Academic tradition in Leipzig: Visiting the university

One of the places are always on my bucket list when on the road are the university or academic centers. I am interested not only in the academic life, but also in the architecture and the ways in which intellectual histories were inserted as part of the local branding. Recently, I visited the 600-year old Leipzig University.

I noticed the interesting combination of styles and volumes during my first visit around Augustusplatz, the center of the city, but only this time was able to find out more about the history. This part of the building that looks as a religious space used to be Paulinenkirche, destroyed in 1968 by the communists and reintroduced in the building according to the modern plans.  

On the other end of the book-shaped building complex, the 142.5-meter building created in 1978 as part of the socialist Karl-Marx University that nowadays is used by private owners.

The main lobby, near the main entrance has a main office where one can be directed for various information, but also a computer corner. Old and new history are combined: a submarine construction behind classical sculptures are meant to create the bridge between the new and old scholars. The Leipzig university was created in 1409, and in 1544, the elector Moritz of Sachsen allowed to the university the space of the Collegium Paulinum. Following the Reform, the church and monastery were donated to the university. 

In 1830, there were started the constructions for a new building, under the coordination of Albert Geutebruck, inaugurated 5 years later. In 1870, the university was already out of capacity, and a new university complex was erected by Arwed Rossbach, composed by the following wings: Albertinum, Johanneum and Paulinum. 

The intellectual model was the University of Prague, from where many if the teachers were originally from. They moved to the German lands because of the religious persecutions following the Husite wars. Since its creation, the research continued non-stop. During the war, the university was partially destroyed, and was reopened on 5 February 1946 under Soviet control. The new socialist complex from 1978 was added with new buildings after the reunification of Germany. On 24 March 2004, a jury selected the project of the Rotterdam architectural office Erik van Egeraat Associated Architects. 

The interior yard is a place of meeting, learning, socializing and meditation. The buildings around are hosting a library, a bank office, the Mensa/canteen, a newly opened breakfast bistro and the entrance to the library. The library was created in 1543 and is considered one of the oldest of this kind in Germany. It has 5 million volumes and around 7,700 periodicals.

The students tried to create their own identity marks sending their art and social messages. Due to space restrictions, several locations of the university are hosted in different areas in town. The university degrees cover both graduate and post-graduate studies. In the Augustusplatz building, the main specialities are: Media, Mechanical and Engineering, Computer Science, Civil Engineering, Business Administration, Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Social Sciences. 

The university building was awarded several architectural awards, but this is only a part of the prestige of this university center. The university is ranked second in Germany and 20th in Europe. Regularly, over 29,000 students, not few of them fro outside Germany, are registered for classes. 

There is a long list of personalities who studied here. Among them: Tycho Brache, Leibniz, Goethe, Richard Wagner and the current German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

As expected in an university space, there are frequent social and political messages displayed. Leipzig is also called the 'Heldenstadt'/'The city of heroes', especially due to the contribution to finally shaking the communist system during the peaceful revolution that took place in the city more than two decades ago. 

As I visited the university on the occasion of the Book Fair, there were a lot of announcements and events related to this huge bookish gathering, including this tree of books in the interior yard.

 

The memory is always present. Fragments of original frescoes depicting historical scenes are featured in the Auditorium.

The dynamic life of the university sends a message about the newly recovered economic strength of the city itself. After the fall of communism, the city succeeded to adapt its old trade traditions to the challenges of the market economy. Amazon and DHL decided to establish here their main operational headquarters in Europe, and the city is boosting of life, bikes and intense cultural activities. With 21 museums, 6 public libraries and many concert and theatre venues, Leipzig is developing successfully its new academic identity. 

Academic travels: Saxonian Academy of Sciences in Leipzig

As I continued my travels last weeks around Germany, I had a short stop to Leipzig (more about the university in a separate post), I also passed around the Saxonian Academy of Sciences in Leipzig. The academic network in Germany is decentralized and each 'Land' has its own academia. 

Initially created as the Royal Saxonian Society for the Sciences and Humanities in 1846, the academy has over 200 members. In order to be elected, they should be located in Saxony, Saxony Anhalt or Thuringia. The majority of the projects developed by the Academy are mostly focused on humanities, but there are also some about natural sciences and engineering. 

One of the main activity is the compilation of scientific dictionaries and an impressive collection was started with the creation of the Academy. Another strong point of interest are the history and regional studies, especially Saxony history and medieval legal history. Short term projects were recently introduced as well, covering the impact of technology on daily life and various technical-related issues about the Internet challenges for the academic world. 

Evernote for academics

Yesterday evening, I attended a very good workshop in Berlin about basic and advanced features of Evernote. I started to use it a while ago, but without continuity and as my projects diversify - especially the blogging ones - I felt the need to find out a good alternative to a multiplicity of files, dossiers, hand written notes and notebooks. 

I will refer here strictly to the the offer for the academic projects, as I intend to write a detailed description of the lessons learned of the workshop on my PR and communication blog later in the day. 

Evernote is available in three versions: free, business (5Euro/month) and premium (10 Euro/month). Its keyword is 'organization' as it mostly allows to set up your files around various tags. For the business and premium versions, extended collaborative features are available, allowing the possibility to share and work a file as part of a larger team. For the academics, it can be a relevant option for peer-reviews and multi-authors articles.

In case that you are looking for specific materials in your archives, the 'search' option make possible to find out what you are looking for browsing not only .word docs, but also PDFs and Excel among others. Another good option that I intend to use frequently is that allowing to save articles of interest for a later lecture. Right now, I do have a long list of bookmarked items on my computer, but it goes very slowly and very often I have no idea what I saved. With the help of the tag, Evernote makes possible a better management of the material. The texts can not only be saved, but also annotated, and it suits academics very well. The Skitch app, that can be downloaded from Evernote's website, gives even more options of editing and annotation of pictures.

Further on, the files can be organized up to their priority status, around a large array of tags, describing both the priority status as well as the main topics covered. The latter may be very helpful when one needs to search for specific terms later on.

Another app allows the photographic transfer of hand written notes. From an academic perspective, this can work not only for the scribbles notes in the library, but also for documents necessary for the historical analysis that can be automatically scanned and saved for later. I know some people that will be more than happy to find out that such an option exists, as an alternative to hand writing documents. The document saved like this can be annotated. The integration of the document may last more than usual, 15-20 minutes. 

I am always interested to save as much time as possible and the yesterday presentation outlined a couple of advantages for time management freaks like me: once you are part of a team, one can set up deadline calls and automatic updates of the status. Thus, you should not spend hours sending e-mails and asking everyone what's going on and waiting for answers. Everything can be done with one click. 

As for the e-mails, those unanswered can be saved in a special file, tracking their status. No more worries that you forgot something, it seems that Evernote can do a lot of work for you now. 

With so much work to manage I most probably transfer now part of my files on Evernote, because even for academics, times can really be money. 

Academic book review: The lost world of Rhodes, by Nathan Shachar

There is a special fascination of the South-Eastern European areas, often praised as paradises and melting pots of multicultural worlds and at the first layer view the things are always so: where else can you find such a wide diversity of cultures, languages and histories, all brought together in the same pot? On the other hand, the multiculturalism is rather the consequence of various policies and historical occurrences, political abuses and accidents of all sorts.

The lost worlds of Rhodes is from this point of view an interesting read. Constructed with the acribic fervour of the historian and with the final touch of the curious journalist, it succeed to bring back to life an unknown world of ethnic identities and diversities, mostly centered around the fate - tragic, as always - of the Jewish communities. 

Literary fantasies and raw realities

The book reviews mostly the last two centuries, but with a long view on the variety of historical traces left by different empires and reigns. The fascination with the Mediterranean spaces is long and will hardly cease to exist, but through the literature, mostly travel books, it created a certain parallel world, not necessarily fit to the immediate reality: 'their penchant for regarding the most quotidian phenomena as echoes and reflections of eternal Attic, Etruscan and Minoic harmonies, bred a seductive illusion of a Mediterranean firmly moulded to its glorious past; of a world when the gestures, habits and arts of present-day farmers, water carriers and politicians were taken straight from a schoolboy lexicon of mythical, architectural and poetic references. Such a mindset may become quite a drag of understanding, once you start to wonder about how these societies now spread out over the classical map really function'. (pp.6-7) 

The big sin of many literary descriptions is the avoidance of everything that must trouble the beautiful aesthetic balance - 'there are times when the studied avoidance of brute realities becomes bad taste' (p.7). One example given by the author is Durrell who avoided to mention anything about the Jewish heritage because, he assumes 'it would have ruined the setting for his light hearted aquarello musings' (p. 8)

Under the cultures

France has written a long 'love story' with the minorities from the South-Eastern part of Europe, especially with the Jewish communities. Through Alliance Israelite Universelle, the young Jews were learned not only a language, but also a mental system that intermediate the transfer of modern ideas about citizenship and secularism. Many Jews will be tempted and will either abandon their cultures, mostly moulded after the Sephardi society patterns, or Rhodes altogether, looking for a wider horizon outside. The Zionist ideas did not enter this world before WWI, except Bulgarian and Salonika. However, it seems that the French influences were rather superficial when it was about real support for the French policies and this is mostly available when we think about the failed colonial policies in North of Africa where Paris left almost intact educational systems and the hope of the French citizenship, but without a real 'patriotic' attachment to the political France. 

Regardless of the historical circumstances, the Sephardi world of Rhodes, created following the expulsion from Spain in 1492, indicated serious convulsions and predicted geopolitical resettlements. 

And then, there were the Italians and the Germans coming up, that put an end to the diversity through cultural assimilation and racial policies. 

Although a Holocaust memorial of the old Juderia (the Jewish quarter) was inaugurated in the summer of 2002, the full history of the Jewish community in Rhodes is still to be written. The coming of nearly 10,000 Germans brought the murder of 1,769 Jews. Some of them already left, for Latin America, USA, Africa - in Congo, for instance, they contributed to the consolidation of the state - or Israel. Only 160 survived and most of them left the country shortly after. At a certain point, I was expecting more about the fate of Sephardi Jews in Rhodes, maybe a dedicated full chapter.

Layers of memory

What is interesting from the point of view of the methodology is the mix between journalistic tools and investigations and numerous personal observations following visits on place, and the historical references. It seems to be the best recommendation for reading correctly the different memory layers of the coexistence: 'Each location had its very own background noise of recent and distant memories, suspicions and passions, its own parochial blend of prejudice and tolerance, reason and unreason'. (p. 184)

The travel memoir and historical scholarly observations alternate, but not always the dosage is the right one which might make the reader confused between subjective assumptions and doct references. But this confusion can be the result of the profile of the place as such: 'Inter-ethnic routines in multifaceted cultural settings are always less clear-cut than the categories of social history will reveal'. (p. 185)

The methodological choice is interesting and looks as the only available option, but can be dangerous for the exquisiteness of the historical discourse. Valuable is the repertoire of personal interviews made with former inhabitants of the Juderia, nowadays spread from all over the world. 

Despite some ups and downs, the books is an interesting read for the Jewish historian and the historian interested in the modern history of South-Eastern Europe, as well as in minority issues. 

For me, it created an interest for further investigations of the topic and the book has a long list of bibliographical recommendations that will help me further.

Mental health in academia

I am not necessarily qualified to muse about academic life, but the long-term friendships and my never ending curiosity about intellectual life, often brought me in the vicinity of stories that might involve a drop of mental health. How much mental illness is part of the daily academic life all over the world might probably the topic of a big book dealing not only the statistics and social-economic information, but also the ways in which the 'normal' outside world is seeing the 'intellectual', most often as a strange, unusual, at the limit mentally ill person.

There are a lot of reasons mentioned usually as the cause of the overall alienation of academics: social pressure, the academic pressure towards productivity, sometimes the scarcity of funds or the anxiety of waiting for new sources of incomes, the lack of proper jobs and the high competitiveness of an oversaturated market. The 'illness' that can include various degrees of depression, anxiety, sleep issues and also various addictions, from alcoholism to drugs, is part of a repertoire that I assume there were always around the corner of universities. And I am relying upon not only various literary descriptions, but also various inside stories I kept hearing about academics of all colours since my early years of life. 'Date but not marry an academic' - an advise that sounds so painful when refers to women - is a kind of course that says a lot about how academics can be sometimes perceived in various societies, including in our so-called highly developed Western world. 

Is mental health a real problem in academia?

So, is mental health a real problem after all? Of course it is, and it is very important to discuss about it and find proper networks of support. Although I am a big lover of science and medicine, I am not always sure that therapy is a cure-all. Obviously the qualified help is very important when it comes to dealing with serious mental disorders - how to define them is another issue that has to do with the social perception of different maladies - but it is not enough to help, as long as the academic is going back to the same environment and unsolved problems - among others, how to pay a huge debt and how to find a good decently paid job, while trying to have a minimal social interaction. 

What I think it creates a lot of opportunities for the long-term installation of mental problems is the solitude. Intellectual work is supposed to be done alone, and the many hours spent documenting your articles request almost perfect solitude. The tight deadlines, the crazy schedule of conferences and the long hours of teaching and counselling rarely leave too much time for a normal family or relationships. The academic friendships can be problematic, as long as everyone is focused on his/her own work and competitiveness oblige, there is always a need of privacy and secrecy about what we read and write. 

Life and social challenges

As for the family, maybe they are too far away, maybe we consider ourselves too sophisticated to enjoy their simple and not intellectually challenging company. We assume that we are always in the right company, with our very interesting academic peers, but once the discussion is over, everyone is going home and not many will have too much intuition to call you when you feel sick or lonely.

Maybe such considerations put me in expectation around the real academic circle and always in between worlds. But there is always something more than that. There is something wrong with the intellectual models publicized via academic institutions and works and this should maybe explain some of the failures of intellectual involvement in the 'real life'. The sooner we open the floor to a honest discussion about such issues, the better for the sake of our academic and social sanity.