Frank Dievernich assesses the dimension correctly.

50 years - that is not a long period of time compared to the more than 600 years that Germany's oldest university in Heidelberg can look back on.

However, the President of the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences would not be himself if he had trouble turning this deficit of tradition into a positive one.

His university is now "in the middle of an already successful startup phase," said Dievernich on Friday evening at the anniversary ceremony on campus.

Among others, Prime Minister Volker Bouffier (CDU), Science Minister Angela Dorn (The Greens) and Ina Hartwig (SPD), Head of the Department of Culture, were invited as congratulators.

Sascha Zoske

Journalist in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The “startup”, which was founded in August 1971, is - to stay in the language of business - actually at least in parts a successor company.

The University of Applied Sciences, as it was still called at that time, combined five separate predecessor institutions, including the Royal Building Trade School, which opened in 1906, and the Royal Mechanical Engineering School from 1910. Except in the historic buildings on Nibelungenplatz, the initially 2500 college students were at one location in the Northwest City taught.

In the meantime, the students, who now number around 16,000 and are divided into four departments, study mainly on Nibelungenallee, where several new buildings have been built in recent years.

The campus as a "place of hope"

Dievernich sees the campus, which is to be further modernized in the next few years, a "place of hope" - not only because after a long Corona break, events such as the ceremony are now possible again. Even when it was founded, the University of Applied Sciences symbolized the hope of social advancement through education: like its sister institutions that were established in the 1970s, it was intended to give young people who found university studies too theoretical access to demanding and better-paid professions. In the opinion of Prime Minister Bouffier, she did an excellent job. He is “very proud” of how Frankfurt University has developed over the past half century.

According to Dievernich, the promise of promotion went hand in hand with the acceptance and promotion of diversity. Students from educationally disadvantaged families should feel just as comfortable at Frankfurt University as professionally qualified and migrants who have not lived in Germany for long but who have the skills to study. In the opinion of Minister of Science Dorn, Frankfurt University does a particularly good job of providing first-year students with an apprenticeship instead of a high school diploma: In the Hessian model experiment to open university access for students with a vocational qualification, it recorded the highest number of participants. The university supports students with heterogeneous entry requirements, among other things, through special study advice, orientation events as well as subject and language tutorials.

Engineers help in the fight against heat and noise

The third guiding principle for Frankfurt University, according to its President, is practical relevance.

It is "the context of the application that refines knowledge as transferable".

Engineers at the university developed ideas for the fight against heat and noise in cities, its computer scientists contributed to the digitization of the country, and its social scientists showed how an aging and increasingly diverse society can meet the associated challenges.

The House of Science and Transfer, which Frankfurt University has just founded, is intended to further promote networking with business, but also the exchange between the disciplines, as Dievernich said: It is a “place of lived interdisciplinarity”.

The university reaffirmed its claim to be a place of research as well as teaching by changing its name in 2014: Like many other former universities of applied sciences, it now operates as the University of Applied Sciences.

Even more than this renaming, some representatives of traditional universities dislike the fact that the universities of applied sciences in Hesse have had the right to award doctorates (albeit limited) since 2016: Professors in particularly research-intensive fields - in Frankfurt these are social work, applied computer science as well as mobility and logistics now independently award the doctorate.

An evaluation process to show whether the innovation has proven itself has now begun.

A school for personality

Another innovation Dievernich pointed out in his speech is the School of Personal Development and Education. One can assume that the President's opening, who as an economics professor also taught coaching and “change management”, had a special need. The interdisciplinary facility is intended to bundle research and teaching on topics such as personality development, general education, digital competence and social responsibility. "Because people can learn best from themselves," says Dievernich, "it couldn't be more applied."