The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (German: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; Latin: Universitas Eberhardina Carolina), 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 plant biology, medicine, law, archeology, ancient cultures, philosophy, theology, religious studies, humanities, and more recently as a center of excellence for artificial intelligence. The university's noted alumni and faculty include presidents, a pope, EU Commissioners, judges of the Federal Constitutional Court, and Johannes Kepler. The university is associated with eleven Nobel laureates, especially in the fields of medicine and chemistry.
History
The University of Tübingen was founded in 1477 by Count Eberhard V ("Eberhard the bearded", 1445–1496), who was later elevated to become the first Duke of Württemberg (then as Eberhard I). Eberhard was 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. During an outbreak of the plague in Tübingen in 1482, the university's staff and students sought refuge in increasingly distant towns, moving to Dornstetten, Rottenburg, Urach, and finally Waiblingen. The university only returned to Tübingen in 1483.
Its present name was conferred on it in 1769 by Duke Carl 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. Philip 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 and staff are astronomer Johannes Kepler; economist Horst Köhler (President of Germany); theologian Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and 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. Philosopher and theologian Ernst Bloch is also associated with Tübingen's postwar revival.
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.
Starting in the late 1990s at Tübingen, fundamental research on mRNA-based substances (e.g. for cancer treatment and vaccines) was conducted by groups led by H. G. Rammensee and G. Jung. This work contributed to the Ph.D. and later research of Ingmar Hoerr and by extension to the COVID-19 vaccine programs by BioNTech, Moderna and CureVac.
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 few Jewish students. Antisemitism and national-conservative tendencies had already been widespread at the university among professors and students before the Nazis' seizure of control.
The University of Tübingen was the German university that dismissed the fewest Jewish employees after the introduction of the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" in 1933. This was not because the university had opposed Nazi orders, but because the lack of Jewish scholars or students at the university.
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 because of the 'non-Aryan' origin of their wives. At least 1,158 people were sterilized at the University Hospital.
There was no significant resistance to National Socialism at the University of Tübingen.
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 (b. 1926), 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 Tübingen colleague and friend the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch.In 1970, the university was restructured into a series of faculties as independent departments of study and research after the manner of French universities.
Baden-Württemberg, governed by the CDU/FDP, was one of the first federal states to introduce tuition fees. These were introduced in 2007 and also levied in Tübingen. Tuition fees were abolished in 2012. 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 to protest tuition fees. They demanded free education for everyone.
In May 2010, Tübingen joined the Matariki Network of Universities (MNU) together with Dartmouth College (US), Durham University (UK), Queen's University (Canada), University of Otago (New Zealand), University of Western Australia (Australia) and Uppsala University (Sweden).
On 27 April 2022, for the first time, a woman was elected Rector in the person of Karla Pollmann.
Name
The university's double name stems from 1769 and references its founder Eberhard I, Duke of Württemberg, and Duke Carl Eugen. Since the 1970s, Tübingen students and academia have discussed a possible renaming of the university due to the history of its namesakes. In August 1977, students spontaneously changed the name of the university to "Ernst Bloch University" in memory of the renowned Tübingen philosopher Ernst Bloch, adding a new sign to the Neue Aula, the traditional university's main building.
In 2022, the student council and the Juso university group, among others, submitted a motion to the university senate to remove both names. The senate commissioned a study by historians to determine how the namesakes should be evaluated. The study found that Count Eberhard was characterized by religious anti-Judaism: his 1477 charter for the university's founding explicitly stipulated that Jews were not to be allowed to live in Tübingen; he expanded this stance in his 1492 will, in which he charged his heirs with arranging for the expulsion of all Jews from Württemberg. The study noted these provisions had "far-reaching significance for Württemberg's politics, which had been characterized by fierce antisemitism since the end of the 15th century." The same study found Carl Eugen was an absolutist ruler "who ruthlessly exploited his country and his subjects", including selling his country's soldiers to foreign nations as mercenaries for profit. However, the report concluded that both rulers showed attitudes typical of their time, including Eberhard's anti-Judaism and Carl Eugen's authoritarianism, rather than holding uniquely problematic positions relative to their contempories. The head of the commission stated that there had been no consensus within the group on the question of whether to keep or change the name.
Students responded that both potentates remained unsuitable as namesakes of a university in the 21st century. In July 2022, 15 members of the university's senate voted in favor of the renaming motion, while 16 voted against, and two members abstained. A two-thirds majority would have been required for a renaming.
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 19th 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. The University of Tübingen is also host to a number of Collaborative Research Centres, producing fundamental interdisciplinary research.
The Coin Collection of the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Tübingen [Münzsammlung des Instituts für Klassische Archäologie der Universität Tübingen] is one of the largest coin collections in Germany. The current Director is Prof. Dr. Stefan Krmnicek.
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.
- The university uses a number of buildings in the old town of Tübingen, some of which date back to the foundation of the university. Today, these are mainly used by smaller humanities departments, as is the adjacent medieval castle, Schloss Hohentübingen.
- Northeast of the old town, the Wilhelmstraße area surrounding the street of the same name is home to larger humanities departments as well as the university's administration. The main university library and main refectory are also in this area.
- A new campus for the sciences was built in the 1970s at Morgenstelle, a hill north of the historic centre of Tübingen. Facilities include a large refectory.
- The university's teaching hospitals are located between the Wilhelmstraße area and the Morgenstelle campus in an area collectively known as the Klinikum. The 17 hospitals in Tübingen affiliated with the university's faculty of medicine have 1,500 patient beds, and cater to 66,000 in-patients and 200,000 out-patients on an annual basis.
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 (1,700 rooms) and in the city's southeasternmost neighbourhood, Französisches Viertel (500 rooms).
Museum
In 2006, the Museum of the University of Tübingen (MUT) was founded to professionalize the 60 sometimes very old and singular teaching, show and research collections of the university from all faculties in terms of collection, curatorial and organizational aspects. One aim was to present the collections to the public through interdisciplinary exhibitions, as well as to study them scientifically.