Coloniality in the German Higher Education System: Implications for Policy and Institutional Practice (original) (raw)
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German) Academia and White Supremacy
Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, 2020
This collaboration extends the discussions of white supremacy to the space of German academia by offering personal reminiscences and reflections on experiences as a Black and as a white scholar in this system.
German and American Universities: Mutual Influence--Past and Present. Werkstattberichte 36
1992
While analysis of relations between two national systems of higher education can be problematic, the essays of this conference, the editors believe, show the significance of the comparison which may be an indicator, if not a guide, to significant issues in contemporary higher education generally. Certainly, the papers of this volume produced by German and American experts in higher education inform and enlighten us about the enduring inter-connections. Dietrich Goldschmidt (Max Planck Institute, Berlin) discusses the mutual influence of higher education systems in the United States of America and the Federal Republic of Germany as part of a two hundred year old historical process. The narrative includes the favorable response in U.SA. after Germany's national unification and rapid development, the breakdown of these favorable attitudes after the two World Wars in the decline of prestige of German scholarship and education. Subsequently German influence was re-established by thousands of intellectuals fleeing Nazi rule after 1933. In the ongoing exchange of ideas and experience U.SA. plays the role of a world power preeminent in cultural and intellectual affairs while Germany is still feeling its way after assimilating ideas and considering models from U.SA. German education today is still striving to strike a balance between worthy traditions and the need to adapt the system to modern requirements. Concentrating on the post-1933 period, Karen Greenberg (Bard College) concludes that Americans appropriated German refugee whenever they could, as Americans. They sought to place refugees within their nation's intellectual context. The ensuing mixture of European philosophy and American empiricism was a subtle and intangible transfer of knowledge. The refugee scholars provided thereby a further chapter in a continuing story of American attempts to incorporate aspects of German academic tradition into its own academic setting. In doing so, they made for themselves and the tradition they represented a firm and lasting home. Under the title TransAtlantic Interaction and Cooperation two papers were presented. David Knapp (University of Massachusetts) believes that academic institutions in both Germany and the United States are now closer to a position of academic parity than ever before, especially in science and technology. The stage is now set for a new priority in American-German university cooperation, "programmatic collaboration," enabling universities to develop and disseminate knowledge without regard for national boundaries. The German-American university linkage offers most fertile ground for making American universities think differently about their own intellectual roles. Elaine El-Khawas (American Council of Education) finds that in the U.S.A. considerable dysfunction is evident in the lack of work preparation non-college going youth receive in direct contrast to the apprenticeship system in Germany Henry Wasser Ulrich Teich ler 11 2 Historical Interaction Between Higher Education in Germany and in the United States by Dietrich Goldschmidt 1.
Article sets out a socio-historical context and a conceptual orientation of the National Socialist university reforms in the Third Reich. In the first sequel the author outlines a short history of repressive policy and politicizing of universities in the German social space. Prehistory (from the perspective of National Socialism as our focal research point), respectively history of German universities shows in comparison with other European countries some specific characteristics. Namely, in Germany strong hierarchical differentiation so of university positions as of university disciplines has been more stressed, authoritarian or state supervision over the universities has been more visible, and each transgression of (anti)intellectual (cognitive) limits was more sharply sanctioned as -for example -in France. After the decline of relatively free spirit of the Aufklärung research university, when University of Göttingen was one of the high points and it attracted many young people and excellent scholars, early 19 th Century was confronted with a new ideological project of Nationbildung (retrospectively integrated into history). In these new powerful and unifying paradigmatic frames gradual enclosing of universities and self-sufficiency of German Sonderweg myth began to appear, and soon took the form of so called idealistic representation of German university. This process is, however, not single-colored but a complex one, full of inner contradictions; within it the reactionary university forces recovered, strengthened and built grounds on which a National Socialist »revolution« would place a reformed »political university«.
Migrants, Refugees, and “Diversity” at German Universities: A Grounded Theory Analysis
Boston College, 2020
The current displacement crisis in the German context has focused scholarly attention on refugee student access to higher education. However, much less research has attended to supports at higher education institutions (HEIs) for enrolled migrant and refugee students. In fact, education research in the German setting rarely focuses on students from any migrant background, though these students comprise between 20-25% of all German tertiary enrollment. This study uses Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2014) and a postcolonial lens to analyze "equal opportunity" plans and programs at 32 German HEIs across all 16 federal states. Data sources include the "equal opportunity plan" unique to each HEI (Gleichstellungsplan) and interviews with "equal opportunity office" (Gleichstellungsbüro) faculty and staff. Key findings include a bureaucratization and numerification of diversity in the German case, as well as an almost exclusive focus on diversity as gender. This dissertation offers a potentially transferable theoretical model, which may be relevant in national settings with increasingly diverse student populations, histories of colonial possession or fantasy, or primarily public higher education
Decolonizing higher education: the university in the new age of Empire
Journal of Philosophy of Education
Campaigns to decolonize higher education have focused mainly on decolonizing the curriculum. Although the cultural features of colonialism and its material imperatives and damage were both modes of colonial domination and exploitation, more attention has been paid to the former in recent debates about education, and it tends to dominate arguments about and characterizations of decolonization in higher education, by making knowledge and the curriculum the central focus. We argue the need to attend not only to the cultural consequences of imperialism and the damage to the self so thoroughly emphasized in postcolonial and decolonial theory, but also to the material implications of colonialism and the evolution of Empire, which has persisted in new forms since formal decolonization. Decolonizing higher education and its institutions must also address new forms of Empire which have colonized the university. We argue that unless the material aspects of colonization and decolonization are ...