University of Tübingen hosts Prime Minister and Science Minister

Baden-Württemberg’s Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann and Science Minister Petra Olschowski visited the University of Tübingen on Friday and sought an exchange with researchers and students. The topic of the one-and-a-half-hour discussion was the role of the humanities in a changing society.

“The humanities are of great importance for overcoming societal challenges, especially in an age of crisis. Only they can really analyze and explain social and cultural changes and upheavals. Above all, however, they provide important impulses and impetus as to how the transformation can be designed in such a way that it succeeds as a project for society as a whole. It is particularly important, for example, that ethical questions are taken into account in the development of natural sciences and technology from the outset,” said Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann. “Here at the University of Tübingen, not only media studies and rhetoric have been intensively committed to the dialogue between science and society for years – and to the important task of

“The University of Tübingen is also internationally a location for cutting-edge research in the humanities. In the Excellence Strategy, it pursues the concept of ‘public engagement’ in order to promote the important exchange between science and society. I am convinced that the involvement of the humanities is essential in order to be able to comprehensively understand and shape the prerequisites for innovation, processes of social change and the associated opportunities, but also conflicts,” said Minister of Science Petra Olschowski.

“The University of Tübingen is a place of excellent natural and life sciences,” said the rector of the university, Professor Karla Pollmann: “Three clusters of excellence for infection and cancer research and machine learning make Tübingen’s outstanding position in this field very clear. Precisely because of these special strengths, I was particularly pleased that the prime minister and the minister made the role of the humanities, in which Tübingen has always enjoyed an outstanding reputation, the focus of their visit.”

The exchange between the prime minister, the minister, the researchers and the students revolved around topics such as the question of whether the humanities should get more involved in social debates and, if so, how this could be done. Other topics were the dialogue between the humanities, natural sciences and technology, the contribution of the humanities to the education of the younger generation as “Global Citizens” or the specific expectations of the University of Tübingen with regard to scientific communication and translation.

“The change that is currently taking place in the societies of all industrialized nations is fundamental in its character,” said Pollmann: “New lifestyles and individual role models are encountering rapid changes in traditional industries, but also in service professions. The triumph of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics not only calls into question the continued existence of many traditional professions, but also the irreplaceability of people, their workforce and increasingly their creativity,” said Pollmann. There were also numerous crises that put our society under massive stress – from the corona pandemic to the Ukraine war and climate change. In this situation, the humanities are not a repair shop for society and the economy. Nor could they eliminate all problems. However, they are essential for understanding the most diverse changes and challenges and irreplaceable in their role as orientation sciences.

In this context, the Rector referred to outstanding projects at the University of Tübingen, such as the Collaborative Research Center “Threatened Orders” or the planned research center on right-wing extremism: “Our responsibility towards society is manifested, among other things, in the fact that we face the challenges of the past, the present and the future analyze and contribute to overcoming them.” The university sees another important task in the development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, taking ethical issues into account right from the start. “Last but not least, as a university, we bear a great deal of responsibility for the education of the younger generation,” emphasized the Rector: “Here it is important for us to give students the opportunity

Pollmann referred to the long tradition of outstanding humanities research in Tübingen: “We are not the only university that shaped Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin; Tübingen is also the birthplace of historical-critical Bible research, which laid the foundation for modern theology in the 19th century.” After the Second World War, prominent thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Ralf Dahrendorf, Walter Jens and Hans Küng shaped Tübingen’s profile . The importance of the university for humanities research in Germany can also be seen in hard figures. The current DFG funding atlas lists Tübingen as one of the top three German universities in the field of humanities. The renowned Times Higher Education Ranking according to subjects came to the same conclusion.