Bremen Turns Over Campus to IUB: Soon to Open Doors

Bremen Turns Over Campus to IUB: Soon to Open Doors

Newly founded International University Bremen (IUB) took possession Feb. 7 of an 80-acre red-brick campus in Bremen, an historic Hanseatic city in northern Germany.

With Rice as a model, the new IUB campus, purchased from the German government for $8.6 million—a fraction of its value, is an ideal facility for a research university, with tree-shaded lawns, spacious classroom and laboratory buildings and residential halls architecturally reminiscent of an American liberal arts college. The first students are expected to enroll in fall 2001.

IUB is the result of a collaboration between the city of Bremen and Rice. The central mission of the international university will be to educate students from around the world to assume leadership roles within the global economy. IUB will focus its research efforts on cooperative partnerships with other institutions in the areas of science and engineering.

Advisers from Rice are already at work in Bremen helping to develop the curriculum, map out an institutional research agenda and establish student life programs for the new university.

The city-state of Bremen provided initial funding of $120 million to the new university, seeing its creation as critical in the active development of the region as a research hub for technology and science. Although initial funding for IUB came from public sources, the university is a private, independent institution.

"We in Bremen are delighted with the rapid progress that we see taking place at IUB," Bremen Mayor Henning Scherf said. "With the handing-over of the keys to the campus, we are taking a giant step forward in realizing our dream for this new institution."

These sentiments were echoed by IUB board Chairman Reimar Lüst, who until recently served as head of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and was chief executive officer of the Max Planck Society and the European Space Agency. "We at IUB are indeed fortunate to now be in possession of this made-to-order campus," Lüst said. "It is difficult to imagine a facility more closely matched to our plans for a residential research university."

Instruction will be in English, and students and faculty will be recruited internationally. Hundreds of applications and expressions of interest have already been received from scholars and scientists.

In contrast to the diverse university landscape in the United States, virtually all universities in Germany—and most of Europe—are state-owned and relatively fixed in their operational structure. As a private institution, IUB seeks to bring a measure of flexibility and diversity to the German higher education system.

IUB’s founding president, Fritz Schaumann, a former deputy minister in the German Education and Research Ministry, said, "The concept of a residential university is a rarity today in Europe. Our intention is to create at IUB a community of teaching and learning, where students and faculty come to know each other outside as well as inside the classroom. I am convinced that this new campus, with its superb teaching and student life facilities, will hold tremendous appeal for students from across Europe and around the world."

A major American-style innovation at IUB will be its endowment. German universities historically have not developed endowments characteristic of U.S. colleges and universities, both public and private.

Rice and IUB plan to collaborate through programs such as faculty and student exchanges and joint course offerings. The two universities will coordinate their degree programs to ensure automatic transfer of credits for exchange students. Rice President Malcolm Gillis, a charter member of the IUB board of governors, has said that one reason Rice looks forward to IUB’s opening is that it will provide science and engineering students from Rice the opportunity to study abroad while still taking courses that meet Rice’s rigorous degree requirements in those areas.

The curriculum and research programs at IUB will be geared to the natural sciences and engineering, with degrees also offered in the humanities and social sciences. Current plans are to establish a state-of-the-art information resource center instead of a traditional library. Plans are under way to link IUB to Rice and the public University of Bremen, with their mature library collections and specialized holdings.