From an elite institution to a university for the masses? Rapid growth starting in 1960s

In the 1960s, the development of university staff entered a new structural stage. At first, all status groups equally benefited from the rapid growth, but by the mid-1970s, full professors began to fall behind. This shift altered the proportions within the faculty structure.

The perceived superiority of the Soviet Union, which the West felt compelled to recognize suddenly with the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, is often seen as the catalyst for the wave of expansion and modernization that affected Western European universities from the late 1950s. Stirred by the Soviet achievement, UNESCO was tasked with assessing educational standards in Western industrial nations. Phrases such as “educational disaster” or “underdevelopment” were bandied about. Education policymakers gathered resources to modernize educational tracks and extensively tap into the so-called “educational reserves” – lower social classes and women. In Switzerland, the federal government was authorized by a constitutional amendment in 1963 to implement support measures of its own and to contribute to the cantonal scholarship system, followed by The Higher Education Promotion Act in 1968.

Overall, these efforts sought to accelerate the systems of scientific and technical innovation and provide the booming economy with expertise and human capital to remain competitive. The field of higher education studies talks about a wave of social “inclusion,” turning the university from an exclusive elite institution into an operational unit of the postwar industrial and service society. Practical demands made by key players in the economy and in society became increasingly important, influencing appointment processes, new institutes, curricula, and research agendas.

Rephrased in more contemporary terms, the aim was to meet the urgent need for “skilled professionals” and “expert knowledge” to secure and increase prosperity. Alongside industrial policy for economic elites and the middle classes, social reform movements also focused on achieving social and, later, gender-specific “equal opportunities.” Although driven by different motives, both forces worked in parallel in one aspect: access to the university was widened, and higher education became somewhat “democratized.” Enrollment numbers skyrocketed within a few years.

From parallel to divided expansion
This surge in development occurred – not just in Basel – in two phases. The surge in student numbers at the end of the 1950s was followed by a delayed expansion of the teaching staff starting in the mid-1960s. It is well known that this expansion mainly impacted nontenured faculty and limited-term positions in teaching and research. Between 1960 and 1990, the number of temporary teaching staff, faculty with habilitations without regular appointments, and extraordinary (associate) professors grew much faster than the number of tenured full professors. This development divided along structural lines everywhere, and Basel was no exception. The expansion also entailed a restructuring, altering the balance among various status groups.

The development of non-tenure-track assistant professor positions, especially in the humanities, highlights this trend: while such positions in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences were only introduced in the 1960s (there were only seven of them in 1960), their number rapidly increased to fifty-four full-time equivalents by the mid-1970s. The corresponding expansion at the university level was somewhat more modest but still notable (from 98 to 239 FTEs).

This perspective – that the significant expansion of teaching capacity in service of a “mass university” occurred at the expense of so-called “lower-cost” status groups – is undoubtedly correct in the main. A more detailed examination of the development paths of individual categories of teaching staff, however, highlights a nuance that remains hidden in the statistics collected only for select years. Until around the mid-1970s, the numbers of full professors in Basel increased alongside those of extraordinary (associate) professors and nontenured faculty members with habilitations (Privatdozent*innen). It was only in the context of the economic downturn following the 1973 oil shock that the split in staff development emerged, though this is often underscored as a general characteristic of the age beginning with the Sputnik shock of 1957.

The assumption of at least a partial turning point in the mid-1970s is further supported by the negative correlation between the numbers of full professors and temporary teaching staff: as the increase in full professors flattened out in the mid-1970s, the growth curve for limited-term instructors became markedly steeper. Compared to other universities, the structural split was particularly pronounced in Basel. At the University of Bern, for which there is a detailed prosopography of the teaching staff, this split is much less pronounced.

Vertical and horizontal growth of chairs
Before the staff development split in 1973, the expansion of full professorships was driven by two different motives. One was to increase teaching capacities. The “parallel chairs,” as they were called, in anatomy, public law, German studies, or history were established to address the growing number of students. It was insisted that the holders of these positions should generally cover the same areas as existing chairs to ensure this personnel relief was fully effective. Otherwise, it was feared, individual study times would simply lengthen.

The other reason for creating chairs was to widen the disciplinary spectrum. The numerous new chairs in molecular biology (in tandem with the Biocenter in 1971), as well as those in practical theology or neurosurgery, primarily represent the process of scientific differentiation. Former subdisciplines that had evolved into their own fields were newly endowed at the full professorship level.

After the economic downturn in the mid-1970s, the first motive clearly took a backseat. Overall, policy for new professorships now almost entirely aligned with the “fight against reductions” (Georg Kreis). University and cantonal authorities sought greater involvement in funding on the part of the federal government and the canton of Basel-Countryside.

Disparate phases of expansion
Education policymakers in Switzerland and other European countries accelerated the expansion process at varying speeds. International and intercantonal comparisons show noticeable phase shifts.

From 1966 to 1985, expansion in Basel was more moderate than at other Swiss universities. In these twenty years, the total number of teaching staff with habilitations at the University of Basel grew by a factor of 2.2, whereas the national average was 2.6 (excluding ETH Zurich). This may partly reflect the conservative nature of a university with a rich tradition, but it also indicates the relatively modest growth in student numbers in Basel.

Compared to Germany, Switzerland expanded its universities more slowly. Between 1972 and 1981, the number of teaching staff with habilitations at German universities roughly doubled, while their Swiss counterparts increased by a factor of 1.3.

In a second period from 1985 to 1995, expansion at Swiss universities matched the growth seen in comparable European countries. Basel, with a growth of 1.4, slightly exceeded the national average of 1.3. These comparative figures from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office include all groups of academic staff. Basel’s expansion was largely driven by the lower level of short-term academic staff, which increased disproportionately more than at other Swiss universities (by a factor of 2.7).

“Social opening” or “cultural loss”?
The consequences of the staff expansion and restructuring since the 1960s for the institution and daily life at the university were varied. In the larger disciplines, faculty and institutes increasingly felt anonymous. Especially in the humanities, social sciences, and law, the student-to-professor ratio increased.

At the same time, subprofessorial teaching faculty increasingly took over teaching duties. Many of the introductory courses – except for lectures – fell into the hands of nontenured faculty. The disproportionate expansion of limited-term academic staff flattened the faculty pyramid. Due to their increased responsibilities, these auxiliary faculty members demanded more participation rights. After some struggle and the rise of the student movement, in 1970 they were allowed to join the “Neo-Regency,” or “New Senate,” as the new model of governance was called.

Opinions strongly diverge regarding this comprehensive historical transformation of the university. The US-focused field of American higher education studies describes this period as the key phase of “inclusion,” during which traditional European educational practices were surpassed, university access was broadened, and academic work was given socioeconomic value.

Historians who regard the university as a quintessential Western cultural institution, by contrast, focus on aspects of loss: “This transformation marked the definitive shift from a small-scale, hierarchically organized university that proudly displayed its venerability and tradition, to a mass university poised to lose its distinctive corporate nature, intellectual rigor, and monopoly on degrees, and risk becoming an operational unit of industrial society with defined ‘inputs’ and corresponding ‘output’ expectations” (Wolfgang E. J. Weber).