The Friends of the University

In November 1929, Rector Erwin Ruck, along with around thirty cosigners, issued a call urging people to see it as an “honor” to join the Friends of the University association. The purpose was to strengthen the ties between the university and the community, fostering intellectual life through mutual exchange and “spreading appreciation for intellectual values and the content of intellectual life to ever-wider circles.” Evenings with “open discussions” were planned to achieve this goal.

On 21 January 1930, the first such evening was held in the Cathedral Hall of the Bischofshof, or Bishop’s Court. At Rector Ruck’s request, seventy-six-year-old Indo-Europeanist Jacob Wackernagel, who had been rector in 1912–13 and continued teaching officially until 1936 (at age 83), delivered a comprehensive lecture on “The City and the University of Basel.” The attendees are unknown, but the press described a “densely packed audience.” The planned discussion was limited to three contributions. First, Rector Hermann Bächtold spoke mainly to offer thanks. Then the president of the Kuratel and president of the Council of States, E. Thalmann, likely also offered thanks but also noted that the belief in the university’s importance “extended far into the working class.” Finally, Dr. Strub advocated for a “close life connection” between students and working professionals. (See National-Zeitung and Basler Nachrichten, 22 January 1930).

The lecture text was published as the first issue of a special series by Basel’s university press, Helbing & Lichtenhahn. Wackernagel praised both the achievements of the classical education model and the university’s significant presence in the city. By this, he meant what the association was now again undertaking and what the Voluntary Academic Society, or FAG, had initiated as early as 1835. It is difficult today to understand the significance and innovation of this “reaching beyond” the university – of going public, as it would now be called. “In the flood of lectures we are inundated with today, it almost seems laughable that back then, the dissemination of academic knowledge to a wider public only happened in closed associations, while generally accessible lectures did not occur at all.” The Tuesday evenings in the Old Aula were inspired by this idea. The best teachers took up this task: Jacob Burckhardt, for instance, held history lectures for years in such a modest setting as the Association of Young Merchants. The new association aimed to revive this old tradition and stand as an intellectual-political institution alongside the “financially oriented” Voluntary Academic Society.

Wackernagel also praised the Volkshochschule, founded in 1919. This institution, he argued, was not aimed at a “truncated education” but had two important functions: first, to instill respect for the work of science and scholarship among the nonacademic public, and second, to give those who perform monotonous and “soul-destroying work” the chance “to escape into another world for a moment and wash the dust from their souls.”

Wackernagel, the son of a former German Germanist, educated in Germany himself and a professor in Göttingen from 1902 to 1915, often compared the conditions of the Basel and German universities to illustrate how much more precarious the situation of the city university was without a hinterland. He speculated on what it would be like if Solothurn or Aargau were to assist wealthy Basel and also “want to govern our university.” Still, he did not address Basel-Countryside, and his point was focused more on the idea that the university, apart from foreign students, must focus even more on its own population – on its students and their “fellow Swissmen.”

At a second discussion evening, Rudolf Löw spoke on the topic “artists and the university.” In November of the same year, 1930, another lecture took place, given by Andreas Speiser in honor of Kepler’s 300th birthday. Shortly after, the association invited the public to a discussion evening regarding the long-planned and overdue new construction of the new construction of the Kollegienhaus. On 11 December 1930, Rector Ruck advocated in a letter on behalf of the association to the government for the new building at St. Peter’s Square. The following year, Government Councillor and Director of Education Fritz Hauser spoke in February about general university education, followed by another lecture on “Culture and Technology.”

The series of publications grew to a total of ten booklets: in 1932, a volume with three lectures on Goethe by Andreas Heusler, Gustav Senn, and Karl Spiro was published; in 1934, a booklet by Ernst Staehelin on the Faculty of Theology and another by Gustav Senn on the natural sciences section of the Faculty of Philosophy and History; in 1936, a booklet by Alfred Labhardt on the Faculty of Medicine; and in 1940, one by Erwin Ruck on the Faculty of Law. A hiatus followed. The previous year, the association had been prominently involved in the inauguration celebrations of the Kollegienhaus: once again, Erwin Ruck presented a rector’s chain as a gift from the Friends of the University on the eve of the grand day, which Rector Ernst Staehelin wore during the procession the following day.

Just when the activities of this association completely ceased is unclear. After a forteen-year pause, two more publications were released in 1954: texts by the Germanist Walter Muschg on types of poets and by the historian Werner Kaegi on humanistic continuity in the confessional age. After another five years, in 1959, a publication by Rudolf Nissen on the human organism was released, and the last booklet from 1961 was written by Leo Schrade and focused on Heinrich Schütz’s contribution to Protestant liturgy.

The somewhat unusual initiative from which the 1929 activities emerged can only be understood by referring to an earlier letter from the initiator, Erwin Ruck, to grasp the overall direction of the endeavor. Rector Ruck relied on years of experience and insights gained during his time in this office. These had led him to believe, he wrote, that “the traditional connection between Basel’s citizens and the university has largely loosened, in some cases even been lost, and that the key demographic for further development, those aged around twenty-five to forty, often have little interest in the university, science and scholarship, and intellectual culture in general.”

Even more was at stake: with its revitalization program, he argued, the association was seeking to offer “deeper insight into the intellectual currents, and thus to achieve a comprehensive intellectual picture, of our time.” Its aim was to counteract the “widespread intellectual fragmentation and superficiality” and the “lack of intellectuality in the way of life” (Invitation from the Rector, 21 June 1929). In the printed call for membership from November 1929, the wording is even more emphatic (see also the call in Baslerstab no. 264, 13 November 1929, and on the same day in Basler Nachrichten no. 311). Here, concern is expressed about “the danger of intellectual superficiality and desolation for broader circles,” with mention of the “the decline of intellectual life” and “intellectual decay.”

The founding meeting took place on 28 June 1929 in the Senate Room of the Lower College on Rheinsprung Street. After one year, Ruck was able to announce that nearly 400 memberships had been secured, including from the student body, although many names from among the faculty were missing. An interesting refusal came from Albert Oeri, the editor-in-chief of the Basler Nachrichten, on 29 June 1929: he considered himself unable to do anything for the university after the university had refused to habilitate his parliamentary editor Karl Weber, who had published on journalism in Basel-Countryside as early as 1919 and later received a teaching assignment and the title of professor from the University of Zurich. The request for financial support also failed to garner much support. On 16 November 1929, Rudolf Sarasin-Vischer informed the rector that both Handelsbank and Bankverein had only provided 500 francs each, with the reasoning that “they had no direct relations with the university.” Sarasin’s response: “No comment.” It is quite conceivable that those approached preferred to give to the Voluntary Academic Society, or FAG. For its part, the FAG had only praise in its commemorative publication of 1935 for the complementary association that emerged in 1929.

The Basel communists did not leave the bourgeois complaints of decadence unchallenged. Dr. Franz Welti, the first president of the Swiss Communist Party in 1923, noted in a letter to the initiators that neither intellectual superficiality nor materialism was responsible for this decay; but rather that it was a “typical consequence of capitalist development in the age of imperialism and the monopoly of financial capital.” Vorwärts editor Dr. Fritz Wieser likewise reiterated in another letter: “I see the cause of the intellectual decline you lament and which is indeed undeniable in entirely different factors, and accordingly, based on my communist considerations, I also consider other means necessary to bring about a change.”

Without adopting the dogmatism behind this assessment, it can be noted that the reservations were not inappropriate: the intended mobilization of the mind was much more political than it admitted. It served bourgeois policy ends that aimed to cover up the social contradictions it had itself produced with its devotion to education in the traditional sense of cultural formation. The accusation of materialism was especially problematic because it came from a side that had the best material conditions and, on this basis, turned to a life of the mind – hence the understandable skepticism or obvious rejection of bourgeois strategies to repair this breach.