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U.S.-Style Universities for Germany?
Abstract
Martin Enserink
Germany's public university system, almost exclusively run by local state governments, is overcrowded, overregulated, and
lacks effective quality-control mechanisms, but efforts by the federal government to reform it have stalled. German industry,
in particular, has become fed up with the slow pace of change and universities' inability to deliver the kind of graduates
it needs, and so entrepreneurs are now backing a number of new private university projects. Leading the way is Bremen International
University, a collaboration of Rice University and the German city-state of Bremen and styled after an American research university,
which will select its own students, charge them hefty tuition fees, and pay its staff members a salary based on their achievements--breaking
some of the most sacred taboos in German higher education.
International news articles often compare different countries, favoring one country over another. On the basis of this notion, we hypothesized that when people read international news articles favoring their own country over another, they would afterwards evaluate their country (in-group) better than the other country (out-group) – a tendency referred to as positive distinctiveness in social identity theory (SIT). We further hypothesized that when people read international news articles favoring their own country, they would afterwards have better knowledge of the news articles they read. An experiment with two groups (positive vs. negative articles in terms of participants’ own national identity) was conducted in Germany and the US (total N = 364). We found that when participants read positively valenced news articles, they afterwards showed more positive distinctiveness (e.g., U.S. students believed that the US had a better national educational system than Germany). We also found that when German participants read positively valenced news articles, they demonstrated better knowledge of the articles. This effect was not found in the U.S. sample. Overall, we found support for the notion that social identity mechanisms are relevant when it comes to analyzing the effects of news media.
This paper reflects on some of the main issues facing research universities as they strive to simultaneously complete the creation of systems of mass higher education and also move towards Internet-based universal access. It examines these issues from an American perspective, but in comparative context. Universities on both sides of the Atlantic face problems, but they take different (though similar) forms and evoke different responses. They are part of a larger crisis in higher education in Western societies. That these problems flow from the partial success in creating and adapting systems of mass higher education over the past half-century make them no less threatening to the institutions which achieved that success.
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