1984 to Today: Change and Continuity

Over the past weeks we looked at different aspects of life at the Department, and of moving the Department to its new location in the Jacob-Grimm-Haus. What is the sum total, then, of what we learnt?

The Department and its individual divisions have grown over the years; new members of staff – especially new professors – came (and sometimes went away again) and made their mark on teaching and research at the Department. With new professorships came new specializations. The Linguists took up semantics in addition to syntactic theories, for example, and the North American Studies division now has a professor for Media Studies – both were very far in the future in 1984. It is in teaching English as a foreign language that we see perhaps the greatest change at the Department. Although the number of students studying to become teachers was very high already in the mid-1980s, we now have an institutionalized programme that teaches them how to teach: with an eye to study programmes, this was something of a quantum leap.

It is not only the new professors who impacted the curricula, though. Outside Göttingen University, the various research areas developed in new directions, and these filtered back to teaching, researching and studying at the Department, too. The turn towards using critical theories in reading literature, and to including gender-oriented approaches both towards the subjects taught and the teaching subjects, is one such example.

The Great Move itself appears to have been less of an upheaval than might have been expected. This is largely due to the years of preparation the Department spent on making sure everything was as suitable to the individual instructors as possible, starting already in late 1978. Reading the exchanges of letters and suggestions sometimes makes one wonder – the very idea of requesting a washbasin for his office, as one professor did, seems odd today. Yet this is an indication of a different kind of change, one that occurred only slowly and almost without being noticed: the self-perception and self-assessment of the different types of staff members has changed considerably. While, in the 1980s, it would have been almost impossible for a mere Mittelbau member of staff to give a lecture series, today it is not all that uncommon and is rarely ground for raised eyebrows.

Studying has changed, too, and this does not only refer to a change in study programmes – the modular BA and Master programmes that we have today were still a thing very much in the future in 1984. Life at university, and studying for the degree, are very different from what they were like in the mid-1980s. For one, many more students have to support themselves by working part-time, which has an impact on their study times. For another, the advent of the internet and information that is readily available (if not always correct) at one's fingertips means a different approach to gathering and saving information. No more copying passages by hand - the camera in your phone does that for you. What does that mean for us instructors? The University is currently working on a digitization strategy. E-learning elements have already been incorporated into some few courses and modules, but they are still few and far between. We are still trying to find our feet, together with our students, to find out how to embed digital elements in teaching.

Nex year, in the summer semester of 2020, our degree programmes will undergo a substantial evaluation process. To ensure an appropriate quality management, instructors and students, members from the Faculty's Examination Office and non-teaching members of staff will get together in a series of meetings and discussion rounds to see where we are already doing well and what needs to be improved. You are welcome to chip in and participate – the Department does not function without students or staff members, after all, so have your say!

If you are interested in investigating the history of the Department a little further, why not think of writing an article for Litlog - see the call for contributions on the right!