Professorships Dwindle

A total of 663 university positions in the fields of linguistics and cultural studies had been left vacant between 1995 and 2005, the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers (DHV) announced Monday. Quoting data from the country's federal statistics agency, the organization said that the figures accounted for more than one in 10 of positions nationwide. During the same period, 1,451 professorships had been lost at universities.

"Improvement in the quality of our higher education system and study conditions isn't possible without a noticeable change in the proportion of 60 students per lecturer, which cannot compete internationally," DHV president Bernhard Kempen, a professor of law at the University of Cologne, said in a press statement.

Kempen called for Germany's federal and state governments to reinstate the 1,451 positions that had been eliminated.

"With ever fewer professors, the system cannot improve," he said.

The DHV's figures showed that the cuts were most extreme in the humanities, particularly in classical philology and education, which both lost around 35 percent of lecturers over the decade.

Fewer teachers, more students

Both Catholic and Protestant theology had lost academic staff, by 18.9 and 20.7 percent respectively. The number of professorial positions in engineering (356 spots or -13.3 percent); mathematics and natural science (264 or -4.3 percent) and medicine (86 or -2.7 percent) had also fallen.

Law, economics, social sciences and art history departments were the only ones to benefit from the creation of new positions. The former three fields saw gains of 5.6 percent, while the increase in university lectureships in art history was 9.4 percent.

During the same time, the number of students had increased by 0.5 percent, said the DHV, which represents over 22,000 members.

In an academic ranking of the world's universities released by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai last week, Germany's two best universities, Munich's Ludwig Maximilians University and its Technical University, only came in 53rd and 56th.

International comparisons carried out in recent years have consistently shown that Germany's educational system -- from primary to secondary schooling -- lags behind those of other industrialized nations.