Organizing the education system

The Leuphana University Lüneburg has reinvented itself in the course of the higher education reforms – and is showing with its innovations how higher education institutions can deal with societal challenges

The construction site at the university is barely noticeably from outside: extended buildings with brick façades, long green lawn strips – the facilities lie on a former military barracks where the European Bologna reforms are being implemented with a consistency that is second to none. It is the campus of the Leuphana University in Lüneburg. Nowadays, it is difficult to find any trace of the stringency of military life. The students have taken over the campus, adapting the former horse-riding hall into a gigantic party and cultural centre, while the university cafeteria, once a sterile mess hall, has been turned into an inviting glass structure.

The university’s head offices are located directly at the entrance to the facilities, where tank units used to quarter. “We don’t view studying as a collection of classes, but rather as a phase of life,” says Sascha Spoun, president of the university. “Of course there are lectures and seminars, but also much more!” Spoun stands firmly behind the reforms, which the professors and students in Lüneburg have taken as an opportunity to turn their university around. The basic principle behind their efforts being: a study programme should not be strictly focused on one’s own major subject only. Students should receive a broad, general education as well and work in a project-oriented manner already during their studies.

First Semester: General Studies

Students entering the Leuphana University will take their first semester entirely in General Studies, in which students from all departments and disciplines participate. Themes include body and spirit in Descartes’ metaphysics, introduction to cognitive theory in the age of Enlightenment, the emergence of modern Chemistry or films and aesthetic perception. It is precisely this openness to other disciplines that attracts students here: until they receive their Bachelor’s degrees, they attend courses from the so-called complementary study programme, with lectures and seminars that are not related to their own major subjects. The obligatory courses provide students important points for their studies, while the concept also aims to bring a broader scope to the university.

“Our idea was to educate broadly and to interpret contemporarily,” says University President Sascha Spoun. The Bologna Reforms were an important opportunity to that end: “We viewed them as a chance to not only think about our study programmes anew in the national context, but also to see them in comparison internationally.” In the early stages, more than 100 working groups discussed in parallel what a new and improved university could look like. Their creed in doing so was: The University can benefit a great deal if it views the reforms as an opportunity for a fundamental make-over. For the students, professors and staff in Lüneburg that also meant a chance to improve their institution’s standing, given that, beforehand, the university was hardly known, even within Germany. Thanks to the new concepts, that has changed.

Criticism of the reforms

The reform course certainly was not without its opponents or debates, especially once the newly designed degree programmes took off in 2007. Both within the university as well as among professors throughout Germany, there was a considerable amount of criticism against the path Lüneburg had taken. This came, not least because a great deal of traditional practices and concepts were done away with. Meanwhile, it would seem that success has demonstrated that they did a lot of things right: the number of students is increasing on a continuous basis – and a number of them choose Lüneburg, not despite, but precisely because of their non-conventional concepts. Their study model has also been the target of multiple prizes.

Modelled after Anglo-American higher education institutions, the Leuphana University consists of a College for Undergraduate studies and a Graduate School for Master and Doctoral degree programmes. The various disciplines have been consolidated into several focus areas. Accordingly, there are interdisciplinary Master degree programmes such as Culture, Arts and Media, Sustainability Sciences, and Management & Engineering. Another programme offered is called “Public Economics, Law and Politics”; its structure is typical for the Lüneburg approach to higher education: the programme admits Bachelor degree graduates with an economics, legal or political science background. The study programme consists of three areas – and there are “catch-up” courses, in which the political scientists can become familiar with law issues, the law students can learn about economics, and so forth. “We had been teaching the same stuff for decades,” says Professor of Political Science, Ferdinand Müller-Rommel. “But the world has changed so much in a short time. Shouldn’t we be discussing Globalization more in Political Science? And to do that, don’t we need more perspectives than just the political science one?”

Also characteristic of the approach in Lüneburg is that the language of instruction in a large share of the courses is English – and that numerous international students switch to Germany for the programmes in Lüneburg. In these sorts of ways, and they are sure of this in Lüneburg, the ideas of the Bologna reforms can be brought to life. Particularly internationalization and building cross-border networks are ultimately some of the most significant goals that the European higher education institutions strive to achieve.