Academic Questions 4: Career paths

The German for “career path” is “Laufbahn,” but the English and German terms don’t give exactly the same picture of your course through life. A path can wind around in the woods, you can lose it and find it. A Laufbahn is not like this. In German, the Bahn is the railroad. A Rennbahn is a race track; a speed-skating raceway is an Eisschnelllaufbahn. Your way along a Bahn doesn’t wander, you can’t find it and lose it and find it again.

In the US you can wander casually into and out of many kinds of work, in a way that is not so possible in Germany. Let’s say that in the US you want to set up a shoe-repair shop. According to various online recommendations, you should hunt around to find someone who will show how to do the work, or maybe you can find a course somewhere. Then you figure out, by whatever means you can, how to produce some sort of business plan. and figure out, by whatever means you can, what sort of government paperwork is required before you open your doors. Stumble along, find your path through the woods.

In Germany there is a standard formal apprenticeship and licensing process. If you’re going to put new heels on people’s shoes you have to pass a theoretical exam that includes knowledge of the anatomy of the human foot, as well as knowledge of relevant regulations and business practices. You also have to pass a practical exam after doing your apprenticeship. It’s like getting on a train that goes down a track that is already laid out, it’s not like finding your way through the woods.

The track that takes you through an academic career in Germany has some problems: it’s been under attack recently, because the early stages of the academic Laufbahn are not attractive here; it’s a reason why talented young German researchers leave the country and talented young non-German researchers don’t come. So Germany has been starting to re-lay the tracks on this particular railroad. But it's difficult.

Of course money is part of the problem: especially in professional fields (business, law, medicine), the pay is not as high in German universities as it is in the US. But I think other problems—independence and uncertainty for young scholars—loom as large as the differences in expected salaries.

Promising young scholars are often eager to be independent when they finish their Ph.D.s. They want to escape the bossiness of their dissertation committees. They want to pursue their own questions by their own means. But they are usually not completely ready to do this yet: they need advice and assistance. So how does the system cope with these contradictory demands for independence and help?

American culture has a strong independence myth, and so young scholars are officially independent. Their actual dependence is dealt with informally on the side. As an Assistant Professor, in theory, you’re on your own: no one supervises your research or (except for purposes of coordinating multi-section courses) your teaching. In practice, if you’re not too unlucky or socially incompetent, various senior people will adopt you and forward you and sacrifice their time to help with your projects.

German culture, in contrast, has a strong myth of order and hierarchy; and so, at least in the past, the theory has been that young scholars are firmly supervised. Independent action exists informally, on the side. German society has loosened up in this respect in the last generation or two but I can remember, in Bavaria in the 1970s, when the hierarchical myth was so strong that it seemed shocking to respectable society for a group of students to rent an apartment together, just as a group of equals. Communists! Anarchists! No one is in charge! The right thing was for students to live in properly organized dormitories or in spare rooms in grown-ups’ houses or apartments, where someone was in charge. (There were actually cases of people being booted out of civil service jobs because it was discovered that, as students, they had lived in roommate groups. I know what having roommates is all about, said my Munich landlord. No private property. Group sex. Don’t try to tell me anything different.) So when you finish a Ph.D. in Germany, the traditional expectation was, not that you would be independent, but that you would be working for a senior scholar who would employ you on his or her projects. This is not attractive to young scholars who have projects of their own in mind. 

In the last several years in Germany, a number of positions called Junior Professor (untenured) have been created. If you're very good, you might be able to get one of these soon after you finish your Ph.D., instead of working for years as some senior professor’s slave. The tricky thing about this, however, is that you can come to the end of your untenured Junior Professorship with an excellent record, but you can be dead meat because there isn’t a full professorship open in your field at the right moment. The tracks may not connect in the right way to move you along in your personal Laufbahn.

Let’s suppose that in the US you are an ambitious young person trained in a good Ph.D. program, and you get an excellent first job. If you do spectacularly well, you can simply stay at the the excellent university, becoming an Associate Prof and then a full Prof. In Germany you can’t stay where you’ve been; you typically have to move to become a tenured Prof, and you have to wait until a position opens somewhere. It’s not a question of how good you are, it’s a question of when a relevant senior person retires or drops dead. (This is true for Assistant Profs in the US in fields where supply significantly exceeds demand; but once you're an Assistant you have a chance at continuity.) Or possibly a senior person will move, but they don’t do that so often in Germany. There isn’t much of a senior labor market. (See end of post for a little more on this.)

There’s plenty of insecurity in US academic career paths as well, but the nature of it is different. Of course the likelihood is that you won’t do spectacularly well when you start out. If you begin as an Assistant Prof at a very good US school you probably won’t get tenure there. So you move on to an Assistant Prof or Associate Prof position at another school; and here is where the US career path starts to look like one of those tracks through the woods that fades and divides. (I recently wrote an evaluation letter for someone’s fourth attempt at tenure. That makes a good twenty-five years of being an Assistant Prof, at four different schools.) If the research career doesn’t work out at all, you can move down to a non-research school. 

In Germany I think it’s easier to fall right off the tracks of the Laufbahn like a derailed train. For one thing, you can’t go on and on getting new Junior Professorships; you may not even be able to go on and on getting new positions as a WiMi (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter, the traditional post-Ph.D. position, in which you work for a senior Prof). Moreover, many of the German Ph.D. programs like to bring students in straight from their previous degree program, without sending them out into the world for work experience first, because there’s too much fear the students won’t come back once they leave. But if you don’t have the work experience, then you aren’t legally qualified to teach in the non-research universities in Germany (Fachhochschulen). If you fall off the research-university track, there’s nowhere in academia to go.

At least one German university recently converted to the American system (Assistant, Associate, and Full Professors). It will be interesting to see how this works and whether the practice spreads.

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Two footnotes

About the academic labor market: Why is there not as active a senior-faculty labor market in Germany as in the US? One reason is that salaries are greatly constrained by the national civil-service grades, and teaching loads are constrained by state laws. A university cannot go very far in tempting some big name away from another university by offering him or her a lot more money or different working conditions. The other reason is that, compared to US universities, German universities do not conceive of themselves so strongly as competing with one another. In the absence of such competition, why would a university want to nab an established professor from another university? Even if you could do it, what would be the point, as long as you have competent people in the fields that you need to cover? When you hire a Professor in the first place, you want to get the best person you can, of course. After that … is it the best use of the universities’ time and money to engage in bidding wars for senior talent? Does it add to social welfare and total scholarly achievement? Not a lot, so why should it be encouraged? And there are not so many professional administrators trying to build careers by raiding other schools. (This has its good and bad side; more on the lack of professional administrators later.)

About language: Life in different languages feels different, partly because the meanings that are available, the things you can pin down in words, are not the same from one language to another. But also, even when the meanings in a strict definitional sense are the same, the feeling around the meanings, the pictures that cluster around the meanings of words, are different. Laufbahn and career path are somewhat like this. Another example: the German phrase for “it occurred to me” is “es ist mir eingefallen.” The two phrases mean the same thing, but they make different pictures.  “Occur,” in the Latin root, means “to run up to,” and einfallen means (among other things) “to fall in or on.” So as you walk through the woods of the world in English, ideas run up to you like little furry animals. If you’re walking through the woods in German the ideas fall on you like ripe fruit.

Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal 3

West of the locks near Westhafen (see previous post), the canal gets bigger and deeper and the landscape more uniform, relieved only occasionally by graffiti-splash on blank walls.

Construction site along the Hohenzollernkanal.  My photo, winter 2014

This western stretch of the Schiffahrtskanal is called the Hohenzollernkanal, and you've seen the boring part of it if you've flown into Tegel airport and then sat in the loud bus-clotted traffic on Saatwinkler Damm, on the way into center city. On your right is the usual airport-area logistics clutter. The canal flows by on the left, with a kind of moral remoteness, dark and still below a scrim of trees; an occasional bicyclist's head bobbles past on the path on the far bank. On the other side of the bike path are endless Kleingartenkolonien. 

There's no one-word American-English translation for this, we mostly don't do Kleingärten in the US. We have urban gardens: vacant lots where a handful of people put in rows of tomatoes and salad greens and zucchini, with nothing but a piece of string tied to sticks to separate one person's vegetable rows from another's. 

A Kleingartenkolonie, in contrast, looks like a sort of hobbit suburb, a whole settlement of half-size houses on half-size lots, each neatly hedged or fenced off from the rest. A lot is big enough for a few fruit trees and a lawn and maybe a specimen evergreen or a lily pool, as well as flower and vegetable beds. The little house--anything from a glorified shed to a micro-villa--is a place where you can take your afternoon coffee if the weather turns too bad to have coffee under the apple tree. The image of US urban gardens tends to be socially radical; the image of German Kleingärten tends to be spießig (suburban, stuffy, whitebread). They go on for miles, especially in areas that are not prime residential (around the airport, along big rail lines). They make for a monotonous landscape, especially where owners put high hedges along the path. 

So I break off the walk one day and pick it up at the same spot another day, wondering if I am about to have another 6 K or so of nothing but Kleingarten fences hung with beware-of-dog signs. 

I take a bus up to Jungfernheide, the park just south of the airport. Through chromatic ranks of apartment houses: salmon-red houses with sage-green trim, daffodil-yellow houses with violet-blue trim. I cut through the park, where the bare pre-spring woods are bright in the sun, up to the canal. (German makes finer distinctions of seasons than English does: there is pre-spring (sunshine in February), after-winter (winter that comes after winter should be over: snow in April), pre-summer (naked sunbathing in April) and so on.) In the edge of the woods is a day-care center, where the children are just coming back from a walk. Very small children in very bright coats, all colors, like little lollipops bounding along the uneven path under the trees.

Here we are on Saatwinkler Damm again (sigh, let's eat auto exhaust), but the landscape slowly mellows as we go. Saatwinkler Damm gets smaller and quieter past the airport. Here and there the canal bank is lavishly be-crocused. (This is getting better!)

Crocus along Hohenzollernkanal, February 2014.  My photo.

The canal divides here in the west, wrapping its arms around an island called Gartenfeld (campground on one end, semi-comatose manufacturing facilities on the other). I try the paths along both canal arms, first the main branch of the Hohenzollernkanal and then the older, narrower piece, the Alter Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal. 

 

On the old branch of the canal the street is some distance above the water, and the question is how feasible it is to get away from the cars and down to the waterside, where there is a track among the trees. There are a few locked-off stairways down to landing stages, but at first there is no other way down for someone of advanced years and unstable knees. Besides, there is a “Keep off” sign from the Waterways and Shipping Office. However, after a bit, there is a public stairway down to the water, and we presume that “Keep off” no longer applies (I have only been thrown off property once while walking around Berlin. So far.)  

It's quiet on the track down by the water. 

Along Alter Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal. February 2014, my photo.

Ducks are flirting on the water, pursuing each other and pairing off. The males display aggressively: mallards with bright green heads as silky as Christmas ribbon, and mandarin ducks like painted wooden toys.

Mandarin duck pair, Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal, March 2014. Photo, M. Seadle

There is an old fisherman baiting his hook with shaky hands in the late-morning sun.

Inviting though they are, these semi-official water’s-edge tracks always make me a little twitchy. The problem is that they can run you suddenly up against a fence or a concrete abutment with no way around, just when the last way back up to the street that was suitable for old ladies was long long ago. I see a street bridge up ahead, with the track sloping up easily to it, and think, Okay, maybe I’ll go back up to the street again. But when I get further, I see that there’s a very clear, broad, hand-railed walkway along the water underneath the street, so … why not stay down below? It sounds like there’s still a lot of traffic up at street level.

Aiee, this is a low bridge. It’s really dark under here, a tunnel of damp crumbling concrete, with trucks shaking the roadway that’s only this far above my head.  Me, I’m a little claustrophobic. I’m glad to see the light at the end of the tunnel as the path curves round. 

Out from under the bridge, smack up against a closed fence. Dead end, no way up.  Nice view of the canal, sort of.

Under the Gartenfelderbrücke. March 2014, my photo.

Back through claustrophobia-ville and up to the street, therefore—and ah, how wonderful, this is where the traffic ends. Nominally, Saatwinkler Damm goes on, but it’s just a one-lane cobblestone, closed off to cars and scattered with strollers and bicyclists.

The old branch of the canal turns north after a bit, and the path becomes Boathouse Way, given over entirely to boat storage, rowing clubhouses, and the like. (One rowing club advertises itself on the waterside landing as "a comfortable small club that does not go in for competitive sport." My kind of athletics.) 

Somewhere over on the left is a little body of water with a wonderful name: Pipe-burst Pond (Rohrbruchteich).

The last stretch of the canal is beautiful. There are alders here with long, long catkins flying in the breeze. (Good stuff, alder wood. Fender Stratocaster guitars are made of alder wood. The piles hammered into the lagoon on which Venice is built are alder wood. It stands up to a lot.)

Alders along Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal. February 2014, my photo.

Then the arms of the canal rejoin. The landscape softens and feels more countrified. There is more water. Water mirrors water and sky, and it begins to feel as though water and sky will be getting the upper hand of the land before long.

Along Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal, February 2014.  My photo.

The gardens that back on the water have landing stages, and a little rowboat tipped up against the fence is as normal as a wheelbarrow.  

The land starts melting away into the chaotic waterscape of the Havel. 

Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal. February 2014, my photo.

All that is solid melts into air (Marx undoubtedly meant something different), and air and water are hard to tell apart. The water gets wider and wider, and we are at the river.

Time to go home. Look for a big street, there should be buses on it.  Ah, there's a bridge--a big bridge must have a big street attached to it. Which bridge, where exactly are we?  What else--it's the Water-city Bridge (Wasserstadtbrücke).

Bus to the U-Bahn, through one of my favorite stations, Paulsternstrasse, and so home.

Paulsternstrasse U-Bahn Station March 2014. Photos (above & below), M. Seadle.