Es Geloybte Aretz Continuation Thread
- Thread starter carlton_bach
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In short - not really. Education in the US is very much a brand-driven market. Universities compete for hard cash that way. THe continental system isn't like that. Here, while there is a good deal of competition between nations and higher education is a prestigious field, there is really no such thing as 'Ivy League'. Most of the truly expensive decisions happen at the national level anyway (funding is public and ministries have their thumb on it), so it's not like Göttingen, Lyons or Budapesth could just decide to build a nuclear reactor, a rocketry lab, or a particle accelerator. THere is much more division of labour.
That said, some universities are more equal than others, and it is mostly down to proximity to the institutions that fund them and/or commission their research. There is, obviously, Berlin (not just HU, but also both Hohenzollern-Institute which do accept postgraduates), but also Paris (with numerous ecoles superieures and national research centres), Vienna and Bologna. Within Germany, every major member state strives to have at least one prestigious university that stands out at something, though some are again more exceptional than others. Dresden, Göttingen, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Breslau and Munich are all major centres of international repute. But there are many decentral foci for very specific things. If you want to study tropical diseases, you go to the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Hamburg. No other German university duplicates the effort. There is very little other reason to study in Hamburg (unless you are very specifically interested in Bantu languages, Tibetan folk religion, or maritime law). The country is dotted with places like that, centres of excellence in a very narrow field that just don't have competition because nobody is going to pay for it twice.
Yes it's also pretty unlikely to change, because the status quo serve everyone much better. In fact German universities have even less interest in trying to pull foreign students in ITTL, because the pull factor is even stronger for Germany here and they have a large hinterland which they lacked in OTL until post 1990. The better question is what happens to universities in minor (west) European states, which in OTL have done their best to sell themselves abroad to a L2 English speaking audience.
Also I suspect that the international prestige of Ivy League will stay much smaller ITTL, a lot of the Ivy's prestige build on them hiring European refugees and later hiring the best and brightest academics from around the world. But here we will see most of those refugees staying in European universities, which will work against Ivy building the prestige up and a lot fewer academics will speak English. So it will be much harder for Ivy League to recruit abroad and they will be in much stronger competition with British universities over English speaking academics. So we may live in a world where a lot of common people in the developed world won't recognise names like Harvard or Yale.
Chartwell House, The Wilderness Years [post canon]
Who was it, Clemmie ?
The gentleman from UMass dear -- they wonder whether you might be available to pen a biography of their namesake ?
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One of the things not really discussed is the level of cross-national scientific inquiry. If we assume that French, German and English speaking institutions are all very strong and making discoveries is something linked to national pride, it may actually hamper technological development. It is an open question whether competition or co-operation are the best drivers of science and people will make different cases. But if the barriers of knowledge sharing are higher, it could definitely stunt the growth of scientific discoveries post-second Russo-German war.
It's not so much the language barrier (though that could be an issue), I so suspect that Physicists in the West will be largely bilingual in German and English, for example, and prestigious journals will likely produce foreign language versions anyway if we are in a poly-lingual world. But when it comes to big expensive undertakings like CERN's LHC, or ITER or even large telescopic astronomy (think about the recent black hole picture), these are beyond the scope of one big nation and probably require a global undertaking. As science develops further and further and experiments at the cutting edge become more expensive, we need a strong sense of the scientific community working across political borders and across cultures.
Part of the problem disappears when you realise that such projects are beyond the means of individual neoliberal nation states, but not really too much of an issue for societies that put real resources into science (compare the cost of Hubble or ITER with that of, say, a nuclear aircraft carrier which seems to be no problem to afford). But yes, some fields of research, especially the IOTL high-prestige ones like space exploration and particle physics, are going to lose out without a superpower competition.
Are you sure, it would seem to me that both Germany and Russia would see that as a safe place of competition after their second major conflict.
If you go to Königsberg or Breslau what is the most Likely thing you are studying?
What would Germany's football team look like in an alt World Cup? Would it be just one of the various teams representing the Kingdoms of the empire like England or would there be a national football team representing Germany?
In the 2000s and in terms of brute statistics, law, education or business because that is what most people are studying. But if you had specifically chosen either for your major, in Königsberg it would likely be philosophy or public administration, in Breslau physics, engineering, or biotech.
They would definitely send a German team. Vereinssport is where German nationalism was born, these people have Germany tattooed on their heart. And it's even going to be a fairly good team. Football is popular in Germany ITTL, though not as universally as IOTL
What sports are popular in ITTL Germany and why has football slipped some?
It hasn't slipped, it's just never risen to the near-complete dominance it enjoys in OTL Europe. ITTL, football is a popular and highly competitive sport, especially among the urban working class who appreciate something that can be played without expensive equipment and gives you the opportunity to roll over bourgeois kids on the pitch.
The situation is more like it is in the OTL United States where no one sport dominates, but several enjoy prominence (though sports generally is less commercialised ITTL than IOTL and the very idea of 'owning a team' is unthinkable in the German system of club sports). German TV viewership number in the second half of the 20th century are mainly clustered in football, track and field, tennis, motor racing, and handball, but there is a large fan base for fencing, equestrian sports, rowing, sailing, skiing and shooting. This is partly because the traditional ruling classes support these with money and influence, but also because there is a great deal of national pride invested in winning these things. Germany's traditional officer class spends a lot of time practicing these skills, and they remain on the curriculum in many exclusive schools (German schooling requiress some type of sports, but leaves it wide open what kind. As a result, if you attend a city school in Altona or Essen, you are most likely playing team sports and farmers' kids will mainly end up doing group calisthenics that look a lot like close-order drill, but a proper Ritterakademie or Kadettenanstalt will maintain a riding stable, a fencing hall and a rifle range.
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So modern pentathlon will be the olympic sport of choice for them.
That was only ever the 'schlagende Verbindungen', but yes, though the majority of student fraternities go 'nicht schlagend' in the course of the 20th century and you don't have to join one if you prefer not to, if you insist on being in a traditional one, you need to take your 'Schmisse'.
Possibly interesting reference material, obviously from OTL. Though I suppose you didn't mean to include e.g. the fishing association
Guess even in OTL the shooters are quite big at 1.3 million.Attachments
I suspect both the fishing and shooting associations enjoy a certain regulatory advantage skewing their membership numbers upwards, but more importantly, neither makes a good spectator sport (nor do hiking and climbing, two other very popular sports).Possibly interesting reference material, obviously from OTL. Though I suppose you didn't mean to include e.g. the fishing association
JamesG
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I'd dispute that fishing and shooting couldn't be good spectator sports (although fishing is tough for live spectators). In Aus we used to have televised live fishing competitions on Saturdays and Sundays. I found them wildly boring, but clearly some people were watching. As for shooting, pistol and trap shooting are both televised in the Olympics IOTL. I think with a different history and some entrenched cultural support those two and maybe even target rifle shooting could have a small but serious viewership.
It reminds me of the logic of televising golf: even if it only gets 1% of the viewers other sports might get, those viewers are orders of magnitude more likely to spend money on the things being advertised, so it still pays for itself.