'We are not in Kansas anymore' Freiburg Universtiy post-Bologna

The German University System post-Bologna –

The ‘Truth Setting You Free’ in the Nobody-Gives-A-Damn System

After three years in overcrowded lecture halls with disgruntled and disappointed professors and repetitive syllabi no matter the semester, you finally see the light at the end of a very long and very dark tunnel, still everything collapses like a house of cards.

You get mail from persons unknown, apparently working for the Powers-That-Be who are currently on vacation. Granted, a well deserved holiday because dealing with irritated and idiotic students all year long is like being condemned to hard labour for life. Call me! Urgent!!! the message reads. When a very bored and unfailingly disaffected female voice answers, you are not prepared to face the possibility that three years of working through your own disappointments to avoid a scholarly neurosis as big as the former UdSSR may have been for naught. One of those pass-fail classes you successfully completed cannot be validated because those 4 ECTS credit points for which you worked over a period of 15 weeks don’t count as anything. Again, granted you will have to face the facts, this may have been due to your own failing. So after gulping down a lungful of air (shock really is not necessarily condusive for keeping your oxygen levels balanced) your brain desperately tries to regain a semblance of the rational mind you have extensively trained for three gruelling years to understand the issue, while the disembodied voice on the other end of the line snarls at you to be grateful, at any rate they “are being quite courteous to inform you” because obviously they are “not there to solve your problems”.

During your 10 minute phone call you will hear the words “Well, this is something I cannot help you with“ at least a five times in four different contexts. Initially it means I don’t care what you do just leave me alone. Students are much nicer as numbers on paper – no extra work. But you keep on insisting, there must be a solution. Because you’ve been taught pointing fingers is not the way to facilitate an honest dialog, you confess your sins, shoulder the blame and ask for absolution. By now the voice seems deceptively less aggressive and more open to communication.  However, she sounds self-defensive and quite a bit annoyed, repeating the same mantra-like response when asked about possible options. Well, this is not something I can help you with. What her dark sarcasm outside of any classroom actually tells me is I am not qualified to make that call. The next logical question about who could help you incites a friendlier reaction. Maybe you could try the B.A. advisor for the specific department, or well maybe even the teacher of your course or well, her boss will be back by September. You explain about your now derailed plans for the future that you are under quite a bit of pressure with Exmatriculation documents looming on the horizon and the time-stamped offer from other universities to continue your studies. The originator of your doomsday call is less then pleased and repeats: “Well, this is something I cannot help you with” forcefully, echoing her initial reaction, you are wasting my time; I’ve got better things to do. Talk about bricks and walls! You get the inkling Pink Floyd was right after all. In your head you make contingency plans, knowing your battle is lost even before you have begun fighting. So you thank her gratuitously and promise to call her back when you have news.

Your teacher is French. And despite it being a cliché or maybe even a malicious stereotype, French people tend to take August off from anything work related until the Rentrée in September. You remember one of those scholars of high repute telling you how everything was in flux all the time and while they may have initially made the effort to keep up with all the alternations in the system, the rules of the game change too frequently and too capriciously. So they just gave up on a reform they never really supported to begin with. Your e-mails disappear into the ether, unanswered. The department’s B.A. advisor is sympathetic to your plight and calls you right back, only to tell you, sorry dearie, “there is no official solution to your problem” and my unofficial solution proves to be quite elusive. In the end you return the call to Lady Doom and ask politely if there is an ultimatum or a deadline you need to know about which she declines. And again it is not something she can help you with. Your papers are still on her desk, waiting for a ray of hope, for absolution, for an answer, for something.

            A week goes by and predictably you hear absolutely nothing. By now you are again, and quite officially, a returning student, alone, angry and disillusioned, looking for a roof over your head. In the end you come to realize the great reputation you believed in is just a bogus truth, another grand narrative about a supposed elite. Erasmus of Rotterdam was here, Martin Heidegger, Konrad Adenauer just like NS propaganda minister Goebbels and when you take a closer look at the restroom graffiti a whole host of junkies and vandals also left their imprint on every available surface that nowadays is bathed in an eerie blue light to prevent the drug addicts from pumping heroin into their veins. While the golden writing on the wall glistens in the fading sunlight of a new day, you stand next to Socrates whose his aging face is eternalized in bronze in front of the entrance portal. You feel 600 years of history slowly suffocating you. You, too, have taken a bite from the new Host and sip from the offered chalice, not realizing its Athenian wine is in fact a hemlock cocktail. And as the once bright future fades to black you still hear the chorus sing: The truth will set you free.