Too Many Students and Not Enough Chairs in Germany’s Universities

 

Professor Benjamin Ortmeyer teaches on the misuses of education during the Nazi era. His lecture hall is designed for 500 people, but 720 students are registered for his course and about 600 show up every week. “I couldn’t understand the students if they didn’t protest,” he said.

And protest they do, as German public universities, already overcrowded, brace for even more students. Florian Muhs, part of a student working group on overcrowding at the University of Frankfurt, says many come to him to complain.

“There are not enough professors, and the rooms are not big enough,” he said.

The group has written an open letter to the president of the university and state officials, and he says the student body might consider protests. “It’s all about getting attention, especially from people who aren’t directly affected by the situation,” Mr. Muhs said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged that Germany would become a republic of education in a widely publicized speech in 2008, and her dream is quickly becoming fulfilled. Several factors are fueling the rise, including a desire for the life opportunities provided by a university education, the abolition of mandatory military service, and a reduction of one year in the high school curriculum.

But Professor Matthias Jaroch, spokesman for the German Association of Professors and Lecturers, says the government is failing to back her vision with cash, causing a crisis of overcrowding. The association demands that the state and federal governments put more money into education. “We are now working at a ratio of 60 students to one professor,” he said. “The system is no longer tenable.”

Some universities say they are trying to plan ahead by hiring more teaching staff and providing more rooms. Academics and experts agree, however, that more government money is needed to fix an outdated system that will have to accommodate a tide of students in the years to come.

About 200,000 students have been added to the university system in the past three years, an increase of about 10 percent, according to the German office of statistics. By 2020, the number of students is expected to grow an additional 300,000 students, Mr. Jaroch said.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe University has seen its student population spike to about 38,000 students, a rise of 7,000 in the past three years, Olaf Kaltenborn, a spokesman for the university, said.

Most departments have enrollments that exceed their capacity, Mr. Kaltenborn said. The department for history and philosophy, for one, is at 170 percent of capacity. The pressure is only expected to rise: the university has set up a task force to deal with the extra students arriving as German high schools eliminate the 13th year of study during the next few years. “We don’t want to be thought of as facing the storm blindly,” Mr. Kaltenborn said.

According to Ms. Eckstein, the student in Mr. Hummrich’s course, students are warned by their peers that because of overcrowding, newcomers like her will not be able to take a full course load. More senior students get preference so that they can graduate.

The first sentence out of the professor’s mouth, she said, is usually, “First semester students have to go.”

 

ProCro, SoBro, FiDi, BoCoCa: A Lawmaker Says, ‘Enough’

All are names, gone and widely forgotten, of the areas currently known as SoHo, Stuyvesant Town and the Upper West Side. Their rechristening was driven by marketing and the age-old arriviste penchant for reinvention: like colonists, neighborhood newcomers staked their claim by renaming wherever they happened to land.

But now a state assemblyman, Hakeem Jeffries, is writing legislation that would punish real estate agents for inventing neighborhood names and for falsely stretching their boundaries. It would also require that name changes get city approval.

Under Mr. Jeffries’s vision, NoLIta may never have been allowed to break away from Little Italy. Alphabet City might not have been subsumed by the East Village. SoBro could have been dead on arrival (some might argue it already was).

Mr. Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat, might have a difficult time persuading other legislators to sign on, but he says such renaming is not innocuous because it artificially inflates housing prices. “Neighborhoods have a history, culture and character that should not be tossed overboard whenever a Realtor decides it would be easier to market under another name,” he said.

Mr. Jeffries’s outrage was set off by reports that real estate agents were using the name ProCro to peddle properties on the border of the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Prospect Heights and Crown Heights, an area within his district. He also said the name “sounded silly.”

But in the history of the city’s changing neighborhood names, it has never been easy to predict when a new name would stick.

The abbreviation floodgates appear to have been opened by SoHo, a name that gained traction in the mid-1960s as artists began to live illegally in factory spaces south of Houston Street. It also had the allure of having a twin, nomenclaturally speaking, in London’s Soho, a centuries-old area whose name appears to have roots in a hunting call.

Next came TriBeCa, tentatively trotted out in the early 1970s. “It’s called TriBeCa, though nobody’s wild about the name,” The New York Times said in 1976. By then, abbreviation fever had struck: The article also noted that some residents preferred to call the area LoCal or SoSo, for South of SoHo.

And then it was off to the races, with neighborhoods like NoHo, NoLIta and finally Dumbo (actually an acronym, for Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) coming about and — with the exception of NoLIta — being enshrined on city maps. Joel Minster, senior vice president of Kappa Map Group, which publishes Hagstrom maps, said the inclusion process involved consulting local residents and the city.

Developers and marketers fanned the flames, creating what has become a likely graveyard of names, using whatever ramp, tunnel, viaduct and manhole cover that happened to be nearby: NoBat, NoCal, BoHo, CanDo, ViVa (West Harlem between two viaducts), and, in Brooklyn, BoCoCa (where Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens converge) and GoCaGa (Gowanus meets Carroll Gardens).

The blogosphere giddily took the rebranding to new heights. In 2005, the blog Curbed held a contest for neighborhood names; the winner was Rambo: Right After the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, between Tillary and York Streets, in Brooklyn.

But other names stuck, somewhat. Lockhart Steele, the founder of Curbed, said he and his friends bandy about the names of FiDi, for the Financial District, and SoBro, a repackaging of the South Bronx. “Those neighborhood names are catching on, albeit perhaps slowly and awkwardly, because they actually fulfill a need,” he said.

Jonathan Butler, who created the Brooklyn blog Brownstoner, said the area that set Mr. Jeffries off, “ProCro,” may deserve its own name because it shares elements of both Prospect Heights and Crown Heights. “Crown Heights is huge,” he said, “and in this case, the subneighborhood designation is quite helpful.”

For all the fuss, a cursory search of Craigslist ads revealed no trace of listings for “ProCro.”

Many lauded Mr. Jeffries’s bid to punish real estate agents for suggesting that properties are in more tantalizing areas, but the halting of name creation gave some pause.

“Neighborhood names and the coining thereof is a quintessentially New York activity that should be encouraged, not discouraged,” Mr. Steele said. “Telling people not to is like telling New Yorkers they can’t have hot dogs in the street.”