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.
##
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.
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