La Charité Hospital in Berlin

I mentioned that La Charitè Hospital in Berlin, the largest in Europe, is thriving because wealthy patients, including many Arabs, were noo longer patronizing US hospitals because of visa problems. Jim Tent comments: "The famed Charité hospital epitomises much of what is happening in Berlin higher education since the fall of the Wall and German reunification. Some developments are positive; many are negative. As recently as 1988, one of my colleagues here at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a superb maxillofacial surgeon, Dr. Peter D.Waite, traveled to the Free University of Berlin to work with the FU's fine maxillofacial surgeons there, such as Prof. Hans Robert Metelmann (I had arranged a faculty exchange between the FUB and UAB in the aftermath of my history of the Free University). Metelmann had profited greatly from his year at UAB and wanted to show his American partner something of Berlin. One day, the two surgeons crossed over Checkpoint Charlie and visited the famed Charité Hospital (host to such luminaries as Robert Koch, Rudolf Virchow, Ferdinand Sauerbruch and other medical luminaries in the 19th and 20th centuries). They expected to see a great hospital embedded in a great medical clinic. Bu what did the two visitors of 1988 find? Peter Waite told me candidly upon his return to Alabama: "That wasn't a hospital. It was a museum! Under forty years of GDR management, the Charite had been looted, neglected, and ground down into a virtual shell of its former self. Waite and Metelmann were appalled that patients were still being treated there. However, it is legitimate to ask: What has happened since? The answer is not reassuring. Under the Berlin City Government, heavily influenced by the successors to the old communist SED (now the PDS), Berlin City funding has funnelled ever larger sums into the "old" Humboldt University and into its medical clinic, the Charité. However, that explains only a modest part of the picture of Berlin higher education today. Following reunification, the same decision-making process took first one of the Free University's major clinics, its Benjamin Franklin Clinic (originally funded by the United States to the tune of $60 million dollars plus in early 1960s dollars), and then a second major clinic, the FU's ultra modern Rudlof Virchow Clinic located just westward of the old dividing line between East and West Berlin, and transferred both of them wholesale to the Humboldt University. This means that both clinics are now officially listed as the "Charite Campus Benjamin Franklin and the Charite Campus Virchow-Kinik." i.e. they are an integral part of Humboldt University (not the Free University to which they belonged only a few years ago). It is little wonder that Arab and other needy international patients might find their way to the "Charité of today. I don't wish to sound doctrinaire, as if I were some old-time Cold Warrior pterodactyl, beating his leathery wings into the 21st Century. Furthermore, I am not someone who has it in for the Humboldt University simply because of its name or because it emerged in the East during the Cold War. However, the politics of Berlin have evolved since 1989 in such a way that Germany's once and current capital have played cruel political games upon all three of its several universities. Yes, now there are three (in alphabetical sequence): Free University of Berlin; Humboldt University: Technical University. Many Germans who are conversant with higher education consider the presence of three universities within one German Land (Berlin) to be impossible, and their argument is augmented by the fact that the City of Berlin is basically bankrupt (for reasons that extend far beyond higher education). Therefore, those same Germans claim, Berlin should consolidate its higher education. Consequently, a contest among the FU in West Berlin Dahlem suburb, the Humboldt located in Berlin's Center, and the Technical University (also, basically in the Center), should see ultimately a winner whereby all three universities merge together under one name - if one accepts the understanding that one city or Land (state) should have one university. Given the highly distinctive histories of each of the three universities in question (my apologies to the TU for not offering more about its technical university accomplishments), it would seem logical to include all three "campuses" under one umbrella rather than folding all of them under one rubric. For forty years the "Humboldt" University was a Soviet-SED institution of no distinction or worth. For twenty years the "Free" University was a highly successful experimental university followed by twenty years of turbulence. The "Technical" University was an unheralded but nevertheless worthy institution of higher learning that expanded far beyond technology to encompass most areas of higher learning by almost any nation's standard. All three have earned their right to continue as major universities. If the Germans of today, and specifically if Germany's Berliners are wise, they will create a "Berlin State University System" with a board of regents and a broad state system not unlike that of California or New York (or Alabama?) in which each campus evolves and grows. Germany's central Government must also recognize Berlin's peculiar status. There are precedents and the United States is hardly alone in seeing the problems in a city like Washington, DC. Look at the system in France, and specifically in Paris. If German political and university officials will seriously consider such alternatives, then Berlin's problems will prove to be solvable. Then there will not be any need for boosters of one or the other university to rail against the "depredations" of the other. Furthermore, each can retain campuses or urban settings in its own name that reflect the origins and the accomplishments of each unique institution. After all, the goal in each instance is the same: providing quality higher education to receptive young minds". RH: Since World War II universities have proliferated. Into how many universities has the University of Paris been broken up? The French structure os odd in that the recteur o the University of Paris controls all education in his academic district, Here in the Bay Area there are eight or more universities controlled bu different bodies. WAIS chairman Maurice Harari was for years Secretary General of the International Association of University Presidents, so he is very familiar with the proliferation of universities around the globe.