European Journal of Education, Vol. 41, No.

2, 2006

Bachelor of What, Master of Whom? The Humboldt

Myth and Historical Transformations of Higher
Education in German-Speaking Europe and the US1

MITCHELL G. ASH

Introduction
Public debate on higher education reform today is dominated by a variety of
competing, highly simplified views about what higher education institutions, par-
ticularly universities, are or should become. To a surprising extent, these views
are based upon even more highly simplified characterisations of university history.
The claims in question have been repeated so often that they have become clichés.
They are accepted by most players in the game, not only by politicians or univer-
sity rectors and presidents seeking convenient rhetorical formulae for the
addresses they must give at jubilees and other important occasions, but also by
many specialists in higher education policy research or in social studies of higher
edu- cation. Historical research has challenged all these conventional claims Ash
(Ed., 1997; McClelland, 2005; Rüegg, 2004). A central purpose of these remarks
is to acquaint readers outside the field of higher education history with the most
important of these challenging results. A second goal is to try to bring out some
of the implications that a revision of such clichéd views of higher education
history might have for current policy debates — or at least for the public
constructions of such debates.
In the first part I will examine what I call ‘The Humboldt Myth’, describe how
it came into existence and ask why it remains so powerful, despite the fact that it
has very little relation to realities on the ground, especially in German-speaking
Europe. In part two, I will ask to what extent it is actually correct to say — as is
so often the case — that the American universities adopted the ‘Humboldtian’ or
‘German’ university model. I will argue that this can only be maintained with
serious qualifications, even though some contemporaries wrote otherwise. In part
three, I will ask to what extent we can speak of an ‘Americanisation’ of higher
education in German-speaking Europe after 1945. I will argue, briefly, that such
‘Americanisations’ did happen to a limited extent, but were at least as often
asserted or feared as carried out. Finally, I will try to state some implications of
all this history — and the confusions, misunderstandings and mythologies at work
— for current reform discussions, in particular for the Bologna process.

‘Humboldt’ as Myth — The Invention of a Tradition

The history of the ‘classical’ German research university is generally thought to
have begun with the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810 (Anderson,

© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, OXford OX4 2DQ,
UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
246 European Journal of Education

2000). For the past 100 years, the name of Wilhelm von Humboldt has been used
as a symbol for this ‘classical’ model of the research university. Its components
have been described quite differently in different contexts, but the following four
elements appear to be common to all descriptions:

Freedom of teaching and learning (Lehr- und Lernfreiheit). Central here is that
Humboldt was a liberal in the traditional sense. He believed in individual
freedom, and therefore argued that students had as much right to choose their
instructors and subjects as professors had to decide what and how they taught.
This implied a radical break with any form of set curriculum.

The unity of teaching and research (Einheit von Lehre und Forschung). For Hum-
boldt and those who cite him, learning is a collaborative enterprise, in which ‘the
professors are not there for the students, but rather both are there for science (and
scholarship)’ (Humboldt, 1809/1990, p. 274).

The unity of science and scholarship (Einheit der Wissenschaft). For Humboldt at
least there was no fundamental distinction in principle between the natural sci-
ences and the humanities, because the concept of Wissenschaft applies to both.

The primacy of ‘pure’ science (Bildung durch Wissenschaft) over specialised profes-
sional training (Ausbildung, Spezialschulmodell). Humboldt and those who cite
him claim to understand science and scholarship as processes of inquiry — ‘not a
finished thing to be found, but something unfinished and perpetually sought
after’, as he put it — not the discovery and repetition of things to be learned from
textbooks, but an approach to learning, an attitude of mind, a skill and a capacity
to think rather than specialised knowledge (Humboldt, 1809/1990, p. 274).

Each of these principles appears admirable in itself, but they all become problem-
atic once we try to determine what they actually meant in historical practice
(Schubring, 1991). More important for this discussion is another point. The claim
that ‘the modern research university’ was founded in Berlin according to Hum-
boldt’s ideals is also problematic for the following reasons:
1. The conception of the university symbolised by Humboldt’s name had
many authors and was not even linked with the person of Humboldt
until the turn of the 20th century.
More prominent at the time were names like Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Daniel
Schleiermacher, Johann Gottlob Fichte and others (Vom Bruch, 2001. On the
central role of Schleiermacher, see Rüegg, 1997. For a collection of contemporary
texts, see Müller (Ed), 1990). Sylvia Paletschek (2001) has shown that Humboldt
was known in the 19th century as a founder of modern language studies, not as
a university reformer. Humboldt’s actual writings on university education
remained unpublished at first, and were therefore not widely known until the late
19th century. Thus, the often repeated claim that it was ‘Humboldt’s’ university
that was internationally admired, imitated or exported in the 19th century, and
then spread throughout the world (Krull, 2005) is in a literal sense untrue. Using
such formulations as accepted clichés makes it difficult to ask just what higher
education reformers, for example in the Habsburg Empire from 1848 onwards,

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 Mitchell G. 24
actually had in mind and where they got their models for university reform, given
that they had no knowledge of or access to Humboldt’s memoranda. Recent
studies suggest that the narrow linkage of ‘the’ German research university model
to the name and ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt is a myth, a tradition invented
around 1900 for reasons specific to the situation of the German university at that
time (vom Bruch, 1997; Paletschek, 2001; see below).
2. Certain institutional structures and practices associated with the modern
research university arose before the founding of the University of Berlin,
while others arose much later.
For example, the seminar as a teaching and research institution originated in
Göttingen before 1800 (vom Brocke, 1999). Humboldt studied at Göttingen, and
the seminar for classical philology there was one of the models for his ideal of the
unity of teaching and research. Other institutional structures and practices asso-
ciated with the modern research university arose long after 1810. The natural
scientific and medical research institutes with their own lecture halls, teaching
laboratories, and the associated division of labour in the production of new
knowledge emerged in the 1860s and 1870s. Contemporaries denounced them as
‘knowledge factories’, and they would surely have astounded Humboldt himself,
had he lived to see them at work (Perkin, 1984; Schubring, 1991).
3. The primacy of ‘pure’ science removed from practical concerns was never
uniformly established as a governing policy principle throughout the
German-speaking universities.
Scientific medicine, for example, was never divorced from, but always linked to
clinical training, at least rhetorically and often enough in fact as well (Coleman
& Holmes, 1988; Lenoir, 1992, esp. pp. 53–106; Tuchman, 1993). The same is
true for the other two traditional university faculties, law and theology.
The claim has greatest credibility, on the surface at least, for the so-called
Philosophical Faculty. It was indeed in Berlin that this part of the university first
acquired independent and co-equal status with the traditional faculties, though
this occurred not under Humboldt, but ten years later (Mittelstraß, 1994). Yet
even in this Faculty linkage to the state credentialing system was firmly
established by way of the state examination for secondary school teachers.
Professors in the relevant disciplines of the Philosophical Faculty sat on the
examination boards and often drafted the exams. This part of Humboldt’s
contribution, and this alone, was known to contemporaries, because it resulted
from the Prussian school reform that he indeed originated, which established the
Gymnasium certificate (Abitur) as the formal entrance requirement for
university study.
The brilliance of Humboldt’s idea was the claim that basic science (Wissen-
schaft) was itself practical in humanistic teaching. In context, this meant that
Gymnasium teachers with university training were best fitted to prepare
secondary school students for university (Ringer, 1969). Thus, it is not at all
peculiar, and yet profoundly ironic, that one of the earliest professional
associations for academic scholars and teachers, the Association of German
Philologists and School Men, founded in 1838, was the creation of classicists —
members of the very discipline that Humboldt expected to embody his ideal unity
of knowledge (La Vopa, 1990). The point is that there was a fundamental
intellectual tension, and at the same time a tight institutional linkage, between

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248 European Journal of Education
the ideal of ‘pure’ science and the practical

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 Mitchell G. 24
societal function of the modern German university from the beginning.The
tension increased as the 19th century went on, and the natural sciences and
laboratory medicine acquired more weight in the research system, while their
representatives struggled with the philologists for space in the Gymnasium
curriculum.
4. The rediscovery of Humboldt’s original writings on higher education policy
in the late 19th century coincided with a perceived crisis of the very system
he was later supposed to have created.
As contemporaries noted, by the turn of the 20th century, both the unity of
teaching and research and the primacy of ‘pure’ science — insofar as they had
ever existed — were in deep trouble, both in the natural sciences and in the
humanities. The key slogans of that time seem eerily familiar today: contemporar-
ies complained about overcrowded lecture halls, seminars and laboratories; uni-
versity enrolments had indeed increased nearly fivefold, from about 13,000 in
1850 to 64,657 in 1914 (Titze, 1983). That does not sound like very much now,
but appears to have been frightening at the time. They warned against the danger
of an ‘intellectual proletariat’ of unemployable academics, or an ‘invasion’ of
foreigners (and Jews), and finally they diagnosed an ‘exodus of research from the
university’ (vom Bruch, 1997).
At just this time, in 1899, the German technical academies acquired the right
to grant doctoral degrees. The claim that science was becoming a matter of large-
scale institutionalised knowledge production (Großbetrieb der Wissenschaft) rather
than of individual creativity also comes from this period; its author was not a
natural scientist, but the theologian Adolf von Harnack (1905), and he was referring
not to industrial laboratories but to the great editorial projects and source collections
organised by classical philologists and scholars of ancient history at the Prussian
Academy of Sciences.
The response to all this in the natural sciences was to move ‘Humboldt’ to the
post-doc level by establishing the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of
the Sciences in 1911. This continued an already established tradition of institu-
tionalising innovations by founding new institutions, while leaving the
institutional structure of the university more or less as it was. In the humanities,
the name of Humboldt became a symbol for a ‘renewal’ of the supposedly ‘classical’
humanistic German university ideal — which meant in practice that the adherents
of that (mythical) ideal remained at odds with modernity for the next 100 years.
5. The tension between the mythical ‘Humboldtian’ ideal and the reality of
modern higher education therefore did not begin in the 1960s, as many,
especially politically conservative critics have assumed, but much earlier.
That tension, and the mythical discourse around ‘Humboldt’ have continuously
shaped, and in many ways continue to distort higher education policy debates in
German-speaking Europe. Genuine university reform appears finally to be under
way, both in Germany and in Austria, but the process may be difficult, because
many of Humboldt’s ideals retain much of their attraction today.
How can this be so, given that Humboldt’s ideals were created for a university
at which at most 1% of a given age group studied, and therefore bear little relation
to the realities of present-day mass higher education, especially in German-
speaking Europe? The following reasons account to some extent, if not fully, for
the continued power of the ‘Humboldt Myth’:

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1. ‘Humboldt’ is a symbol for the autonomy and predominance of the profes-

soriate in university affairs.
2. ‘Humboldt’ is a symbol for the primacy of basic over applied research.
3. ‘Humboldt’ is symbolic of ideals in which many teachers (and even some
students) sincerely believe, and try, despite enormous obstacles, to achieve.
This is true in particular of the unity of teaching and research. Myths need
not be lies, but can instead constitute ‘corporate identity’, albeit in the form
of a ‘counter-utopia’.

Did American Universities Adopt the ‘Humboldt’ or any ‘German’ Model?

It is often claimed, not least by American scholars of the subject, that German
uni- versities served as models for the American research university, which later
went on to dominate the world science system. German writers on the subject
share this view; indeed, Rüdiger vom Bruch (1997) recently suggested, with
deliberate irony, that Humboldt found his true home in America.The relevance of
that claim to cur- rent debates on the alleged ‘Americanisation’ of German-
speaking higher educa- tion in the context of the Bologna process seems clear. If
this claim were true, ‘Americanisation’ would mean nothing less than re-
importing the real ‘Humboldt’ back to his European homeland. I will return to
that point. Here, I want simply to ask to what extent this often-repeated claim, or
cliché, is actually correct.
As context for this discussion I cite a statement made by the historian Harold
Perkin 20 years ago. He argued that the German university influenced the world-
wide dispersion of the research ideal ‘for reasons that owe more to accident than
to real understanding of what was being imitated’ (Perkin, 1984, p. 33). A recent
volume with the title ‘Humboldt international’ (Schwinges (Ed), 2001) shows
that, while many countries indeed looked to Germany as a model for the
modernisation of their university systems in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it
was no longer ‘Humboldt’s’ university by that time — if ‘Humboldt’s’ university
ever existed! And what they took from ‘the’ German model had more to do with
local circumstances than with the German model.That is certainly true for the US,
to which I now turn.
The following central points seem important to emphasise here:
1. The American universities which emerged in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries were far too diverse to be described as imports from any single
country. Rather, they were unique creations which combined elements
from the British, German and other European university systems with local
inventions (Turner, 2001; see also Shils & Roberts, 2004).
Specifically, the first or Bachelor degree programme was and remains a specifically
American variant of the English college rather than the German Gymnasium
or university curriculum. Its purpose was never to train future researchers or
profes- sionals, but to build character; thus it had moral or citizenship, rather than
purely scientific or professional goals. Around 1900, supporters of liberal arts
undergrad- uate education spoke of preparing ‘well rounded men’. Perhaps this
goal did not apply at the already numerous women’s colleges; be that as it
may, this ideal persists at least in nostalgic form until today. Later, ‘general
education’ was substituted for character formation as the ideal aim. But the
point remains valid nonetheless that ‘science’ in Humboldt’s sense was never

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central to the pedagogy of American undergraduate education. It is true enough
that German idealisations

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252 European Journal of Education

of ‘Humboldt’ also stressed the claim that systematic scholarship builds character
— this is what Bildung durch Wissenschaft is supposed to mean. As noted above,
however, Humboldt himself said that neither teachers nor students should be there
for themselves, but rather for Wissenschaft.
In the US, insofar as ‘German’ elements entered higher education at all, they
did so in graduate education, which was added on to the first degree, whereas the
doctorate was then and remained for many years the only tertiary level degree in
Germany and Austria. Even Johns Hopkins University, which initially offered the
Ph.D. only in imitation of the German model, soon added the Bachelor degree,
in order to conform with its American sister institutions. However, as is well-
known, even graduate degree programmes in the US have always been more
highly structured than in Europe. A two-degree system (Magister or Diplom,
then the doctorate) was introduced into German-speaking universities only in
the 1960s and 1970s and is now the norm there as the Bologna process begins;
but the first degree in Germany and Austria continues to be much more oriented
— at least ideally, if not always in practice — towards research training than is
the case in the US. Though it is surely correct that leaders in American higher
education at that time often cited the German universities as world leaders,
overemphasis on the German origins even of American graduate education
distorts historical reality.
2. In any case, the original cliché is based on a nearly exclusive focus on
American elite, mainly privately-funded, universities.
The symbolic figures are men like Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins or
Charles W. Elliott at Harvard (Thwing, 1928; Veysey, 1965; Herget, 1992). It is
surely correct that a very high percentage of the faculty at Hopkins as well as
other new American graduate degree programmes had studied at German
institutions (Fallon, 2001, p. 101).Yet even at the elite institutions the introduction
of graduate degrees did not escape criticism. America’s great philosopher,
William James, denounced ‘the Ph.D. octopus’ (James, 1918). However, once we
ask to what extent the publicly-funded universities in the US, which arose at the
very same time as the famous private institutions, actually followed the lead of
Harvard,Yale, or Johns Hopkins, a serious gap becomes clear.
One example will suffice here. In 1905, Edmund S. James, then President of
the University of Illinois, published a paper entitled ‘The Function of the State
University’ in the journal Science (James, 1905). There, he cited the Morrill Land
Grant Act of 1862, which granted substantial amounts of public land for the
establishment and support of higher education institutions ‘whose leading object
shall be . . . to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and
the mechanic arts . . . in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the
industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life’ (p. 609; emphasis
mine). In the succeeding decades, he added, the state of Illinois had ‘provided for
the other departments necessary to transform the original college of agriculture
and the mechanic arts into a full-fledged university of the modern type’ (p. 610).
As he noted with pride, this modern university included colleges of liberal arts
(with its associated graduate schools), law, medicine and dentistry, as well as
schools of music, library science, pharmacy, and education. Given this structure,
it was only logical that James defined the university, not as an institution of pure
learning and research, but rather as ‘the institution which furnishes a special,
professional, technical training for some particular calling’ — training which,

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 Mitchell G. 25
however, should be ‘scientific in character and must be based upon adequate
preliminary preparation of a liberal sort’ (p. 612).
Needless to say, this was precisely the opposite of Humboldt’s utopia. Indeed,
it was not in the elite private institutions, but in the public universities that the
Bachelor degree became a first professional qualification in some fields, such as
nursing, education, or social work. Perhaps it will be no surprise when I now
argue that
3. Not the adoption of the ‘German’ model — ‘Humboldtian’ or not — but
certain unique features of American higher education have accounted for
its extraordinary success.
I will list three such features here, without claiming to be exhaustive.
a. Institutional openness and diversity.
Simply listing the types of schools from a recent comprehensive history of Amer-
ican higher education (Lucas, 1994) is sufficient to make this point: State Uni-
versities and Land-Grant Colleges, Municipal Colleges and Universities,
Women’s Colleges, Black Colleges, and Catholic or other confessional
institutions. Daniel Fallon (2001, p. 100) has argued that American reformers
understood from the beginning that a modern higher education system would and
should combine broadly accessible liberal arts education with graduate training
concentrated in a small number of research-oriented institutions. Perhaps most
significant in this context are the women’s and historically Black colleges, many
of which were founded before 1900. These were not conceived as research
institutions, and there is little or no indication that they were influenced by the
‘German’ model. We might also ask whether confessional institutions such as
Georgetown, Notre Dame or the Catholic University of America followed the
‘German’ model or took their cues instead from Catholic institutions elsewhere
in Europe, but that would lead us too far afield.
b. The combination of professional programmes and academic research
departments, placed alongside one another in the same institution rather
than rigidly separated, as in German-speaking Europe.
This institutional approach undermined the elitist ideal of ‘pure’ science, without
eliminating the tension between basic and applied research. Actually, as Daniel
Kevles (1979) showed long ago, the ideal of ‘pure’ science was replaced in the
US by the notion of ‘best science’, but, even then, critics, citing untutored
geniuses like Thomas Edison, argued that such elitism was foreign to American
democratic, pragmatic values. Over time, professional training programmes
(such as schools of education, social work, or even hotel management) were also
introduced into private institutions. The ultimate result was what Clark Kerr
(2001/1964) once called the ‘multiversity’; later he spoke instead of a ‘pluralistic’
university (Kerr, 1991). As such structures became common in both private and
public institutions, they fostered an awareness that in modern societies there was
no distinction in principle between the scientific profession and any other.
c. Combination of outstanding research at the upper levels with broad acces-
sibility to basic higher education.
According to definitions used in the US census, the US crossed the threshold to
mass secondary education (50% of citizens aged 25 years or older reporting more

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than eight years of schooling) in 1910, and the threshold to mass higher education
(50% of citizens aged 25 years or older reporting more than 12 years of
education) in 1968 (Fallon & Ash, 1999).2 Of course, this definition of ‘higher
education’ includes undergraduate institutions and the so-called ‘junior colleges’,
because these are understood to be higher education institutions in the US.
Limiting the count to research universities would achieve seemingly easier
comparability with Europe, but at the cost of severe distortion, since American
research universities also offer undergraduate education. Research universities are
far smaller in num- ber than other American higher education institutions, but
they are among the largest in enrolment. In the Federal Republic of Germany and
in Austria enrol- ment in higher education institutions increased more than tenfold
between 1950 and 1990, and yet, by this measure, the threshold of mass higher
education in German-speaking Europe has not been crossed, although the
transition is clearly far advanced.
More recent developments, such as increasing racial and ethnic diversity of
student bodies and the spectacular increase in women’s participation, have only
built upon and complicated the structural basis already described, rather than
changing it in any fundamental way. As a result, American universities have come
to deal with the three purposes of the university — teaching, research, and
professional training and certification — in a way that is quite different from that
supposedly practised in German-speaking Europe (Clark, 1995). In the American
system, as in Germany and Austria, the same institution performs all of these
functions; but in the US the functions of teaching and front-line research were
(and remain) unified, if at all, primarily at the graduate level.
4. An additional element of the overemphasis on the impact of ‘German’
models is a particular conception of the impact of the émigrés from Nazism
after 1933.

Space does not permit a full account of this issue; a few words must suffice to
make my point. There can be no doubt about the triply destructive results of
Nazism for the German and Austrian universities, as well as for science and
scholarship more generally in those countries (for an overview, see Ash, 2003).

(1) ‘Decapitation’ or rather ‘self-decapitation’, though the impact of the

Nazis’ dismissal of Jewish scholars and scientists differed across
disciplines.
(2) The failure of German and Austrian university teachers to resist the Nazi
dictatorship in any meaningful way. Their failure to protest against mass
dismissals of colleagues labelled as Jews and their hasty rush to collabo-
rate with the regime undermined the credibility of the ideal of academic
freedom that Humboldt had allegedly propagated, revealing it to be the
mythical utopia that it had always been. If we redefine ‘academic free-
dom’ to mean the autonomy of the full professors as a corporate body, in
conformity with the way it was understood at the time, even this was
maintained under Nazism only to the extent that it served the ends of the
regime.
(3) The most important of these destructive results in the long run was a loss
of international standing from which it took more than two generations to
recover. The émigrés’ encounter with new academic and scientific
cultures led to cultural transformations of profound scope.

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(4) But the émigrés, even the most prominent among them, had no transfor-
mative impact on the structure or philosophy of American higher educa-
tion, though some of them surely had significant impact on the content of
certain disciplines. Roger Geiger (1986) clearly stated the point nearly 20
years ago: ‘The intellectual migration tended to confirm rather than cause
the ascendancy of American science’. Moreover, ‘when viewed from an
institutional perspective, however, the major effects of the intellectual
migration seem to be somewhat out of the American mainstream’ (p.
244).
What the émigrés did notice was a discrepancy in academic cultures and intellec-
tual styles that indicated limits to the claim that the ‘German’ model took root in
America (for examples, see Ash & Söllner, 1996; Harwood, 2004). They con-
stantly wrote to one another — natural and social scientists, as well as humanists
— that their American colleagues were often highly specialised, knew little outside
their specialties, had little awareness of or respect for humanistic culture, and
were much more interested in foolproof methods for producing exact factual
knowledge than in the broader theoretical implications of their research. Of
course, such observations appear stereotypical when stated so briefly — as do
Americans’ complaints from the same period about the Germans’ tendency to
behave arro- gantly, or to engage in abstract speculation without empirical
support. None of these views was empirically correct, but we are talking here
about images and discourse, not about nuanced realities; and the differences thus
marked had a real basis in different institutional arrangements in the two
university establishments.

Was there an ‘Americanisation’ of German-speaking Universities

after 1945?
‘Americanisations’ of various kinds certainly did happen, at least in West
Germany after 1945, for example in economic policy (the West German currency
reform was initially proposed not by Ludwig Erhard, but by an American
economist who was serving as an occupation officer in Munich at the time), and
to some extent in business management (Berghahn, 1986). In higher education,
however, ‘Amer- icanisation’ was more often asserted or feared than actually
carried out. American (and British) occupation officers initiated numerous ‘re-
education’ programmes, and these were followed in the 1950s by cultural
exchanges such as the Fulbright programme (Füssel, 2004). Many of these
programmes were undoubtedly effective. The impact was particularly high in the
social sciences; for example, the discipline of ‘political science’, in many respects
an American invention, was established in post-war West Germany primarily by
returned émigrés (Söllner, 1996). But resis- tance against intervention from
without, fearful references to ‘massification’ in 1950’s discourse (Beyler, 2003),
and the self-assertion of German research and intellectual traditions proved to be
stronger than these reform initiatives on balance. Ironically, the name ‘Humboldt’
was often invoked to legitimate restored profes- sorial privileges after 1945 —
which in turn set back internationalisation of German science by a second
generation (Jarausch, 1997). In the German Democratic Republic, the University
of Berlin was even renamed for the Humboldt brothers in 1946 — as a symbol
of ‘Socialist humanism’ (Connelly, 1997).

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‘Americanisation’ — such as it was — began in earnest in the late 1950s and
early 1960s in the context of re-orientation to serious international cooperation

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 Mitchell G. 25
and coincided with generational change. By the 1960s and 1970s, it had become
customary for West German natural and many social scientists to acquire a new,
informal degree, jokingly called the ‘iAg’ (in Amerika gewesen). The science transfer
and intellectual exchange that resulted were considerable, and have yet to be
studied in detail. But even then, limits to ‘Americanisation’ were obvious. I will
name only three here.
1. The ‘department system’ — with limits
In the Federal Republic, the 1960s and 1970s are well-known as an era of
extraordinary expansion in higher education. The Ruhr University in Bochum and
the University of Bielefeld, both in North Rhine-Westphalia, exemplify this
devel- opment; their architecture alone embodies a strong commitment to
modernisation (Lundgreen (ed.), 1994; Stallmann, 2004). Interestingly enough,
the consensus on expanding higher education came from rather different sources;
while Social Democrats supported improving access and proclaimed higher
education to be a human right, conservatives supported expansion as technocratic
modernisers. But did that expansion lead to the import of American-style
institutional structures?
Actual policy proceeded on three tracks: expanding the capacity of existing
universities; founding new universities to meet increasing demand and open up
new regions; and creating new reform universities as innovative experiments, for
example in Konstanz. The new universities in Bochum and Bielefeld represented
the second and third strategies, respectively, though both broke with the
traditional Faculties and instituted department-like structures. To what extent such
changes were actually based on the American university structures remains an
open ques- tion. Rudolf Mössbauer, a German physicist who won a Nobel
Prize in 1961, made waves on his own by forcing the implementation of a
department system as a condition of accepting a professorship at the Technical
University of Munich in 1965 when he was called there from Cal Tech, but his
example was by no means universally followed. Indeed, when he returned to
Munich in 1977 after an appointment at the ETH in Switzerland, he found that his
reform had been reversed (see the biography on the website of the Nobel
Institution).
2. The student revolt: ‘democratisation’?
The student revolt of the late 1960s was not directly caused by nor did it cause
any of this, but it posed a still more radical challenge to the traditional elitist
university model. Its leaders advocated ‘democratisation’ of university and
research administration at all levels. Pressure from this quarter led in part to the
creation of the so-called ‘group university’, giving students and mid-level staff
equal voice in university governance for the first time in German history. But this
cannot be called ‘Americanisation’ because it never happened in the US! Seen in
historical context, this was actually an extension of the already existing European
corporatist model of university governance from the professoriate to include new
constituencies.
3. Teaching and (or versus) research — pressure for degree reform
The utterly inadequate financing of the expanding universities by German
Länder governments produced a crisis that blocked reform for decades. The most
relevant aspect of that crisis was the extreme pressure it put on a central

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258 European Journal of Education
component of the ‘Humboldt Myth’ — the unity of teaching and research.
Dieter Simon wrote in the 1990s that the ideal had long since ceased to be
effective in practice; many

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 Mitchell G. 25
university teachers, he claimed, had long since departed from the forefront of
research and were engaged, at best, only in what he called Lehrforschung —
work in secondary literature needed to prepare classes. In response, German
professors began to call for a three-degree system, or at least a two-track model to
the first degree, one for future scientists and scholars and one for those ending
their studies with the first degree. Perhaps it will be surprising to some readers to
learn when this first happened — it was in 1966 (Wissenschaftsrat, 1966). That
date alone speaks volumes about the slow pace of change in higher education,
especially in German-speaking Europe. And with that we come, finally, to the
present situation.

Relevance for Current Reform Debates

It is important to remind ourselves, at least briefly, of the wider context within
which current higher education reform discussions are taking place in German-
speaking Europe, before turning specifically to the Bologna process itself.
1. The wider context: four key words
Seen from the perspective of wider cultural and political debates in German-
speaking Europe and the use of historical constructions in such contexts, a short
list of key words comes quickly to the fore: ‘globalisation’ (here often portrayed
in a foreshortened and distorted manner as ‘Americanisation’), ‘privatisation’
(rather than ‘marketisation’, the term often used in Britain (Lawn, 2001, 2003;
Wright, 2004), ‘autonomy’, and ‘elite’. Such terms have become common scare-
words in European discourse generally, and not only in university policy debates.
Sometimes it almost seems as though the critics of reform have the discursive
upper hand in Germany and Austria.These words mean different things to
different people, and that is one reason for their frequent use. Such key words
have acquired power in part because they appear useful to political players
across the spectrum
— for conservatives seeking to retain corporatist privileges as well as for those on
the left seeking to defend what they take to be fundamental qualities of the
European welfare state. The common denominator appears to be the defence of
European achievements — grand intellectual and elite traditions if the speaker is
conservative, social state structures and open access to higher education if one
is more to the left — against a perceived threat from without (Stucke, 2001;
Jarausch, 2003).

‘Americanisation’. Recent efforts at higher education reform in Germany and

Austria have drawn to some extent from elements of the American university
system, but they have also looked to certain European models as well as to
Australia and other places for guidance. It is thus incorrect to describe the changes
now underway in Europe solely as ‘Americanisation’. Taking recent changes in
German higher education law and the new Austrian university law as examples,
it might be more interesting to ask whether the reformers have understood those
features of the American system that they may think they have imported.
Space does not permit me to do that here, but the fundamental point seems
clear: the core issue, not only in higher education but quite generally in the
current transformation of welfare state regimes now under way, is the relationship
of state and civil society, and the correlative question in this field is whether

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 260 European Journal of Education
higher education is a private or a public good. For Americans, this question is a
non- issue. It is obviously both, so the issue is whether university legal status,
institu-

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 Mitchell G. 26
tional arrangements, and financing should reflect that screamingly obvious fact or
not. Is that what is happening in Europe today?

‘Privatisation’ — ‘Humboldt’ or Darwin? Or neither? If one were to believe all

the noise in public discussion, it would seem as though German and Austrian
univer- sities were instituting ‘social Darwinist’-style, entrepreneurial structures,
with wild, free-for-all competition substituting for legally ordered relationships.
Serious higher education reform has indeed begun in Germany and Austria, but
what is happening there can hardly be described as ‘privatisation’.
In Germany, a series of revisions in the Higher Education Framework Law
passed since 1998 has had the effect of loosening, though not entirely removing,
the restrictive structures that had inhibited change until that time (Welsh, 2004).
One of the most important of these is the ‘EXperimentation Clause’ which allows
Länder governments to institute reforms without waiting until all Länder have
come to a consensus. This provision has released considerable energy and
initia- tive, and is surely partly responsible for the rapid introduction of first-cycle
degree programmes as part of the Bologna process, at least in some
universities and subject areas. A second change is the possibility — not the
obligation! — of establishing so-called ‘global’, i.e. flexible, instead of line item
budgeting, as well as a large degree of university control over faculty hiring.
But of course budget flexibility does not equal ‘privatisation’! And the very idea
of the ‘EXperimentation Clause’ presupposes a situation in which everything
not addressed by such a ‘clause’ is still subject to strict, if not rigid regulation
by the Länder. In fact, two of the central problems of the German system are
still very much in place: the insistence on civil service or government
employee status for all teaching staff, with all of the associated rigidities; and
the legal fiction directly resulting from this, that all universities are to be
treated in the same way with regard to policy implementation, despite obvious
qualitative differences amongst and within them.
The Austrians have gone much further, without being widely noticed (at least
in public) by Germans until recently (an exception is Nickel, 2002; Por Austrian
accounts, see Schnedl & Ulrichl, 2003). The University Law of 2002 releases all
Austrian universities from their previous status as subordinate organs of the state
and declares them to be ‘corporations at public law’ (Universitätsgesetz, 2002).
German universities also have this legal status in principle, but remain subject to
the federal states in fact. In Austria the change means that new teaching staff no
longer have civil service status, but are treated as employees with time-limited
contracts; full professors can be granted exceptional status equivalent to perma-
nent tenure. The law also mandates fundamentally new legal and institutional
arrangements at the top of the system, including governing boards and a strong
rectorate, but leaves internal university structures largely free to be shaped as the
local leadership wishes. For the first time, the possibility has emerged of a
situation in which serious developmental planning can take place, funding and
positions can be redistributed among university faculties, and there are clear
winners and losers. This appears to be rather like the situation in American state-
supported universities on the surface. However, decoupling from civil service
affiliation does not equal privatisation! In fact, state influence, even
predominance, continues in practice, for at least two reasons: because
representatives selected by the Ministry of Education sit in significant numbers on
all university Advisory Boards (in the case of the University of Vienna, by far the

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262 European Journal of Education
largest Austrian university, the number

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 Mitchell G. 26
is four out of nine); and because direct state contributions still account for most
of the budget (the figure at present is 80%) — however flexibly that budget can
now be administered.

‘Autonomy’. As was just pointed out, legal autonomy is not the same as ‘privati-
sation’, but in public debate under the rubric of ‘Americanisation’ the linkage of
‘autonomy’ with ‘privatisation’ seems obvious on the surface. In this discursive
framework, ‘autonomy’ appears to have become a code word for the delivery of
higher education into the tender hands — or rather the gaping maw — of the
market. In such polemics, the word is often coupled with ‘privatisation’ to
hammer the point home. (In Britain, perhaps due to the different legal status of
universities there, the preferred term is ‘marketization’ (Lawn, 2001; Wright,
2004). Ironi- cally, opponents of reform in Germany and Austria also use the
word ‘autonomy,’ but in this case they are referring nostalgically to the
supposedly golden days when they were left alone to do as they wished — with
the help of friends in the Ministry, of course!
For observers coming from other political cultures, it appears parado Xical in
the extreme to use the term ‘autonomy’ to describe a situation in which such
‘autonomy’ was in fact guaranteed by the State and therefore implied, both in law
and in practice, actual dependence upon ministerial bureaucracies. But of course
such usage makes perfect sense when we remember the formulation ‘freedom of
teaching and learning’, part of the invented tradition described in part one. The
historical facts that such ‘freedom’ could be abrogated at any time at the behest
of the State, and that this actually occurred with the willing collaboration of
teachers and learners under Nazism, are suddenly forgotten in such usages —
even or precisely by those on the left who are normally intent, with good reason,
on reminding their colleagues of that very past.
Because opponents of change in German-speaking Europe ignore the situation
in publicly-supported institutions in the US, such polemics often overlook two
simple facts that ought to be emphasised here:
Legal ‘autonomy’ is not the same as actual autonomy. As stated above, in Austria
heavy dependence on state funding remains in place for the time being, despite
the change in legal status brought about by the University Law of 2002. As the
strongly constrasting situation in the US clearly shows:

Autonomy means mixed financing! In the US, the states have been withdrawing from
commitments to support higher education institutions for decades. Opponents of
the process have castigated state governments for a failure to fulfil commitments
of various kinds, but given the civic culture of the US, which had a weak central
government until the 1930s, it has occurred to almost no one there to claim that
higher education is a public good in toto.
And indeed, the gradual or sudden reduction of funding from the states in the
US has led to two extraordinary developments, which might be news to many
readers of this text and which were not predicted in America. The number of
‘state-supported’ universities of any size that obtain more than 50% of their
budgets from the state governments is now ZERO, and yet public university
budgets have actually INCREASED as a result of mixed financing. Contrary to
public polemics about the ‘corporate university’, by no means all of that increase
comes from support of research by large business corporations. Rather,
publicly-supported

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universities have responded to the withdrawal of financing by their state

governments by moving to increase funding from numerous other sources,
including research funding from the federal government; sales of services; and
third-party gifts from alumni and other, civic-minded individuals. In the process,
they have INCREASED rather than decreased their freedom of action, because
no single funding source is sufficient any longer to give any single actor the final
say in university affairs.
Here we return yet again to the fundamentally different relations of the state
and civil society in the US and continental Europe. What is happening in America
today is easily understood in a historical context as a renewed mobilisation of
civil society — and NOT only market — forces in support of higher education
that is part of a long tradition in that country. That is why informed American
visitors never cease to be astonished by questions that are constantly repeated in
German and Austrian debates, such as how many universities or higher education
institu- tions ought to exist in a given place, whether particular programmes of
study are too numerous and the like. Simply recalling the number of higher
education institutions in Boston, Massachusetts, and comparing it with the figures
for Berlin or Vienna, shows how strange such discussions can appear to be. In a
system that combines state and private or civil society financing and control, the
‘how many’ question ceases to be of any relevance; higher education institutions
are created and survive in the numbers and to the extent that various sorts of
people are willing to pay to support them. The obsessive focus on distributive
questions is characteristic of and perhaps understandable in a state-centred system
with limited budgets. Seen in this light, higher education policy debates become a
subset of a larger dispute on the reform or future of the welfare state. That is
another reason why allegations of ‘Americanisation’ carry weight.

‘Elite’. The ‘elite’ issue is currently a hot topic in Germany and Austria, whereby
the meaning of the terms ‘elite’ and ‘university’ appears to have become rather
flexible indeed. In Germany, even the SPD-Greens coalition government talked
for a time about awarding certain universities the title ‘top universities’ on a
competitive basis. Funding has now been jointly agreed by the federal and
Länder governments to support innovative graduate programmes and other
centres of excellence on a competitive basis. In Austria an effort to establish a new
‘university of excellence’, focused primarily on the natural sciences, has excited
controversy. But the proposed annual budget will be in the range of 80 to 120
million euros, which indicates clearly enough how seriously Americans can take
all this. Com- paring such sums with the annual budgets of true elite institutions
such as Harvard or Stanford, one remembers a statement made by the former
Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, in
another context: ‘Show me the money!’ Or, as a television sitcom actor might
say: get real!
German-language debates on this issue and on higher education in general
constantly evoke examples from the famous American elite universities, like Har-
vard, Stanford or Chicago, along with Switzerland’s ETH — but not O Xbridge!
All this utterly inane babble goes on as though Harvard or Stanford were the only
higher education institutions in the United States, and state-supported universities
like Wisconsin, Michigan or the Texas and California systems simply did not
exist. And yet these institutions combine multiple-source financing, high levels of
access to higher education at the entry level, and world-class research facilities.

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 Mitchell G. 26
As at least some higher education administrators in Germany and Austria — if
not the

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 266 European Journal of Education

larger public or the media — have finally begun to realise, these institutions, and
NOT the elite private universities, are the relevant comparators for serious higher
education policy in Europe (Ash, 1999). Apparently neither the media nor media-
savvy higher educationists think that it is sexy enough to orient policy towards
such real-world models, and believe it more exciting to dream about German-style
elite universities without having a prayer of finding the cash to pay what they
really cost per student! In any case, as informed Americans know well, neither
quality nor access problems are limited to the ‘public’ sector — there is a wide
range of prices and quality in the private sector as well. This only increases
Americans’ astonishment when they are confronted with the simple-minded
stereotypes that dominate public German-language discussion.
2. The Bologna process: will the right degree names be enough?
I turn now to the ‘Bologna process’ itself and the claim of at least some of its
proponents that its aim is to establish a European higher education area compat-
ible with the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’. It is well-known that the primary aim of the
‘Bologna process’ is to establish a common European higher education architec-
ture by 2010, and thus to assure more effective mobility of students, researchers
and teachers within the European Union. This is not a cliché, but a serious policy
goal, the possibilities and problems of which can and should be examined on their
own terms. An additional claim is that the ‘Bologna process’ will result in a system
corresponding to, and therefore degree programmes compatible and competitive
with, the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model — whatever that may be. A third claim,
at least in later communiqués, is that the Bologna process will stimulate curricu-
lum reform and thus begin a transformation from research- to student-centred
teaching. Let me focus on the second of these aims here.
The programme outlined in the Bologna Declaration calls, amongst other
things, for the ‘adoption of a system essentially based on two main cycles, under-
graduate and graduate. Access to the second cycle shall require successful com-
pletion of the first cycle studies, lasting a minimum of three years’ (Bologna
process 1999).
What is missing from this picture is the use of the English terms Bachelor and
Master for the degree programmes themselves. These were added later — nomen
omen est, to coin a phrase. Of course, both terms come originally from the Latin,
and the irony that degree names from the Medieval European universities are now
to be transferred from the Anglo-Saxon world to the continent from which they
came has not been lost on historically informed users. Symbols are important,
especially in higher education and science, which deal, after all, primarily in
symbolic capital. Is the decision to use these names a master stroke, so to speak,
or one of the biggest mistakes in the history of higher education policy?
In October 2004, German newspapers reported results of a survey allegedly
carried out by the Educational Credentials Evaluation Agency (a private organi-
sation funded mainly by university associations) and the Institute of International
Education in New York (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2004). The survey showed
that 71% of respondents believed that a foreign Bachelor degree must certify four
years of study in order to be accepted as equivalent to an American Bachelor. As
many as one-half of Bachelor degrees already issued in Europe by that time had
not been recognised in the United States, because they are three- rather than four-
year degrees. It is important to emphasise here that there is no state body in the
United

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 Mitchell G. 26
States responsible for certifying the compatibility of degree programmes. Rather,
individual state bodies or even single institutions make their own determinations;
accreditation associations can and do issue guidelines, but these need not be and
often are not slavishly followed in practice. The hope that a single accreditation
body in the US could make such formalistic determinations in a way that would
be binding for all institutions accredited by that body is a projection from
European state-centred institutions, and has little basis in fact. Important in such
assessments is the distinction between formal and content-oriented
comparisons.
The report just cited focuses primarily on formal criteria for compatibility,
such as the number of years to degree and the number of credits or courses per
year. Much more important, however, for determining the actual market value of
degree programmes — regardless of what sort of ‘market’ we mean — is the
content of the programmes themselves. Americans take it for granted that indi-
vidual institutions, and even departments, will still examine each student’s cre-
dentials individually, as they already do for those of students transferring into
their institutions from other states in the US. Any serious comparison of
Continental European and American degree programmes must take note of a
fundamental difference in structure, expressed in the quantitative relationship
between the number of credit hours in a major field, and the rest (minor field,
general educa- tion, electives). American first-degree programmes require a
carefully distributed mix of these four types of courses, with the ‘major’ rarely
taking up more than half the total credits. Most European programmes, in
contrast, are focused on training in one or two disciplines or special fields of
knowledge, with relatively little space for general education or even the free
exploration of other subjects.
This is not an incidental matter, but a fundamental structural difference deeply
rooted in history, as I tried to make clear in the first part of my remarks. The
architects of the Bologna process may have thought they could avoid confronting
the form and content issues simply by instituting the three-degree system and
giving the new degrees the right names. If that is indeed what they thought, they
could not have been more mistaken. One wonders what the British Minister
thought he was signing! Given that the Blair government introduced the Founda-
tion Degree in 2001, located below the Bachelor, it seems reasonable to ask to
what extent the Bologna process is now binding in Britain.
The claim that the three-degree progression of the Bologna process will estab-
lish programmes compatible with those in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world will only be
accurate if one of the following conditions is met:

(1) if all European institutions institute four-year first-cycle degrees, and

eliminate the three-year programmes;
(2) if the US and Great Britain are actually prepared to convert their Bachelor
degree programmes in all fields into the sorts of three-year, narrowly
specialised first degree programmes envisaged in Germany and Austria
and eliminate the very general education components that make them
distinctive; or
(3) if all parties are prepared to structure their Bachelor degrees in the way
such degrees are organised in professional areas such as business manage-
ment, journalism, nursing or social work in the US (i.e. with very small
general education components and much larger practice-oriented course

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268 European Journal of Education
work than is the case for degrees in the so-called liberal arts).

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 Mitchell G. 26
Obviously, none of these outcomes is likely to happen. In any case, as someone
who has already acquired extensive experience in examining transfer or credit
applications by foreign students at the University of Vienna, I can attest that
American students will face a rude awakening if they think they can simply
transfer into a German or Austrian university once the Bachelor has been
established there. The same will be true for German or Austrian students hoping
to transfer into American M.A. or even Ph.D. programmes. The report I just cited
indicates that such rude awakenings are already happening to German students
seeking to transfer to American institutions.
Of course, it may well be asked whether or not such issues actually get to the
heart of the real hopes and motives driving the ‘Bologna process’ from the political
side. It is an open secret that financial concerns also play a role in driving the
Bologna process, at least in German-speaking countries. If state financial assis-
tance to students could be limited to the first degree only, and the duration of the
first degree were limited to six semesters rather than the present eight (on paper
— real time to degree is often longer), this would make it possible to cut state
support to students by one fourth! From the Master level onwards, financing
would then be personal or external. In somewhat more optimistic, but for many
still frightening scenarios now in play in some of the German Länder, rigid limits
are to be placed on the numbers of students allowed to proceed beyond the first
cycle, thus limiting potential claims on state support for second- or third cycle
programmes. Whether universities will be allowed by Länder governments to
acquire supplementary funding from other sources, including tuition, in order to
finance more places in second- and third-cycle programmes is still an open
question. Though some Länder appear to be preparing to introduce modest stu-
dent fees, German slowness to move in this direction suggests that there are still
limits to ‘marketisation’ in this part of Europe.
As stated above, another central claim for the benefits of the Bologna process
is that the new Bachelor degrees will reduce the percentage of early leavers and
raise the numbers of nominal ‘academics’, thus improving the OECD statistics on
this subject for Germany and Austria and making these countries appear to be
making progress towards competitiveness in the knowledge-based economy.
Unfortunately, precisely the American experience suggests that scepticism about
the possibility of actually achieving such technocratic goals is appropriate. In the
state-supported universities in the US, the percentage of early departures without
a degree is alarmingly high, especially in the first two semesters. It is generally
agreed that this is due to inadequate preparation at the secondary level, as well as
insufficient emotional maturity, and thus inadequate concentration on studies
among the students. The assumption that the new European Bachelor degree
programmes can and will actually be completed in six semesters — the basis for
the hoped for savings in student assistance — appears to be equally unrealistic.
For years, actual time to completion for Bachelor degrees in the US has been
closer to five years or longer, rather than the traditional four years. A major gap
yawns here between the dream of achieving social change by administrative fiat
and the realities of student life.
Of course the success of the optimistic version of this scenario depends on
labour market acceptance of ‘Bachelor’ degrees — so where is it? Unfortunately,
policy-makers appear to be agreed that this is one of the major problems of the
Bologna process thus far. One of the goals stated in the Glasgow Declaration, for

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270 European Journal of Education

example, is to work on making government employment systems accommodate

the new first- and second-cycle degrees (Glasgow Declaration, 2003). This sug-
gests that there has been little movement in this area so far, but if the largest
employers of university graduates in European countries have not yet changed
their standards, then why should other employers do so? This is also why the
process is being stoutly resisted in Germany and Austria by groups like the
associations of technical universities or secondary school teachers (Herrmann,
2005). These are precisely the fields in which existing degrees (the Diploma for
engineers) and state examinations (for teachers in Germany) are tightly linked
with employer requirements, and no such link seems to be given as yet for
Bachelor degrees.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I return to ‘Humboldt’. As I suggested in the introduction, any
separation of past and present in this context is artificial, since constructions of
tradition function primarily in the present and only secondarily as claims about
history. And indeed, ‘Humboldt,’ too, has its place in the current opposition to
reform, alongside ‘Americanisation’. The claim — one shared again by conserva-
tives and Social Democratic opponents to reform — is that the Bologna process
will lead to the ‘death’ of ‘Humboldt’. For example, Heike Schmoll wrote the
following in a lead article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in May 2005: ‘What
is happening in the context of a politically desired accommodation of the
European higher education system is the destruction of universities in the
Humboldtian mould through Americanisation, as well as the political and
economic influence on research and teaching and a general equalization of
degrees . . . The issue is neither education (Bildung) nor quality, the issue is
numbers and graduates’ (Schmoll, 2005).
Such polemics might well be expected from conservatives, though they do not
match well with the claim, also advanced by conservatives, that ‘Humboldt’
already died with the opening of the universities in the 1960s. Interestingly
enough, fears of the ‘death’ of ‘Humboldt’ can also be found on the left, many of
whom entered academic life precisely as a result of the opening of higher
education and have apparently grown attached to the utopian ideal described in
part one of this article, even though it bears almost no relation to the realities of
mass higher education (Stölting, 2005). This may help to explain why it is no
coincidence that resistance to the Bologna process has been stronger in the
humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences and technical fields.
But the Humboldt Myth has also been persistent in these disciplines because
the ideal of freedom of teaching and learning has become a dignified label for a
laissez-faire approach to teaching and unwillingness to take responsibility for
learning outcomes (Pechar & Pellert, 2004).
Given the multiple pressures involved and issues and interests at stake, what
can be expected? Here is my personal opinion, for what it is worth. The creation
of a European higher education sphere is a fascinating project, likely to result in
something far different from and in many respects more interesting than the ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ system with which it is supposed, erroneously, to be compatible. As
shown in part three, the division of existing Diplom or Magister programmes
into two degree cycles, with the first for foundational studies and the second for

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 Mitchell G. 27
the first steps towards research, fulfils a long-standing demand from within the
German system. It has the additional advantage of being in accord with the wishes
of the vast majority of students who have little understanding of or desire to do
academic research and are at university for rather different reasons in any case.
Whether European employers, including state Ministries, will eventually
recognise the value of the new Bachelor degrees remains to be seen.
The difficulties in the way of actually achieving a common European struc-
ture — and the potential for innovation within that structure — are great enough,
given the labour market problems just mentioned, as well as long-standing differ-
ences in the organisation of degree programmes and academic standards within
Europe and institutional inertia. Perhaps it is most worthwhile to focus efforts on
this goal, rather than to delude oneself about the degree to which the results will
actually be compatible with American (or British) models. It is too late to change
the degree names, but it is illusory to pretend that the content of these wine
flasks is or will be comparable with that of American ones, at least. In any case,
as economists well know, ‘competitiveness’ can also be achieved by offering
different — and better — programmes instead of duplicating those offered by
competitors.

NOTES
1. Revised and expanded version of a keynote address to the conference, ‘The
Bologna Process and the Shaping of Future Knowledge Societies’ (Third
Conference on Knowledge and Politics), University of Bergen, Norway, May
19, 2005.
2. OECD statistics have not been used here deliberately, because these generally
cite numbers of ‘academics’ based on degrees completed, which is not the
same thing as numbers of years in school.

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