US-American biologist Ian Baldwin has found out the black comic way that it is not true that the Germans don’t have a sense of humour. He made the mistake of responding to German attempts to make their leading research institutes more international by recruiting experts from around the civilized world, which Baldwin undoubtedly assumed included the elite US educational system out of which he came. The German academic selection committee must have considered him to have had an appropriate academic background, since they offered him the plum position of Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena. In fact Dr. (whoops!) Baldwin had a cv and a list of publications that made him just the right kind of internationalist to lend prestige to the faltering reputation of the German academic system on the international stage.
Imagine then his surprise when on January 9 as new Director he received a letter from the criminal inspection division of the Jena Police ordering him to appear before them for an “interrogation as an accused ” (Vornehmung als Beschuldeter), which involved a process which could only have reminded him of his undergraduate reading of Kafka’s The Trial. On Feb. 18 he was informed by the Culture Ministry of Thüringen that he had been accused of the following: “Im Rahmen Ihrer Tätigkeit führten Sie Ihren amerikanischen Hochschulgrad ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ in Form der Abkürzung ‘Ph.D’ (“In the framework of your activities you used your American (Presumably they meant US-American) title of ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ in its abbreviated form Ph.D.” But only those with Doctorates from EU countries could use such titles, not Americans. (My brother Doug failed to get a response from Thuringian cultural bureaucrats when he asked about Canadian titles.) Thus Mr. Baldwin discovered that if he had gotten his degree from a Latvian, Romanian or Bulgarian university he could call himself Doctor in Germany but not if it was from a university in Massachusetts, even if he was now the director of one of Germany’s premier academic research institutes, a position which of course demanded that he have a doctorate. And they say that you can’t write like Kafka any more. As is turned out, just as in “The Trial”, the process seems to have been initiated by a revengeful foreigner who also had a doctorate from a non-EU country and had been ordered not to use it on the basis of a law passed during Nazi time.
Fortunately for the German academic scene, Dr. Baldwin, after the intervention of German academic elite who were in a position to overrule Thuringian bureaucrats, can now once again use the title “Ph.D.”. And fortunately for them he also must have known that Kafka was also a great comic writer, even if the comedy had the potential of a dark nightmare if ever those bureaucrats came into power again. However, my brother and I still don’t know what happens to Canuck PhDs if their holders follow the lure of the Loreleis of German academia.