The Decline of German Universities

摘要

The travails of university life might ordinarily warrant just a few column inches in a national newspaper, but this summer, universities are big news in Germany. "Universities wasting away--but who's worrying?' asked a recent lead story in the weeklynewspaper Die Zeit. "Plain talk for the deaf," ran the title of an article in Die Woche, another weekly, about the universities' plight. Two recent books, entitled Rotten to the Core? and Con the Universities Still Be Saved? also helped fuel the discussion. And in Die Zeit, physicist Raimar Lust, former head of the European Space Agency, described the state of the universities as a "hopeless-looking dead end where [bureaucrats] set the direction.