University teaching has been struggling with the same problem for decades: there are too few lecturers for too many students.

The imbalance goes back to the political desire to smuggle as many students as possible through the universities without proportionally increasing the number of lecturers.

This is to be compensated by the daily reinvention of teaching in countless projects, which, often without knowing it, produce the same innovative idea that is soon no longer heard of in everyday teaching.

Thomas Thiel

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The Science Council's new recommendation paper on studies and teaching rightly calls for a leap in quality.

The big question is how to succeed.

In times of a tight budget situation, the required measures result in a significant additional financial burden.

This applies, for example, to the demand for academic mentorship: According to the authors, teaching should be in smaller groups, the long-term goal is individual support for students, which can safely be described as wishful thinking.

In order to get a little closer to it, one would have to change central parameters such as capacity law.

The paper sends a clear signal for reform to the federal and state governments, which, see the article on the right, are making little effort on this point.

More leeway in designing teaching

Other recommendations try to take back the consequences of bureaucracy and the economic image of man in the Bologna reform.

The aim is to reduce the number of exams and events.

The administrations are called upon to abolish useless reporting obligations.

Lecturers should have more leeway in designing their teaching.

These are all sensible suggestions that have the advantage of not costing anything.

They are based on the image of a responsible, reflective student who does not see his studies as a transition to working life, but as a personal maturation process, and who, like his lecturer, must be given the time and freedom to do so.

The demand to reduce the competitive pressure and to finance teaching more through the basic equipment aims in the same direction.

Of course, the idea of ​​an individual relationship of trust between students and lecturers remains an ideal as long as politics adheres to mass thinking.

For the time being, only the reduction in bureaucracy is realistic.

The Science Council intends to present a separate publication on digital teaching in July.

Experiences from the Corona period are already reflected in the current paper.

In particular, they consist in viewing the course of study as a social event.

The pandemic has thus initiated a humanistic turn that still lacks the foundation.