Germany Tries to Make Itself Foreigner-Friendly
But scowling bureaucrats and skinheads can scare off
academics once they arrive
The Chronicle of
Higher Education
July 2, 2002
By RICK PERERA
(Berlin)Germany is trying to market itself as an attractive
home for the world's finest scholars -- even as it struggles to shed its reputation
as a rigid, unfriendly place.
The country boasts a rich academic tradition, top-flight
research, and relatively lavish financial support for academe. Education is key
to Germany's economic productivity, and helps it to pack the world's third
largest economy into a land area the size of
Montana. But German campuses face handicaps in attracting
the best talent from abroad. Along with the language barrier, the country has
an opaque system of diplomas and degrees, and a reluctance to recognize foreign
academic credentials.
Regulations governing visas and residency permits are
confusing. Racist violence, especially in the formerly Communist east, continue
to mar the country's image, and any rightward slant in politics or racist
incident is apt to make international news because of the country's Nazi past.
The ambivalent signals Germany is sending foreigners are
also seen throughout Europe, where immigration is a central political issue. In
the Netherlands, a new conservative coalition that includes the overtly
anti-immigrant party of assassinated leader Pim
Fortuyn has taken power. "I think that conditions for
foreign scholars might even get worse," says Anders van der Horst, spokesman
for the Netherlands Organization for International Cooperation in Higher
Education. Already complicated immigration procedures are likely to be
tightened, he says, and any move to loosen regulations "is not in the
forefront of public opinion, to say the least."
France has also experienced a wave of anti-immigrant
sentiment, as evidenced by April's surprise second-place showing of far-right
presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, although many academics say they have
been in the forefront of anti-Le Pen protests.
But German academe's new image-makers say the country is
being unfairly tarred for the actions of a few. Indeed, the number of
xenophobic crimes in Germany, including nonviolent ones, decreased from 15,951
in 2000, to 10,054 in 2001. And
Germany is relatively hospitable to foreigners: About 8.5
percent of Germany's students come from abroad, outranking France, with 6.5 percent,
and the United States, with 3.3 percent. Still, Germany's proportion of foreign
students is lower than
Switzerland's, Austria's, Belgium's, and Britain's, as well
as Australia's. The U.S. State Department describes Germany as a safe country
to travel in, but does mention that those who "look foreign" might
risk attacks by drunken skinheads.
While some European educators worry that a rightward
political shift will put a chill on academic exchanges, German advocates like
Klaus Landfried, the president of the Association of Universities and Other
Higher Education Institutions, want their country to carry the torch for an
increasingly interdependent academic world, in which he hopes that Germans and
others will become more tolerant of foreigners. "Higher education has not
only the mission to invent new things, but also to extend respect toward
society."
None of the news about European anti-immigrant sentiment
daunts Rolf Hoffmann, the German who heads the glossy marketing campaign called
GATE -- Guide to Academic Training and Education -- jointly sponsored by
institutions of higher education and the German Academic Exchange Service and
aimed at bolstering Germany's academic profile abroad.
"The German engineering education is still the best in
the world, and the natural sciences aren't bad either," he says.
"It's just the packaging that needs to be improved."
The program, which Mr. Hoffmann compares to British Prime
Minister Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" campaign, the marketing program
that tries to recast that country's stuffy image, touts Germany as a land of
academic opportunity. Slick Web sites and road shows at college fairs outside
Germany are promoting interest in Germany, Mr. Hoffmann says. The number of
foreign students is up 17 percent since GATE was started last year, with the
strongest growth from countries the marketers have visited, from Argentina to
Vietnam.
Money helps too, of course.
The renowned Alexander von Humboldt Foundation announced in
May a 30-percent increase in stipends to support scientists, meant to help
compete with research grants in the United States. The foundation also recently
awarded a series of special science prizes, the most generous in German history
at up to $2-million each.
While Germany's academic image abroad undergoes a polishing,
the next steps are internal, says Mr. Hoffmann, such as the introduction of
more widely recognized B.A. and M.A. degrees, and increasing the use of English
in instruction and for dissertations.
Those who want to make Germany foreign-scholar friendly know
they also have to streamline the country's infamous bureaucracy. Expatriate and
visiting academics like to trade horror stories of repeated trips to
unsympathetic residence-permit offices and battles over confusing paperwork.
Ronald Halterman, a visiting professor of chemistry from the
University of Oklahoma at Berlin's Technical University, says he is not sure he
would have come to Germany if he knew what the paperwork would be like. No one
warned him what forms and documents he would need at various government
offices, so he had to visit them multiple times. "The bureaucracy here at
the university for getting my first paycheck was atrocious," he adds.
"They were as bad if not worse than [the government]."
Sponsors of academic exchanges, after much lobbying, have
gained legislative support for reforms that make it easier for foreign
scholars, sweeping away old obstacles such as a ban on spouses' employment.
Foreigners would also gain the right to work in Germany for as long as five
years after finishing a degree. Particularly in fields such as computer
science, in which
Germany has a shortage of skilled professionals, the
government is interested in smoothing the way for graduates, including those
from developing countries.
The reforms are part of a landmark package of immigration
laws recognizing Germany's need for new blood. In the past,
Germany's laws took the stance that immigration was
prohibited, but a series of exceptions made that a legal fiction. The bills have
passed both houses of Parliament and been signed into law, but conservatives
are threatening a court challenge.
Academic administrators are also using cash carrots to put a
happier face on traditionally scowling bureaucrats. A coalition of scientific
grant makers, including the Humboldt Foundation, has announced a $24,000 prize
for the "friendliest public agency" dealing with foreigners.
"A foreigner is still perceived in some chambers of
German bureaucracy as a menace," says Mr. Landfried, the president of the university
association. "And there are many people who cannot distinguish between a
person who comes to Germany to enrich the country ... and those persons coming
to Germany to make their living by exploiting the social-security system."
(At the end of 2000, 22.1 percent of the 2.69 million welfare recipients in
Germany were foreigners, although they are only 9.7 percent of the country's
population.)
As is so often the case in Germany, there's an east-west
divide in terms of attitudes toward foreign scholars. The formerly
Communist east, although home to universities with
illustrious histories, consistently loses the race to recruit talent. Of the 20
German institutions that play host to the highest number of
visiting scientists, only one, the Humboldt University, in Berlin, is in the
east.
The problems confronting universities in eastern Germany are
revealed in Frankfurt on the Oder, a grim city of 75,000 on the
Polish border that is, incongruously, home to a bold
experiment in international education. The Viadrina European University, founded
in 1991, was conceived as an academic bridge between Germany and its European
neighbors. Just across the river in the Polish town of Slubice is a sister
campus, the Collegium Polonicum. Students and faculty cross back and forth on
foot, flashing identity cards at indifferent border guards.
Administrators at the campuses express the hope that, with
the eastward expansion of the European Union, the European
University will be at the center of an integrating
continent, an international institution with as many ties to countries in
Western Europe, such as France, as with Poland. But the young university has
yet to make inroads in the West. Its enrollment of 4,000 consists of about 35
percent Poles and 60 percent Germans. Nearly half of the Germans come from the
surrounding state of
Brandenburg.
Only 10 percent of the institution's faculty members are
from outside Germany. Of those foreigners, many would rather endure a long
commute from cosmopolitan Berlin than relocate to this remote outpost. Small
wonder: Brandenburg, one of Germany's poorest states, is home to a small but
violent subculture based on an ideology of racial purity. The European
University has struggled since its founding with reports of harassment and
attacks against foreign students.
Nora Mannaa dropped out of the university after a year. The
daughter of a Libyan father and a German mother who grew up in West Berlin, the
former law student says her dark hair and eyes made her a target of racists,
and says she was tired of feeling afraid.
Five drunken skinheads once called her a "dirty foreign
slut," she says. "It's a big problem that they're building a European
university in a Nazi stronghold.
Administrators and others say that harassment of Polish
students who cross into Germany, once a regular problem, is fading.
According to the student-council president, Robert
Suligowski, a law student from Gdansk, xenophobic violence is no longer a major
concern. "It's worse in Poland," he says. "Big cities there are
dangerous."
Most observers expect suspicion of foreigners to continue to
decline. But Dieter Martiny, who oversees the university's office for
foreigners, says the atmosphere is still tense. "We can't house
dark-skinned people in dormitories in certain problem areas," he admits,
"In the city center, yes, but not in areas where a lot of drunken,
aggressive people live."
At the University of Jena, in eastern Germany, a Chinese
mathematician named Yang fondly recalls his work in Jena with a research group
that he says worked at a very high level in an area of mathematics known as
function spaces. But in January Yang, who asked not to be identified more
specifically, was beaten bloody by three young men. He was not robbed and he exchanged
no words with them because he speaks very little German.
Mr. Yang has canceled plans to return, noting that he might
consider visiting a western German city instead. "Whenever I recall this
thing, I still have some fear in my heart," he writes in an e-mail
message. "This thing really badly hurt my spirit."
Another incident in January, involving a Russian scholar, is
murkier: It took place outside a bar in the early-morning hours, and the three
assailants, who were arrested, claim they were provoked. The cases are still
being investigated, but "as it looks now, as unpleasant and ugly as they
are, they were likely typical problems that could just as easily have happened
to Americans, for example," asserts Axel Burchardt, a university
spokesman.
Other scholars in Jena agree. "One has to be careful,
because hooliganism is all over the world," says Ajit Varma, a biologist who
is visiting from India's Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Some foreign visitors like Jena precisely because it is
small and provincial. "I find the atmosphere at the university quite pleasant,"
says Alexander Nazarkin, a Russian researcher in the Institute for Optics and
Quantum Electronics at the University of Jena. "I can work in peace --
That's the important thing."
Still, incidents like these don't go unnoticed abroad, says
Mr. Landfried, the president of the university association. When
German recruiters travel outside the country, Africans tend
to express the most concern about racist violence. But "in Asia, especially
China, they don't care -- they know newspapers like scandals. You get the same
kind of reaction from intellectual people in Europe and Latin America."
Germany needs to sell itself better, says Michael Gotthard,
a molecular geneticist who returned in April from Washington State University
to his native Germany to work at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine
in Berlin after receiving a major prize from the Humboldt Foundation.
Dr. Gotthard says even many young German scholars, who
emigrate in large numbers, don't realize how much academic opportunity there is
at home.
"I think a lot of problems arise because of a lack of
communication," he says. "If people in Germany don't take care of representing
themselves properly in the media and don't do public relations, people think
the worst."