Professor and Director

Humboldt is a “Gremium” university. Gremium is a German word for “board” or “committee” and these committees explicitly rule the life of the university. Each Institute has a ruling committee with a prescribed number of full professors, members of a group that in the US would be considered something like assistant and associate professors, and students. The Institutsrat, as it is called, makes all of the official decisions for the Institute.

Full professors must have half of the votes, and there must be places for at least four on the committee. The Institute has only four full professors, including me, but through a bizarre set of rules (so bizarre that they might be changed to accommodate a new vice-president), I cannot be elected to the Institutsrat until February 2008, even though there is a vacant position that no one except me can fill.

The rules do not, however, prevent the election of a director who is not a member of the Institutsrat, even though the director chairs the meetings. This allowed the Institutsrat to elect me as the new Director this afternoon with only one negative vote from a person, who (with some reason) objected to my inexperience with the Institute and its practices.

Happily the professor who has served as director during the interim will stay on as deputy director, and he has promised to serve as the internal director while I deal more with the Institute’s relationships with other organizations. This is a division of labor that works well in US schools. The idea is new here, but people are very willing to try it out.