International University Bremen

First Commencement

By John B. Boles

University graduation ceremonies, taken so much for granted in the United States, simply do not happen in much of the world, Germany included. But Germany’s newest university, International University Bremen, already an educational innovation, is giving its students a hand in establishing fresh scholastic traditions that honor their efforts.

This past June, Rice historian John Boles attended International University Bremen first graduation, and while there, he was able to measure the new university’s accomplishments since its formal opening on September 20, 2001.

Visitors to International University Bremen (IUB), Germany’s only private university planned on the Anglo-American model, may not be able to detect the military base that once occupied these grounds, but they cannot help recognizing that what has transpired academically in Bremen in the last three years is a stunning success.

Today, IUB looks exactly like a small American liberal arts college—this could be central Ohio or Pennsylvania. Buildings and huge, multidoored garages that once housed anti-aircraft half-tracks have been converted into classrooms and state-of-the art scientific laboratories. The military parade ground is now a campus green, with students sunbathing or playing Frisbee. And what once were barracks have been transformed into three residential colleges—Krupp, Mercator, and College III (awaiting a donor’s name)—modeled after those at Rice.

The centerpiece of the campus is the eponymously named Campus Center. Here there are the bookstore, meeting rooms, an auditorium, and the Information Resource Center (IRC), which houses print library materials and extensive electronic research tools. This is the most recently renovated—and substantially enlarged—building on campus, and the library’s resources have grown exponentially from an original four (yes, four!) books.

The students of IUB’s first class were recruited to be academic pioneers, and that pioneering identification remained with them all the way to graduation. And nothing bound them together like the event that they called the IUB Rocks. In the months after the first matriculation, construction had left the campus muddy and, worse, the architect had neglected to build a sidewalk connecting the first residential college and the classroom complex. One cold night, practically the entire student body turned out, gathered stones from the various construction sites, and built a rock pathway to the classrooms. This rallying together to perform a community service, this creative response to a common problem, came to powerfully symbolize the can-do spirit and camaraderie of the student body.

As a result of three successful recruiting years, the undergraduate body has grown to 482 (104 in the graduating class) and the number of graduate students to 99. Fall 2004 saw about 650 undergraduates—the number of beds available in the three colleges. In the planning stage, IUB was projected to have 800 undergraduate students and 400 graduate students within five years, and while the graduate numbers will be reached (approximately 220 this fall), the undergraduate goal cannot be met until a fourth college is constructed.

Originally, it was thought that about one-third of the undergraduates would be from Germany, but it turned out that only 22.2 percent are. Eastern European nations are particularly well represented, but 7.9 percent of students are from Africa, 17.4 percent from Asia, and 6.5 percent from the United States and Canada. Instruction in English makes such internationalism possible in the classroom. The undergraduates are 55 percent male and 45 percent female, and 42.3 percent of the total are in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, while 57.7 are in the School of Engineering and Sciences.

The undergraduate students are Rice-like in academic ability. Clearly they had to be adventurous, creative risk-takers to come to a new institution, and the curriculum demands that they work very hard, probably too hard. German law mandates that the bachelor’s degree be obtained within three years, so students take seven to nine courses per semester. Whatever their major, they all must take several University Study Courses, team-taught by two faculty members from different disciplines. These courses represent the interdisciplinary focus of all the academic programs. There is a stronger emphasis on methods courses than is typical in U.S. universities, and students must complete an internship during their three years.

The colleges already are quite similar to those at Rice, with masters, associates, and an O-Week, although college identity is not yet as strong as it is at Rice. In part, this is because many of the graduating seniors lived in different colleges during their three years, as one after another college was opened. But while traditions have not yet arisen to distinguish IUB’s colleges, the masters and students alike are working to strengthen college spirit and identity.

IUB students also have struggled in organizing student governance. Some students—no doubt representing an older European student tradition that assumed an unbridgeable gulf between faculty/administration and students and hence a need for student solidarity to defend their interests—pushed for a university-wide student government. Others, who researched student government at Rice via the Internet and favored stronger college identity, advocated a college-centered system. At present, the university-wide approach has won out, but it is likely that the colleges, as they evolve, will emerge as the defining element of student identity, as they are at Rice. Graduating students say it already is noticeable that first-year students have more college spirit, and increasing college identification seems the clear desire of the college masters and the administration.

The students and faculty I talked to indicated that, on the whole, graduates had an overwhelmingly positive student experience at IUB. There were predictable complaints: the colleges and most of the classrooms and labs were unfinished when classes opened, and the first year was remembered as long, muddy, and frustrating. The IRC was impossibly weak, there were few courses to choose from, and everyone struggled with unanticipated challenges. Many students quite understandably said that the course load was too heavy. There simply wasn’t time to think about what one was learning or to take elective courses, say, in German language, once they were available.

One significant complaint had to do with the constraints of what is termed a “German” university education, which I heard defined as a penchant for rigid administrative practices and adherence to overly specialized learning taught by an aloof, unconcerned faculty. While many said this was an early problem at IUB, most believe that the situation has improved. At the same time—and this was echoed by the faculty I interviewed—the students believe that IUB has to take care in the future to continue to hire faculty and administrators from the U.S. and the U.K. to avoid slipping back into the so-called German mode of education.

But these complaints and concerns were more than compensated for by the genuine enthusiasm for what the students called their pioneer experience at IUB. They all felt they had a significant impact on European higher education by helping to create a viable institution that, in turn, had changed their lives. “We chose to explore the possibility of shaping a new university,” said a student speaker at graduation, “and in the process, it shaped us.”

Most of all, students were absolutely passionate about how the internationalism of the student body had changed their lives. This observation also was made by the faculty and administrators I interviewed. Several senior administrators who helped plan the university said they had expected the international aspect of the student body to be an attraction but had seriously underestimated how life-transforming it would be.

I was impressed by what these creative, risk-taking student pioneers accomplished at IUB in three years. They formed a number of organizations, from various sports teams to clubs for chess, ballroom dancing, aerobics, debate, and drama—there is even an IUB Students for a Free Tibet Club. They crafted a Code of Academic Integrity in the face of much European opinion that the idea of an honor code was an unworkable artifact of American naiveté. They organized a college newspaper and magazine, and they have already published two yearbooks that were well designed, witty, and really captured the sense of the academic year. And by serving on various committees, they helped the faculty and administrators further shape the curriculum and campus infrastructure.

Another incident that indicates the spunk of the student body occurred in May. In a “German-like” move that recognized no need for student input, the administration had, without announcement very near the end of the semester, closed the IRC for a fundraising event at a time when students needed it most to complete papers and projects. In a polite but unavoidable protest, the students strung a clothesline among the columns of the not-quite-finished lobby of the building, and on it each student hung a sock containing a written complaint or suggestion to the administration. Afterward, IUB president Fritz Schaumann sent an email to every student apologizing for not giving them prior warning of the IRC closure, and the administration agreed to formally act on the five best “socks” that the students chose. The IUB Socks, like the IUB Rocks, quickly became a symbol of what students could achieve and contribute to the evolution of IUB.

Later that month, on the Saturday before graduation, an End of Year Festival was held on the campus green. A stage was set up at one end, food-and-drink booths were off to the right, and at the back, little tents housed various student activities and organizations. Blaring band music filled the air as students chatted, soaked up the sun, and simply had a good time.

This scene, which looked so normal to me and could have been on any college campus in America, was cause for great satisfaction to every German-educated faculty person I talked to because such residential campus life is essentially unknown in Germany. Most universities are merely random assemblages of buildings in a city, with no dorms, no student residents, no identifiable campus. Here was an occasion worthy of celebration.

Although some German universities recently have begun to organize alumni clubs, alumni associations also are generally unknown in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Several faculty and administrators explained why alumni feel little affection for their alma maters. German universities are typically large and impersonal, there are no sports teams to rally around, and often faculty pay little attention to teaching. They also are, by law, supposedly equal: essentially credentialing institutions supported by the state, not by student tuition. And, as mentioned earlier, there are no graduation ceremonies—degrees that look more like receipts than certificates are dispensed by a clerk behind a window. Hence, alumni do not care about uniting with their universities after graduation and seldom know fellow students or have warm memories about any aspect of their education.

But IUB was planned to be, and indeed has been, very different from other institutions. Not only had the student pioneers strongly identified with the university and bonded with fellow students in the colleges, but they had paid tuition (or been on scholarship) and recognized that, without alumni support, the university’s progress would falter.

Accordingly, the day after the End of Year Festival, after much prior discussion and drafting of documents, most of the graduating students, with a smattering of administrators and faculty, gathered in the College Center to discuss and adopt the charter of the International University Bremen Alumni Association, a concept truly new to Europeans. After much earnest discussion, the charter was accepted, all graduating students marched up to sign the founding document, and the first officers were elected. Everyone present realized that another historic milestone had been achieved in the life of IUB.

Another disparity also soon became clear to me. In Germany, the practice of wearing academic gowns with all the regalia of hoods and stoles was an extraordinarily controversial, even hated, practice condemned by most professors. Of course, this was new to me, but professor after professor explained that, during the student protests of the 1960s, academic robes were associated with the rigidity of a university system unable or unwilling to adjust to the realities of a new era. While it is possible too that some protesters in 1968 and beyond associated regalia with an aloof professoriat that had too often corroborated, or at least failed to protest, the Nazi regime in the 1930s, most academicians apparently considered regalia a relic of a more recent unhappy past in German university life.

The early planners of IUB, however, wanted it to be a truly international university, sited in Germany but free of any negative associations, either with rigidity or racism; they wanted the university to be related to a much longer, more universal tradition of scholarship and learning, and they wanted to regain the use of academic robes as a symbol of proud centuries of German university life and scholarship, not a despised symbol of less fortunate times. After visiting a Rice graduation, President Schaumann became much more committed to recovering and sanitizing the practice of wearing academic robes.

Still the idea was simply anathema to some committed faculty. As a compromise, fashion designer Sibilla Pavenstedt from Hamburg was asked to design a special shawl, long and rectangular, to be worn over a single-colored grey academic gown; across the broad back “collar” of the shawl were the letters IUB. While some of the faculty—mostly those not from Germany—wore the academic gowns of their doctorate institutions, most of the German faculty just wore the IUB shawl over their dress clothes. All the students except one wore the simple gowns with the shawls. Schaumann and board chair Reimar Lüst wore neither gowns nor shawls.

In another significant adaptation of U.S. and U.K. practice, all the faculty marched in and sat, not on the stage as at Rice, but at the front right of the gymnasium that served as an auditorium. The students followed, alphabetically by college, led by their respective college masters. Proud parents and other relatives, continuing students, an impressive showing of local and national dignitaries, and a surprising outpouring of press made up the audience.

The graduation program, beginning at 10 am on June 2, 2004, included a brief but gracious address by Schaumann, who commented on how moved he was by this culmination of six years of planning and hard work by the administrators and three years of study by the graduates. He also remarked on the rich experiences all had had from the “rocks” to the “socks”—a remark the students really appreciated—and reminded all of what progress had been made, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson to the effect that “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

The ceremony continued with a dance performance by IUB students; brief addresses by the two academic deans (Gerhard Haerendel of science and engineering and Max Kaase of humanities and social sciences); a keynote address by Heinrich von Pierer, president and CEO of Siemens; and an introduction of the class by then IUB vice president for academic affairs Thomas J. Hochstettler, a former associate provost at Rice and, as of July 1, 2004, president of Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Two IUB students delivered remarks: Benny Mwale from Zambia and Vera Kahlenberg from Germany, who presented her talk as a hilarious spoof of an Oscar-winning actress, the conceit being that she had been chosen to act in a movie titled IUB.

Then the students’ names were called out by their college masters, and each student crossed the stage to receive a diploma and shake hands with Schaumann, Hochstettler, and others. Before leaving the stage, the students paused momentarily to flip their mortar-board tassel from the right to the left.

After all 104 undergraduates and three MA candidates received their degrees (the first PhD had been granted several weeks before, and this student did not march), board chair Lüst movingly summed up the meaning of the event: “For a long time I had a dream to build up a new university in Germany like the ones I had experienced in the United States. Today this dream is a reality; a real university exists on a green campus in Bremen: IUB.”

As faculty and guests left the hall and moved toward a large outdoor tent for a celebratory lunch, all the graduates hurried across campus to line up beside the Campus Center for a group portrait. On signal—I suppose they had seen this in movies—they all tossed their mortar boards in the air. The pioneers had done it! They were the first graduates of Germany’s first private university established on the Anglo-American model. Everyone I spoke to was thrilled by the spectacle of the graduation ceremony.

What will these graduates be doing next year? As of June, 79 of them have been admitted to graduate school, with some attending such universities as Oxford, Cambridge, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Heidelberg, St. Andrews, and Rice. A total of 32 are attending universities in the U.K. and 16 in the U.S., although more would have come to the States had there not been the increased difficulty of obtaining student visas. Eighteen of the graduates will be staying at IUB to earn master’s degrees. Relatively few have obtained jobs in Germany, which in part explains the high percentage going to graduate school. Local job placement is complicated by several factors: many of the students cannot speak German, there is high unemployment in Germany, and German industry, unfamiliar with the concept of the bachelor’s degree, is accustomed to hiring graduates with the equivalent of a master’s.

This latter problem, however, will disappear under terms of the Bologna Process. Agreed on in 2000, this is the most far-reaching reform in European higher-education history. By 2010, all European nations will share in a so-called European Higher Education Area and accept roughly equivalent academic standards and curricula, the concept of transfer of credit, and a common system of bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees. IUB is just ahead of the curve, and its experience with the bachelor’s degree with an interdisciplinary curriculum will undoubtedly serve it well in years to come.

In 2000 and 2001, when I interviewed a wide variety of political, business, and academic leaders in Bremen as IUB was being planned, I was commonly told there were three major problems facing the new university: attracting tuition-paying students of the highest quality, attracting a first-rate faculty to what could only be termed an academic experiment, and raising sufficient funds to operate a private university. Another powerful issue was German cultural opposition to elitism associated with a university—fueled by the fact that IUB would use its own standards to select some students and decline admission to others. And there were the smaller but no less real problems of actually running a university, with all the mundane concerns such as recruiting faculty, supplying food and housing, and providing classrooms, equipment, and books.

It is clear that most of the problems have largely been solved. More students are applying, meaning that IUB is becoming ever-more selective. Tuition is 15,000 Euros per year, but as at Rice, admission is need-blind, and generous scholarship funds are available. Faculty has increased from 27 to 91 and, in terms of quality, is on par with the best American institutions. Research grants now total more than 8 million Euros annually, and graduate students are applying in ever-greater numbers. Fundraising will require constant effort, as with any U.S. private university, but so far has been successful, bringing in about 15 million Euros annually.

One important result is the beginning of a nationwide discussion of the concept of elite universities and even of a funding initiative to create five or more elite universities within the existing German state system. As part of this discussion, most television networks and much of the press has visited IUB to see firsthand what an elite university is about, and the publicity nationwide has been overwhelmingly favorable. Several faculty said to me that they believe Germany had “turned the corner” on the issue of elitism, having seen that, as in America, academic elitism is compatible with a democratic society.

The future is not without clouds, however. The initial contracts of the founding president and the first two academic deans are coming to a close, with the imminent prospect of having to hire new academic leaders who share IUB’s innovative commitment to an Anglo-American attitude toward higher education. And Reimar Lüst, whose involvement was so very important in terms of giving IUB instant academic credibility, is more than 80 years old and will soon retire. His replacement will be crucial to the continued success of IUB. On a positive note, new Rice president David Leebron, who is fluent in German and has teaching experience at several German universities, has accepted a position on the IUB board of trustees. And of course, former president Malcolm Gillis remains on the board and is as committed as ever to IUB’s promise.

But if IUB still faces difficulties, its resounding successes are greater by far than any of its planners dared imagine. And typical of the optimism that has marked the project all along, these difficulties are seen as new opportunities rather than insurmountable problems. No one seriously believes that IUB, off to such a spectacular start, will be allowed to fail. Its promise is simply too arresting, its mission too important, not to succeed.