The Seventies
Expansion of Higher Education and boom in applications
By Heike Jöns
Dieser Artikel auf Deutsch
The protest slogan, "Under the gowns - the odour of a thousand years", coined by Hamburg students in 1967, stood at the beginning of a comprehensive reform of higher education that characterized the 1970s. The reform got underway with the foundation of the German Educational Council in 1965 and, just like in other industrialized countries, led to an unprecedented expansion of the tertiary educational system. In order to meet the growing numbers of qualified school-leavers and undergraduates, many of whom were able to apply for support from the new Federal Education Assistance Act (BAföG, 1971), numerous new universities were founded and new appointments at existing universities were made.
This enormous increase in capacity meant new potential for international academic relations which was reflected in a further growth in the numbers of annual applications for the Fellowship Programme. At the same time, the standard figure for fellowships granted annually gradually increased from 300 (as of 1962) to more than 440 (as of 1973) and then to the reference point of 500 (as of 1980) fellowships per year. Despite occasional upward deviations (e.g., after German Unity, 1991 - 1992), this is still the case at the beginning of the 21st century.
Shift in subject emphasis
Increased interest in research visits to Germany was most evident in the sciences and engineering. Between the first and third decades of sponsorship the total number of fellowships increased almost threefold. But in the sciences it was almost fourfold and in engineering just about fivefold. The major reasons for this were growing economic importance and the targeted development of scientific and engineering research at institutions of higher education in Germany, at Max Planck Institutes, and at state-subsidized major research institutions. In the third decade of sponsorship, the bio-sciences, chemistry, and physics produced the most fellows. The first of these unseated medicine, which had been the most frequently-represented discipline during the first two decades.
Humboldt Fellows by home country, 1974 to 1983. Click here for a larger image (Graphics: Jöns).
 | In the humanities, history came to the fore with more than four times the number of fellows in the third decade compared to the first. Growing interest in analysing recent German history and the increasing opening up of archives had led to a research boom in history at home and abroad. But taking all the humanities together, the sponsorship figures had hardly doubled so that their proportion of fellows as a whole was declining. The potential for increased applications in this complex of subjects is particularly small because knowledge of German plays a central role in most research projects in the humanities and the number of foreign academics with a knowledge of German is restricted and, for historical reasons, even declining.
New "Ostpolitik"
In foreign policy, the beginning of the Seventies was characterized by new policies on Germany and "Ostpolitik" which reached a temporary climax when treaties were concluded with the Soviet Union, Poland, and the GDR and laid the foundations for more farreaching détente with the Central Eastern European states. The resulting establishment of diplomatic relations with Poland was accompanied by a veritable boom in applications after 1972 which reached a peak in 1985. Until the Iron Curtain fell, Germany had been a central point of reference in international academic cooperation for Polish academics outside the Eastern Bloc, for political, cultural, and economic reasons.
During the third decade of sponsorship (1974 - 1983) most applications came from India (18 percent), followed by the U.S.A. (10 percent), Japan (10 percent), Poland (9 percent), China (4 percent), and Egypt (4 percent). The Federal Republic had established diplomatic relations with China in 1972. However, academic mobility in the framework of the Fellowship Programme only got underway in 1979 during the period of economic liberalization and opening up to foreign trade after the death of Mao Zedong. The figures for applicants and fellows from Egypt were particularly high in the late Sixties and early Seventies even though diplomatic relations to Bonn had been broken off between 1965 and 1972 after Germany had established diplomatic relations with Israel (1965). Only occasional fellows came from Israel post- 1958. In the Seventies, however, Israel became the most frequently-represented Near-Eastern country in the Fellowship Programme, followed by Iran.
A clear indication that Germany had been comprehensively reintegrated in the international academic community of the Seventies was the interest shown by the U.S.A., globally the dominant academic centre of the postwar period. In both absolute and relative terms, the numbers of applications and fellowships from the U.S.A. reached its zenith in the third decade of sponsorship. The favourable job situation in the expanding U.S. system of higher education was one of the factors encouraging post-docs and young professors to spend a specific period of time abroad because there would be enough jobs to choose from on their return. For the same reason, the application and fellowship figures for Great Britain reached their relative and absolute maximum to date in the third decade of sponsorship.
Integrating foreign excellence and German promise
The huge state investment in higher education and the establishment of Humboldt Research Awards in 1972 made it possible to bring more international academic excellence to Germany. Humboldt Research Awards are granted to internationally-renowned researchers for their past achievements, i.e. to academics at an advanced stage of their careers. Each Award leads to an invitation to spend up to one year researching in Germany. It can only be granted on the recommendation of professors from Germany. Historically, the Programme has special meaning for German- American relations because it was established as part of a thank-you for Marshall Plan Aid on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its announcement. For ten years it only applied to distinguished U.S.-American scientists and engineers, thus being an important symbol of loyalty to the U.S.A. during the period of the New "Ostpolitik". Furthermore, Humboldt Awards made it possible for U.S. scholars who had been forced to leave Central Europe during the Third Reich or whose parents had been emigrants to spend a longer period of time in Germany. In many cases, this led to a positive change in their attitude towards Germany and contributed to coming to terms with their own experiences or those of their parents.
On the initiative of former Humboldt guestresearchers, the Humboldt Foundation started the Feodor Lynen Programme in 1979, in order to meet the need of German post-docs to do research abroad. The programme allows highly- qualified German post-docs up to the age of 38 to spend one to four years on research at the home institutions of Humboldt Fellows or Award Winners. By 2002, ca. 2,500 post-docs had taken advantage of this opportunity in more than 60 different countries of the world.
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