I confess that my thinking about the problem of academic "equivalencies" has been limited largely to my experience on admissions committees at several contemporary American universities. As a historian of modern Germany, I had not given the matter much thought. Peter Drewek's excellent essay has thus taught me a great deal, and it has persuaded me of the importance of this problem in shaping academic policy in Imperial and Weimar Germany. Drewek has imaginatively exploited the sources, particularly the protocols of the national university conferences (Hochschulkonferenzen), to lay out a convincing case. Growing bureaucratic regulation of admissions standards, he tells us, had a crucial impact on enrollments of foreign students at Germany's universities. As these regulations became more restrictive, they undercut Germany's status as the Mecca for ambitious young scholars throughout the world. Drewek has shown persuasively that this process set in shortly after the turn of the twentieth century and that it became more comprehensive and constraining in the later 1920s, long before the National Socialists arrived to power. The flow of foreign students into German universities was increasingly limited in what he has called "the filter of bureaucratic rules."
My ignorance in these matters, from which Peter Drewek has now provided some relief, limits my qualifications to comment critically on his essay. I would thus prefer to pose a couple of questions, in the hope of provoking discussion of several broader issues - in areas where I feel intellectually more comfortable. I wish to address above all the question of what lies hidden or obscured in the numbers with which Drewek has supplied us.
Does bureaucratic regulation provide a sufficient explanation for the fluctuations in the enrollment of foreign students at German universities? At the very least, this explanation begs the question of who studied where and why. The "disaggregation" of some of the data might well reveal that issues of academic discipline, faculty strength, and even the presence of individual scholars in a university's faculty figured significantly in the decisions of foreign students to visit Germany for their higher education. To cite some anecdotal evidence from a case with which I am familiar, the flow of foreign students to the university in Leipzig after 1890 was fed by students of history, particularly those from parts of northern and eastern Europe that had not been consolidated into nation-states. They were attracted to Leipzig above all by Karl Lamprecht, whose vision of "cultural history" appealed to them precisely because it assigned to "nations" an importance and dignity that were independent of statehood.
Second, how does one define "foreign?" This question is related to the first. How many of the students from eastern Europe, including those whose citizenship was Russian, spoke German as their first language? Given the ethnic categories that increasingly governed discussions of citizenship after 1890, this question is more than incidental to interpreting the statistics of foreign enrollments.
The whole story strikes me as intensely political. Several additional questions that I would like to see explored at more length pertain to this dimension of the paper. Where, for instance, is World War I? The graphs of student enrollment elide the war altogether, as they chart the period from 1915 to 1920 as a smooth line. They hide the fact that the war resulted in the departure of practically all foreign students from German soil - perhaps, one might think, with long-range consequences on enrollment fluctuations. The fact that several of the major bureaucratic decisions that animate this story took place during the war also strikes me as worth pondering.
One need not be a devotee of Foucault to appreciate the significance of these and the other bureaucratic decisions. They had to do with questions of categorizing, naming, and labeling people; and these questions, as Foucault has argued, were inseparable from issues of power. The central issue was to define those who were "qualified" for study at German universities. Drewek's essay provides rich details about the elaborate schemes that were devised to fix the degrees of qualification, including one from the pen of Reinhold Schairer, who appears to have indebted himself to Herbert Spencer in defining the "differentiation" of school systems around the globe as the index of qualification.
On one front, then, Drewek's is the story of bureaucratic arrogation, particularly by the Prussian Ministry of Culture, of the critical power to define "qualification." The success of the bureaucrats after 1906 came at the expense of the university faculties, which, prior to this juncture, had retained considerable autonomy and flexibility in judging the applications of those who wanted to study in Germany. At the same time, however, the success of the bureaucrats carried important ramifications for German foreign policy. It seemed to undercut the premises and the more flexible understanding of "qualification" that had underpinned what subsequently became known as "cultural foreign policy" (auswärtige Kulturpolitik). The propositions that training foreigners at German universities served the interests of German power, that it translated into good will, cultural sympathy, and ultimately into political influence abroad, seemed to justify the compromises that faculties had regularly undertaken.
What then of the broader political context in which these enrollment figures fluctuated? I think Drewek's essay itself hints at some answers to this question. He writes at one point (in the German version of his paper) of "political caprice joined [verschränkt] with administrative chicanery [Raffinesse]." I wonder how capricious the bureaucratic actions really were, for I suspect that they reflected the more-or-less conscious choices and decisions of people in important positions, foremost by officials in various ministries of culture (above all in Prussia). The question might be posed whether the retirement of Friedrich Althoff from the Prussian Ministry of Culture in 1907 did not put questions of university admissions into the hands of men of much less imagination or receptivity to the importance of having foreign students on German soil.
Another dimension of the same problem has again to do with labeling. The tag "unqualified" correlated with a whole series of other labels, like "uncultured," "inferior," and "dangerous," through which many German leaders were increasingly making sense of domestic and foreign policy. The deployment of social Darwinism in the construction of these categories of qualification was, in other words, hardly inadvertent or coincidental. The rigidification of these categories in the course of their bureaucratization might well have reflected a more general intensification of political anxieties in these leading circles. Foreign students at German universities thus posed a metaphor for broader concerns, and it was no coincidence that the growing salience of revolutionary Russians and eastern European Jews stood at the center of the debates over equivalencies. The very language of these debates suggested as much. High, uniform standards of admissions were to serve as "methods of preventing excessive enrollment of troublesome foreigners" (the German is more suggestive: "Schutzmittel gegen übermäßigen Zudrang unbequemer Ausländer"). This topos echoed in variations all over the terrain of German politics after the turn of the twentieth century.
Roger Chickering is a professor of history in the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University.