"Enough Complaining!" Interview: Manuel J. Hartung und Thomas Kerstan

DIE ZEIT: Mrs Hamm-Brücher, without you many students wouldn't be studying at all. You were decisive in driving the expansion of the universities. 50 years ago there were 250,000 students in West Germany, today there are two million throughout Germany. Are you proud of that?

HILDEGARD HAMM-BRÜCHER: I'm not the type to be interested in pride. When I became state secretary in the Federal Ministry of Education in 1969, the Science Council had already developed its great expansion plans. I only continued to advance the whole thing. When the universities were expanded more and more, I was relieved: thank God, we did achieve something back then!

DIE ZEIT: What drove you - and along with you an entire group of educational reformers - to force the expansion of the universities?

HAMM-BRÜCHER: We wanted to make the universities more democratic and remove the inequalities in educational opportunities that Ralf Dahrendorf...

DIE ZEIT: ... author of the programmatic book Education is a Civil Right ...

HAMM-BRÜCHER: ... had described with the collective term of the »Catholic working-class girl from the country«: Catholics, working-class children, girls and the rural population were significantly disadvantaged. The idea that education is a civil right and enables upward social mobility was non-existent in many circles in this country. Parents said, »Why should our daughter struggle through a degree when she'll be getting married anyway?« Many talented men couldn't go to university either, because their parents couldn't afford it. On the other hand, how many unqualified students were at the universities even then, just because their parents had big enough purses to support them until they completed their studies! I think as a percentage, there were just as many unsuitable students then as there are today.

DIE ZEIT: Were you surprised at how successful the expansion of the universities was? For a long time no-one expected there would ever be two million students.

HAMM-BRÜCHER: Indeed. Back then we couldn't imagine there would ever be more than one million students. Then came the baby boomers, and more and more school leavers, especially women, headed for the universities. Then the finance ministers took control; they claimed it wasn't necessary to invest additional funds in the universities, intakes would soon be lower again, then the money would be enough; »tunnelling through«, it was called. As a result, quantitative expansion was not followed by qualitative adjustments. I advocated a tiered university system in the Anglo-American style early on.