Dear Colleagues,
You may wish to check out [as we apparently say these days] the new (hopefully) improved section on “Auslandsaufenthalte” on our Institute homepage. Frau Bettig and I have rewritten and extended the text, while Jan Siemon has taken care of the web design side of things. I would like to take the opportunity of saying that in my view Jan has done a great professional job of renovating and maintaining the whole website and thereby considerably enhancing the public image of our Department.
As to the “Auslandsaufenthalte” section itself, Jan has asked whether we couldn’t also provide an English-language version – if only to beef up the slim pickings of the English section “half” of the website. I have to admit that for various reasons I have so far quite deliberately restricted this information to the German section, and frankly I’m still in favour of this approach. However, such a decision is clearly not mine alone, and so I’d like to canvas your opinion on the matter. These are my arguments:
1) It seems to me that the target group for this information is local, in the sense of German or Germany-based.
2) The big programmes (DAAD, PAD) are in any case open only to German nationals or native speakers of German (possible exception, the quaintly classified: “Bildungsinländer”)
3) ERASMUS exchanges (such as we have) are surely supposed to enable students based in one EU member state (e.g. Germany) to study in another EU member state; they are not as far as I know open to non-German nationals who don’t speak German and who happen to be studying English here.
4) I think the current University-wide policy of making things easier for non-German students to study here, for instance by providing English versions of almost everything, is in principle well-intentioned and desirable. It has, however, in my view gone too far – so far that there is little or no incentive for this group to learn the local language. This is at least a pity and in some cases amounts to a considerable cultural loss. Just to share my own most recent personal experience: On the day after the new Bundeskanzlerin was sworn in, I was chatting to one of our Italian guests, who had told me a couple of weeks earlier how deeply unhappy she was with her accommodation. I asked whether she had found anywhere better. She had; the new place was really fine, she enthused. “Oh, good, I’m so pleased for you”, I said, “so now you could say with Frau Merkel: ‘Jetzt bin ich glücklich!’” “Excuse me,” was the rejoinder, “could you please say it in English. I don’t understand German very well.”
Yours PHM