BY HENNING SCHROEDER

Wilhelm von Humboldt seeking shade on a hot summer day in 2019 in front of the university he founded 209 years earlier in Berlin.

Woody Allen got it right, years before leadership seminars became the latest craze in higher education. In the 1971 movie Bananas his character Fielding Mellish goes on a rant after he gets dumped by his girlfriend, “Can you believe that? She says I’m not leader enough for her—who is she looking for, Hitler?” That joke was clearly understood in my home country where the word “leader” translates into “führer.” This also explains why Germans have not really warmed up to the concept of teaching leader- or führership at universities and why academic leadership programs or centers over there can be counted on one hand.

In fact, the concept of the modern research university that originated in the early nineteenth century in Germany was based on the exact opposite of leadership. Coming on the heels of the French Revolution it celebrated the individual that had freed itself from the dictate of worldly and otherworldly leaders— kings, priests, and popes—and remained deeply suspicious of leadership. Personal autonomy was the ultimate learning outcome. And as the era of Romanticism was in full swing, “learning what’s known” was replaced in the curriculum by “longing for the unknown,” which meant everybody had to become their own explorer. Students embarked on this self-guided formative journey in Einsamkeit und Freiheit (solitude and freedom) undisturbed by cohort, classroom, and counseling experiences. Funny that this anarchical, leaderless model of higher education was invented in Berlin, the capital of the Prussian kingdom, which is more remembered for its merciless military discipline than anti-authoritarian schooling. Not so funny, at least not for Prussia was the reason for education reform. It was a humiliating military defeat against Napoleon after which the Prussian king lost half his territory and, interestingly, most of his royal hubris. He actually went on record with a truly progressive statement, “What the Prussian state has lost in physical strength, needs to be replaced with intellectual power.” Too bad there is no modern day Napoleon in sight who can knock the chauvinism out of America’s ruling class and replace it with intelligence . . . but I am digressing. The man who in 1809 was put in charge to increase Prussia’s intellectual power and, as part of the project, came up with the world’s first research university was Wilhelm von Humboldt. He wanted the students to be neither leader nor lemmings— he recognized that society is best served when universities allow students to develop into autonomous, intellectually independent Weltbürger (world citizens).

American universities who like to believe they produce nothing but leaders yet hover over their students like helicopter parents also claim Humboldt as their founding father. If he saw his estranged transatlantic children today, my guess is he would file a paternity lawsuit or give them up for adoption. He would also get a kick out of the fact that the country with the highest density of so-called leadership programs is led by a vicious, moronic clown and, as second in command and sycophant in chief, a brainwashed Christian crusader who believes that Earth was created six thousand years ago.

Guest blogger Henning Schroeder is a professor in the College of Pharmacy and former vice provost and dean of graduate education at the University of Minnesota.