PROPHE News Features: Largest Philanthropic Gift in German History

PROPHE Summary:

The International University of Bremen is the recipient of an astounding large donation-250 million dollars-from a European billionaire. This is the largest philanthropic gift in German history. An immediate aim is to protect the university from otherwise imminent bankruptcy. Longer-term it is to help build a university of excellence. One major aspect of the help would lie in the precedent such large gift-giving may present to other potential contributors. To date, philanthropy has been a rarity, owing to a lack of both tradition and of facilitating tax laws. The International University of Bremen is among Germany's recent wave of private higher education institutions but has a mostly foreign student enrollment. Tuition is nearly $20,000 a year.

For the full story, see The New York Times, November 8, 2006, "Billionaire's $250 Million Donation Saves Private University in Germany," by Mark Landler.

The quarter of a billion dollar gift is surely one of the few largest gifts ever to any university outside the U.S. A huge pledge was recently made in Italy. PROPHE News Features recently reported on a mega gift pledge in India (See India#8: Claims and Counter-Claims about an Unprecedented Philanthropic Pledge) and notable examples have emerged in Pakistan and elsewhere. In the near future, large-scale philanthropy will likely remain only sporadic outside the U.S. but precedent is being established. The break with the past is radical. Heavily dependent on government funds, the bulk of universities has long been public. The global explosion of private higher education institutions is financially characterized by dependence on tuition and fees. But whereas this is logical for the great majority of these institutions, which frequently have job-market or profit orientations, a sub-group of private universities has serious academic aspirations. It is there that major philanthropic contributions may help alter the landscape.

Additionally, the new gift to Bremen can be placed within other wide contexts of global higher education transformation. It is a striking and self-conscious manifestation of Americanization. Although philanthropists acting outside the US generally draw a contrast between their recipient county and the US, the fact is that the US has been a nearly unique case. Germany has been basically typical of reality elsewhere. Within Germany it stacks up alongside a financial revolution on the public university side: the government's recent move to target massive funds to a handful of universities. European tradition has long been much more to spread public subsidies across the breadth of public universities, often with the myth that they are all about equal and the norm that they should not compete.

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