The founder of higher education research in Germany, Ulrich Teichler, looks back on more than five decades of higher education research. The economic miracle and university expansion, the student movement, experiments and crises of the 1970s, organisational breakdown, reunification, internationalisation, ranking and management cult – all these are historical stages that are reflected in higher education and science. Ulrich Teichler, directly involved, reports with openness and humour, presenting clever analyses.. Higher education research and Ulrich Teichler – one is not conceivable without the other. Anyone involved in German and European higher education research – that is, research that has higher education as its subject matter – will not be able to avoid his name. Ulrich Teichler was the founding director and for many years the director of the International Center for Higher Education Research at the University of Kassel, one of the first higher education research centers at a German university. The student protest of the late 1960s is only one of the drastic events that Ulrich Teichler reports on. Other upheavals in higher education, politics and society are also remembered, recounted and – this is his great strength – analyzed by Ulrich Teichler as a contemporary witness. Readers experience exemplarily how a research field is established, how international impulses have an effect, how a research scene emerges and how it deals with the economic cycles of its research field. Since the beginnings of university research in the late 1970s, the research scene has grown enormously and has changed considerably – not least due to a change of generations. As before, however, the observation remains that Ulrich Teichler has had a strong influence on higher education research over all these years. This constellation was the reason for two scientists of the successor generation – Anna Kosmützky and Christiane Rittgerott – to look back on more than five decades of university research together with Ulrich Teichler and to talk to him about his life as a scientist, about research strategies, managing a research center and much more. He answered the questions posed to him with his typical openness, enthusiasm for providing information, and humour.

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ulrich Teichler worked as professor at the International Centre for Higher Education Research at the University of Kassel (INCHER-Kassel) from 1978 until 2013.