Save Phenomenology and Hermeneutics in Freiburg

The University of Freiburg plans to shut down the institutional structure of the chair held by Husserl and Heidegger. It plans to do so for very dubious reasons and intends to replace the chair by an assistant professorship (Juniorprofessur) in logic and analytical philosophy of language. This amounts to replacing one full professorship and one assistant professorship (Akademischer Rat) with a single assistant professorship, likely with tenure option. A person holding that position might not even achieve tenure. It is unclear what the university’s exact plans are, but at the very best, this position will have the option of being promoted to tenured associate professor after six years. Yet the planned Juniorprofessur can never again reach the current status of full professor, which involves additional staff and research money.

The person to be appointed would have to teach 4 courses per semester, supervise doctoral students and build an entirely new structure in logic and analytical philosophy of language on a salary of slightly more than 50,000€/year without the typical team structure of a German professorship, which includes a secretary, at least one assistant professor position (usually with an up to 6-year contract per candidate) and a number of (graduate) student assistants.

The decision to destroy the Husserl-Heidegger chair comes at a time when the university has recently created a full chair in epistemology and theory of science at its University College (UCF). The chairholder and the assistant professors attached to the chair have already assumed teaching duties both at UCF and in the department. The university has thus already established capacities to teach in the field of analytic philosophy.

There are additional rumors that the second chair the small philosophy department currently has will also be reduced to a tenure-stream Juniorprofessur in medieval Arabic philosophy.

Instead of giving up on its entire departmental structure on the level of chairs in philosophy (which in the German context means: serious research positions), we suggest to open up an international search for the best qualified candidate in phenomenology/hermeneutics with the requisite abilities to lead a team that will critically investigate Heidegger from a historically and philosophically informed point of view.

These decisions are declared by university officials to be promoting junior scholars; yet they effectively create positions very much dependent upon current senior faculty until tenure has been granted. The installation of a Juniorprofessur is often discussed in public as a transformation from the German academic system to the Anglo-American tenure system. However, as is less known inside German academia, it is very common in the UK and the US to hire senior faculty if that is in the best interest of the university. In this case, it would be.

In our judgment, the university deliberately destroys one of its strongest assets in research in the humanities. Rather than downgrading the current position and investing into another field of philosophical research already represented at other universities in Baden-Württemberg, the university should continue to support the leading research in the field of phenomenology and hermeneutics for which it has a strong international reputation.

This online petition is designed to collect signatures in order to direct our protest against the plan of destroying the institutional structure of phenomenology and hermeneutics in Freiburg. A letter to this effect will be made available to the Ministry of Science and Education in the state of Baden-Württemberg. The ministry can still change the plans that threaten to make the philosophy department in Freiburg irrelevant for the global context in which we are all working.