation was literally wowed by the campus, the residential college system, and Rice’s whole academic enterprise. On February 10, 1998, an official memorandum of understanding was signed by Gillis and Kahrs, spelling out in detail the cooperative project, with Rice providing planning assistance in the form of two loaned professors and in a variety of other ways. The memorandum called for the setting up of a planning committee with Rice and Bremen membership, described the general nature of the resulting institution, and outlined a timetable for opening the university. A momentous decision had been reached, and everyone present understood the potential both for Bremen’s economy and, broader-ranging, for the future of higher education in Germany—if successful, the new university could herald significant change for German universities.

But the whole endeavor was still a gamble. Would the requisite monetary gifts occur in a nation that didn’t even have a word that meant philanthropy and considered education solely the responsibility of the state? Would students who were accustomed to free higher education be willing to pay tuition? Could faculty be attracted to such a novel educational experiment in Europe?