"But you also have every chance of gaining a profile as a testing ground for the unfamiliar - in an endearing environment and far from the hectic, empty masses"
Christian Graf von Krockow on the University of Oldenburg
1982 in DIE ZEIT

When, at the beginning of the 18th century, the town of Celle was given the choice between a university or a prison as an infrastructure measure, the town authorities decided in favour of the prison. The simple reason: in the early days of the Enlightenment in Germany, they were worried that a university with its many young people would disrupt their leisurely life. The university was founded in Göttingen.

The city of Oldenburg did not harbour the fears of the people of Celle when it made massive efforts to become a university location after the Second World War - even when things began to bubble at the universities in the 1960s and the generation of 1968 set about not only demanding social change, but also implementing it. The city held on to its wish and did much to realise it.

However, when the University of Oldenburg was founded in 1973 and began teaching less than six months later, quite a few citizens were shocked by the students and mostly young academics who wanted a completely different university to the one they had imagined. According to the ideas of its founders, it was to be a reformed university, i.e. a democratic, critical and less hierarchical university that emphasised academic freedom and was open to all. It should not only discuss the problems of society, but also conduct interdisciplinary research. There was a great desire to see the university as a motor for change with the participation of all social groups - including, for example, the trade unions, which previously had little or no connection to universities. This was disconcerting for Oldenburg's middle classes. They wanted a university modelled on the old ones - like those in Göttingen or Heidelberg - and not one that took a critical look at social structures.

However, the founding generation was not deterred. There was initially a relatively high level of consensus among them about the new goals. And the desired naming after the Nobel Peace Prize winner, radical democrat and Nazi opponent Carl von Ossietzky, who was rather unknown in Oldenburg, was intended to symbolise this. However, this unity only existed in the abstract or only at times when the state governments jeopardised the development of the young university for years by making cuts. The unity disintegrated as soon as decisions had to be made about the "right" path. Left-wingers, liberals, conservatives and, in particular, dogmatists of all persuasions then engaged in fierce debates, often resulting in shrill tones that caused perplexity and fierce rejection. And for some, they gave the impression that there was too much discussion and too little work at the university.

In fact, there were always discussions in which more or less talented rhetoricians from the smallest of political groups were always spouting the same speech bubbles with their messages of salvation. But there were also serious, passionate and deep debates about the state and development of society and the role that the university should play in this. The new thinking opened doors to questions that had previously been very rare in academia or were even ridiculed as the pipe dreams of radical pessimists. How, according to one of the central questions, does mankind deal with its resources and how can it better protect itself and nature from the consequential damage caused by industrial production?

The fact that today environmental and energy research is seen as existential for society is a product of this questioning, which also took place at the young University of Oldenburg. They gave rise to many citizens' initiatives and the Green Party in Germany - with major consequences for politics and business, which could not escape the pressure of the movements. Environmental laws had to be tightened considerably, and even the energy companies had to give in and withdraw their plans to expand nuclear energy. However, this process was by no means only inconvenient for the economy, but also created a new sector in which Germany now plays a major, if not leading, role worldwide: environmental technology. The German Chamber of Industry and Commerce expects this sector to see the highest growth rates for the export industry in the coming years. German companies with environmental technologies already achieved a turnover of € 344 billion in 2013. According to forecasts, this figure will grow to over € 700 billion by 2025, and even to € 2.5 trillion worldwide.

The then very small University of Oldenburg played its part in initiating this far-reaching social process 40 years ago, thereby creating the basis for its current profile. Here are a few examples:

The established scientific community at traditional universities and the business community looked rather disdainfully at a man like the physicist Joachim Luther when he founded Oldenburg's energy research in the 1970s and advocated the use of "alternative energy sources" - in particular solar and wind energy. When he consequently called for the decentralisation of the energy supply, the energy companies saw an opponent who wanted to jeopardise their monopoly positions. But Luther gradually found recognition for his research. In 1992, he was appointed to Freiburg and turned the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems into one of the largest of its kind in the world. One of his many honours: in 2008, Time magazine named him a Hero of the Environment. And the consequences of his 18 years in Oldenburg? Well over 300 scientists are now working in the field of energy research at the university and its affiliated institutes. Oldenburg is one of the world's leading locations for wind energy research. The names of physicists Jürgen Parisi, Joachim Peinke, Martin Kühn and Carsten Agert, a student of Luther's, stand for this.

The development of the environmental and resource economics research focus began in the mid-1970s under economist Wolfgang Pfaffenberger. Today, Oldenburg's economists are among the most productive in their community and were ranked number one in a 2010 survey by the Handelsblatt newspaper, which had already stated in 2007: "Oldenburg is the secret capital of environmental economics research in Germany ... No other German university has so much expertise on this topic."
Like Luther, Volker Mellert came to Oldenburg as a very young professor and was determined to make the applied aspect of his specialism a reality. This took on very concrete forms. In his first project on "noise protection", his students took noise measurements in houses on Oldenburg's busy bypass (there was no motorway yet) to support the residents in their demands for noise barriers. This was the seed for Oldenburg hearing research, which became part of Mellert's "Acoustics" working group and led to his academic appointment of Birger Kollmeier. He established hearing research in Oldenburg and gave the university its first cluster of excellence: Hearing4all. Hearing research also became a cornerstone of the most significant expansion of the university since it was founded: the European Medical School Oldenburg-Groningen (EMS), the main features of which were conceived in early 2000 by neuroscientist Reto Weiler and physician Hans-Rudolf Raab and driven forward by three Presidential Boards.

Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, the current Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), is also a physicist. He qualified as a professor at the University of Oldenburg in 1985, where he also became Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1989 and soon took over the management of the newly founded Institute of Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM) at the university. Today it is one of the leading marine research institutes, specialising in environmental research in marine ecosystems and climate systems. Back in 1991, when he turned down a call to the major research institution in Geesthacht and stayed in Oldenburg, he said: "What once stigmatised the University of Oldenburg is increasingly proving to be a very promising chapter for the future: the early and determined examination of ecological issues." Today, he heads the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) and was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) by the British Queen - one of many honours for his global commitment to climate protection.

Despite widespread reservations, however, there were far-sighted individuals in the region who recognised the importance of building a university for the city and its population, and that it was worth supporting - even if it clashed with their own ideas. They came together in the Oldenburg University Society (UGO), which was founded in 1972. Gerhard Wachsmann, banker and UGO Chair in the 1970s, is a prime example of this. He was certain that the structurally weak north-west would fall further behind without a university. He sought dialogue with the scientific community from the very beginning. The banker Christopher Pleister and, in particular, the entrepreneur Peter Waskönig were also part of this far-sighted circle. In the 1990s, he greatly consolidated the already loosely knit networks between the university, business and politics. At the same time, he turned the UGO into one of the largest university societies in Germany. His appeal to business and science to approach each other had a great impact. One person who was very much in line with this was Werner Brinker, Chairman of the Board of Management of EWE from 1998 to 2015 and current Chair of the University Society. He "invested" many millions in the university - and not just in projects that served the direct interests of the Group. Without his willingness to provide support, the critical complete edition of Karl Jaspersˊ works, which was planned to run for 18 years, would hardly have been realised.

The Department of Computing Science, which was established in 1988 in place of Law, which was more popular in Oldenburg, did not need Peter Waskönig's encouragement. Professors such as Hans-Jürgen Appelrath and Wolfgang Nebel, who were also involved in energy research, sought contact with politics and business right from the start and were successful in doing so. With the support of the then President of the State Parliament, Horst Milde, the university's largest affiliated Institute, OFFIS, was established on the old Fleiwa site with almost 300 employees and founded a "knowledge quarter" with many companies today.

In 2008 at the latest, however, when the city won the competition to become Germany's "City of Science" against cities such as Constance, Lübeck, Heidelberg and Rostock, even the last sceptics realised what qualities the University of Oldenburg possessed. Without a university that was respected beyond the region's borders, this accolade would not have been possible for the city, which rightly placed science at the centre of its future considerations and still does today. Studies show that in Europe, the importance of universities for their surroundings has steadily increased - especially in countries where knowledge is the main resource. Cities such as Oldenburg are competing to attract knowledge-intensive companies and must be able to attract highly qualified people. Without a prestigious university with its current 15,000 students, Oldenburg would not be one of the most dynamic cities in Lower Saxony.

Despite some stumbling blocks that were placed in its path and that it also placed in its own path, the founding and development of the University of Oldenburg is indeed a success story in a national context. Those at its helm played a decisive role in this: a rector and eight presidents, three of them in temporary positions. The fact that they describe their successes, but also their defeats and disappointments, in very different ways in this book is no surprise to anyone who has experienced these personalities. Their reports also give an idea of how they led the university and steered it through difficult phases.

Despite the differences in their leadership styles and the way they dealt with daily challenges, it becomes clear how different the inner world of a university is from its environment and how difficult it is to connect these worlds or even harmonise them. However, this is not a problem specific to Oldenburg - in Oldenburg it is even less of a problem than at many other universities, where interdisciplinarity is not as important. Universities are very complex organisations in which their individual parts, including working groups, strive for the greatest possible independence. This is not always productive, but academic freedom is a valuable asset that must not be subjected to simple commercialisation rationality. Part of it is that it also reveals realities that do not fit into the mainstream and challenge society, as happened in the early days of the university and will hopefully continue to happen.

This should also be possible if the networks between the University of Oldenburg on the one hand and politics, business and culture on the other are finely woven. The intended, but initially little-loved child, which is now enjoying great popularity at the age of 40, has long since arrived in the region and is not threatened by a danger that Christian Graf von Krockow formulated in his article about the University of Oldenburg in the ZEIT:

"If false ambition gets the better of you, you will probably sink into dreary provincialism."

Gerhard Harms