University of Tübingen


The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
The University of Tübingen is one of eleven German Excellence Universities. The University of Tübingen is especially known as a centre for the study of medicine, law, archeology, ancient cultures, philosophy, theology and religious studies. The university's noted alumni include presidents, ministers, EU Commissioners and judges of the Federal Constitutional Court. The university is associated with eleven Nobel laureates, especially in the fields of medicine and chemistry. The university has a long tradition and enjoys a high academic reputation both nationally and internationally.

History

The University of Tübingen was founded in 1477 by Count Eberhard V, later the first Duke of Württemberg, a civic and ecclesiastic reformer who established the school after becoming absorbed in the Renaissance revival of learning during his travels to Italy. Its first rector was Johannes Nauclerus.
Its present name was conferred on it in 1769 by Duke Karl Eugen who appended his first name to that of the founder. The university later became the principal university of the kingdom of Württemberg. Today, it is one of nine state universities funded by the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg.
The University of Tübingen has a history of innovative thought, particularly in theology, in which the university and the Tübinger Stift are famous to this day. Philipp Melanchthon, the prime mover in building the German school system and a chief figure in the Protestant Reformation, helped establish its direction. Among Tübingen's eminent students have been the astronomer Johannes Kepler; the economist Horst Köhler ; Joseph Ratzinger, poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and the philosophers Friedrich Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. "The Tübingen Three" refers to Hölderlin, Hegel and Schelling, who were roommates at the Tübinger Stift. Theologian Helmut Thielicke revived postwar Tübingen when he took over a professorship at the reopened theological faculty in 1947, being made administrative head of the university and President of the Chancellor's Conference in 1951.
The university rose to the height of its prominence in the middle of the 19th century with the teachings of poet and civic leader Ludwig Uhland and the Protestant theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur, whose circle, colleagues and students became known as the "Tübingen School", which pioneered the historical-critical analysis of biblical and early Christian texts, an approach generally referred to as "higher criticism." The University of Tübingen also was the first German university to establish a faculty of natural sciences, in 1863. DNA was discovered in 1868 at the University of Tübingen by Friedrich Miescher. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, the first female Nobel Prize winner in medicine in Germany, also works at Tübingen. The faculty for economics and business was founded in 1817 as the "Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultät" and was the first of its kind in Germany.

Nazi period

The University played a leading role in efforts to legitimize the policies of the Third Reich as "scientific". Even before the victory of the Nazi Party in the general election in March 1933, there were hardly any Jewish faculty and a few Jewish students. Physicist Hans Bethe was dismissed on 20 April 1933 because of "non-Aryan" origin. Religion professor Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich and the mathematician Erich Kamke were forced to take early retirement, probably in both cases the "non-Aryan" origin of their wives. At least 1158 people were sterilized at the University Hospital.

After the war

In 1966, Joseph Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI, was appointed to a chair in dogmatic theology in the Faculty of Catholic Theology at Tübingen, where he was a colleague of Hans Küng.In 1967, Jürgen Moltmann, one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century, was appointed Professor of Systematic Theology in the Faculty of Protestant Theology. Drafted in 1944 by Nazi Germany, he was an Allied prisoner of war 1945-1948. He was influenced by his colleague and friend Ernst Bloch, the Marxist philosopher.
In 1970, the university was restructured into a series of faculties as independent departments of study and research after the manner of French universities.
The university made the headlines in November 2009 when a group of left-leaning students occupied one of the main lecture halls, the Kupferbau, for several days. The students' goal was to protest tuition fees and maintain that education should be free for everyone.
In May 2010, Tübingen joined the Matariki Network of Universities together with Dartmouth College, Durham University, Queen's University, University of Otago, University of Western Australia and Uppsala University.

Research focus

The University of Tübingen undertakes a broad range of research projects in various fields. Among the more prominent ones in the natural sciences are the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research, which focuses on general, cognitive and cellular neurology as well as neurodegeneration, and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Clinical Research, which deals primarily with cell biology in diagnostics and therapy of organ system diseases. In the liberal arts, the University of Tübingen is noteworthy for having the only faculty of rhetoric in Germany – the department was founded by Walter Jens, an important intellectual and literary critic. The university also boasts continued pre-eminence in its centuries-old traditions of research in the fields of philosophy, theology and philology. Since at least the nineteenth century, Tübingen has been the home of world-class research in prehistoric studies and the study of antiquity, including the study of the ancient Near East; a particular focus of the research in these areas at the University of Tübingen has been Anatolia, e.g., through the continued excavations of the university at Troy.

Campus

The University of Tübingen is not a campus university, but is spread throughout the town: Tübingen is one of five classical "university towns" in Germany. The other four are Marburg, Göttingen, Freiburg and Heidelberg. In Tübingen there are four areas with a major concentration of university institutions.
Accommodation provided by the Tübingen Studentenwerk is in several locations throughout the town. The largest of the eleven halls of residence are in the city's northern neighbourhood of Waldhäuser Ost and in the city's southeasternmost neighbourhood, Französisches Viertel.

Museum

Since 2006, the young Museum of the University of Tübingen has made it its task to professionalize the 65 sometimes very old, singular teaching, show and research collections of the university from all faculties in terms of collection, curatorial and organizational aspects. In interdisciplinary exhibitions, both the broader public should be provided with insights into the history of science as well as researched in the field of science itself.
In addition, the master's degree program "Museum & Collections" of the MUT, with the participation of six humanities and cultural studies subjects, offers the training of students in the field of exhibitions.
Eight scientific teaching collections - Origins of Art, Pile Dwellings + Celts, Cuneiform, Gods + Tombs, Ancient Art, Ancient Coins, Ancient Sculptures - are open to the public in the Museum Alte Kulturen and in the permanent exhibition WeltKulturen in Hohentübingen Castle. In addition, there are other, partially accessible scientific teaching collections on Hohentübingen: Cradle of Biochemistry, BildBestand, Everyday Culture, AntikenBilder, Professor Gallery, Castle Church and TonSteineScherben.
The MUT - and thus the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen - is the only university institution in the world to house artefacts with world heritage status, such as the oldest surviving figurative works of art and musical instruments of humanity, mammoth ivory figures and fragments of bone flutes. These come from the Vogelherdhöhle, which has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage "Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura" since 2017.

Libraries

The University Library of Tübingen is not just available to those affiliated with the university, but also to the general public. The library provides more than three million individual volumes and more than 7,600 journals. Apart from the main library, more than 80 departmental libraries containing an additional three million volumes are also associated with the university.
The main lending library is located on Wilhelmstraße and consists of several different parts which are connected through corridors and walkways:

Faculties

The university is made up of 7 faculties, some of which are subdivided into further departments.
The university is governed by three separate bodies sharing different functions and duties. However, some persons serve in more than one body.
The Rectorate is the executive component of the university's governing body. The current rector, Professor Bernd Engler, is supported by four deputies consisting of three prorectors and one provost. All are also permanent members of the university senate.
The Senate forms the legislative section of governance. Apart from the members of the rectorate, it includes the equal opportunities commissioner, the deans and 20 elected members representing the professors, lecturers, students and non-academic staff. Two advisors represent the university's teaching hospitals.
The University Council has 13 members, including its president and vice-president as well as five further internal and six external members.

Rankings and reputation

Measured by the number of top managers in the German economy, University of Tübingen ranked 25th in 2019.
In 2012, the University of Tübingen was awarded for its future concept "Research – Relevance – Responsibility" in the course of the German Universities Excellence Initiative. The award brings additional research funds for five years. In 2019, the University of Tübingen was again awarded as one of eleven German Excellence Universities.
According to The Times Higher Education Supplement, Tübingen ranked 89th and 48th in the subject Arts and Humanities. US News Best Global Universities and QS World University Rankings ranked Tübingen amongst the top ten universities in Germany overall in 2017.
In 2016, Wirtschaftswoche ranked the Tübingen Law School amongst the top ten law schools nationwide. In 2018, Wirtschaftswoche ranked Tübingen Law School 4th in Germany. Judges of the German Federal Constitutional Court, the highest court in Germany, are affiliated with the University of Tübingen such as Evelyn Haas, Ferdinand Kirchhof, Michael Eichberger, Gebhard Müller and the former President of Germany, Roman Herzog. In accounting and finance, the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at Tübingen University was ranked 4th in Germany by the QS Rankings 2014. Notable alumni of the Faculty include Jürgen Stark, Helmut Haussmann, the former director of the IMF Horst Köhler as well as Ralf Dahrendorf, who also founded the Department of Sociology at the University of Tübingen before he became director at the London School of Economics.
In 2019, Tübingen was ranked 6th worldwide in theology and religious studies by QS Rankings.
The Eberhard Karls University is the only university in the German-speaking world that teaches rhetoric as an independent subject of study.

Controversies

Tübingen's self-conception has sometimes been controversially discussed as being elitist. Since almost all German universities are public, and therefore mainly paid by taxes and generally egalitarian, there is no German Ivy League of institutions of higher education. Moreover, the German Universities Excellence Initiative is a publicity-laden fund for specific research projects only. It aims to promote cutting-edge research, to create outstanding conditions for young scientists at universities, and to strengthen some selected universities more than others in order to raise their international visibility.
This self-conception is also of historical interest: from 1900 to 1929 members of the Studentenverbindungen in Tübingen already understood themselves as the German national elite. Every May until 2008, fraternities of the "Tübinger Waffenring" organized a big torchlight procession and sang traditional German songs in the old town, accompanied by a counter-demonstrations of extreme left-wing student groups. This event has since been replaced by a public fest organized by all student fraternities and sororities that is open to everyone and which is publicly endorsed by the mayor Boris Palmer, though criticism from radical left students still emerges.
In 1969, the progressive political and theological climate alienated Joseph Ratzinger and led to his short-lived tenure at the university. According to the Swabian daily newspaper, the Schwäbisches Tagblatt, Ratzinger was theologically "traumatized" at the University of Tübingen. In Aus meinem Leben: Erinnerungen he describes the liberalism of Tübingen's student activism as "the cruel countenance of this atheistic devoutness".
Since 2018, the University has been part of a wider artificial intelligence research initiative named Cyber Valley. Cyber Valley has seen investments from multinational companies poured into establishing research centers, research groups, and professorships in the city. The investing organisations and corporations include Google, Amazon, BMW, IAV, Daimler, Porsche, and Bosch. The Cyber Valley initiative has attracted criticism from student groups and activist groups alike, with many protest actions, including building occupations and demonstations, having taken place decrying both the commercialisation of University research and the involvement of the University with organisations that are engaged in military research.

Student life

As the university's students make up roughly a third of the total population of Tübingen, the town's culture is to a large extent dominated by them. Consequently, there is a slump of activity during university holidays, particularly over the summer, when a large number of otherwise regular events do not take place.
Around 30 Studentenverbindungen, the German type of fraternities, are associated with the university. While famous for their parties, public academic lectures and the yearly "Stocherkahn-Rennen" punting-boat race on the Neckar river, some of them are the subject of ongoing controversy surrounding alleged rightwing policial views, leading to strong criticism from leftist groups. The university itself takes a neutral stance on this issue. However, all of Tübingen's fraternities distance themselves from the fraternities of the Deutsche Burschenschaft, which have been widely criticized as adhering to far-right principles.
Also closely linked to the university are a number of student societies representing mainly the arts and political parties. Most notable are a number of choirs as well as student theatre groups affiliated with the faculty of Modern Languages, some of which perform in foreign languages. Radio Uniwelle Tübingen is the university's radio station, airing seven hours of programmes a week produced by students under the supervision of staff employed by the university.
The university also offers gym and sports classes called Hochschulsport. Since Tübingen has a department of sports science with a broad range of facilities, students of other subjects have the possibility to participate in various kinds of sports courses in teams or as individuals. Furthermore, even exotic sports, such as parachuting or martial arts, are offered. Students may attend courses either for free or at reduced rates. The sports department is located close to the Wilhelmstraße area of university buildings and is served by a number of frequent bus routes.
Unlike in some major cities, student discounts are not widely available in Tübingen. Cinemas and the town council's public library in particular do not offer discounts for students, and there are only a handful of restaurants which have reduced lunch deals. However, students may benefit from the Semesterticket, a heavily discounted public transport season pass offering six months of unlimited travel on trains and buses in the naldo Verkehrsverbund transport association for approximately €62.50. The Landestheater Tübingen theatre and all public swimming pools also have discounts for students.
Nightlife in Tübingen is centered on the numerous pubs in the old town along with a number of clubs, most of which dedicate themselves to non-mainstream music. During the semester, the Studentenwerk-owned Clubhaus at the centre of the Wilhelmstraße university area hosts the weekly Clubhausfest on Thursday nights. This popular, free-entry club night is organized and promoted by student societies and Fachschaft student representative bodies and all proceeds go towards their activities in support of students.

Points of interest

Faculty members and alumni who have been awarded with the Nobel Prize:
This list also includes alumni of the Tübinger Stift, which is not a part of the University, but has a close relationship with it.

Archaeology